Not a Hero

Who would've thought that a DLC set in the least interesting location of the original game would be boring, am I right?

This is quite a short DLC that embraces the more action heavy side of the series, and for that to happen they did the right idea to bring back boulder punching Chris, as well as way better weaponry than Ethan had. Chris is clearly much more well trained, with fast reloads and the ability to punch stunned enemies. Its a nice change of tone from the main campaign, and effectively feels like a victory lap, in order to finish one of the games hanging threads (namely the fate of one of the familys members).

It has a few gimmicks, like the use of night vision and a bigger focus on puzzles. There are also a few new enemies that can only be put down with special ammo, and these are really more annoying than a proper threat. The last boss is also a decent ending, and a cathartic way to unload all the ammo you pilled up through the game. I will say that the short FOV does give it some trouble in managing the bigger number of enemies on screen, but its nothing a few grenades wont fix.

Its a bit of a drop of quality in comparison to the main campaign, but I still feel its an essencial part of RE VII by delivering that action goofyness that is in the DNA of the series.

What do you take me for, Capcom? A jackass? I spent most of my review of Resident Evil 7 lauding Capcom for deviating from the action-oriented direction of the previous two games that attempted to capture the magic of Resident Evil 4 to no avail, resulting in the franchise non-ironically parodying itself. I was led to believe that Capcom took valuable time for some much-needed self-reflection and created one of the best games of the series. RE7’s success was due to taking things back a few steps, minimizing the gameplay, and reinvigorating the tense, mood-latent survival horror aspects from the earliest games from the series. After playing “Not a Hero”, the free DLC that is unlocked after completing the base game, I now know Capcom didn’t learn their lesson and am starting to reconsider praising them as I have been. “Not a Hero” takes all the subtlety that made the base game work and blows it out the window with a sonic boom.

“Not a Hero” takes place after the falling action of the base game. The helicopter that escorts Ethan off the premise rides into the sunset and the whole operation is now being commandeered by the forces of the Umbrella Corporation. The man in charge of cleaning up the remnants of Eveline’s plague is Chris Redfield, Resident Evil’s staple zombie-killing, boulder-annihilating special agent. His mission is to pursue Lucas, the one loose end from the base game, into the salt mines and bring the infected nutjob to his knees.

Playing as Chris Redfield inherently compromises on the subtlety and pacing that made RE7 a terrifying experience. I’ve said this many times before and I’ll say it again: the scare factor involving any kind of supernatural monsters isn’t present when the player is controlling a borderline superhuman killing machine with heavy-grade armor. The enemies were terrifying while playing as Ethan because he was diving face-first into something out of his element. Chris is essentially just doing his job here, a staunch veteran in disposing of the undead and the biologically impaired. He runs through the salt mines blowing the heads off of the molded with stoic confidence. His arsenal is vast and the ammo is plentiful, turning the molded into trivial obstacles. Not even the new type of molded prove to be much of a threat, considering the special ammo will kill them with one shot.

The mines are a tad less linear here than they were when Ethan was navigating through them. Chris tunnels through three different routes in the mines that are all connected by a bigger, more open area in the center. I can assume that the impetus for this was to make the straightaway design of the mines more explorative like the areas from the former half of the base game. This doesn’t exactly work because the design of a building does not naturally translate to a spacious area like a mine. The developers had trouble with this because the three branching routes all result in a dead-end. The player can’t even decide the order they go through because one path needs an item from another path to traverse through like the night visor or the mask. The design of the base game wasn’t amorphous by any means, but this is like presenting the player with the main house, the old house, and the testing facility from the start and choosing one for the player. Other than the disappointing illusion of nonlinearity, the mines somehow look drabber than they did in the base game.

Chris’s mission to bring down Lucas also gets sidetracked. Somehow, a group of trained mercenaries fall for the most obvious of booby traps and die as a result. This whole setup gives Lucas way too much credit. He’s not a diabolical supervillain akin to something like Albert Wesker; he’s a scrawny country bumpkin with a few too many tools at his disposal. He’s an effective villain in the base game because he inflicts his deadly games on people who are weak, helpless, and too scared to think straight. These mercenaries should in theory be trained to deal with someone like Lucas. It’s not like Ed Gein ever tried to skin the SWAT team that busted him at his home. Even Ed Gein knew better than that. The saving grace here is that the final battle against Lucas’s monster form at the end of the DLC is the final boss that this game deserved. Monster Lucas is as towering and hideous as his dad’s monster form and manages to be the most difficult fight in the game, even playing as Chris “Boulder-Puncher” Redfield.

Seeing Chris Redfield come to Ethan’s rescue was enough fan service in my book, but I can see that Capcom did not see it my way. From the plentiful arsenal to the laughable visor that looks like it’s from the 2016 Doom, it becomes apparent that Capcom still got cold feet and couldn’t stop suckling at the teat of action-horror that was killing the franchise. All of the mystique and pacing that made even the weaker moments of the base game effective are stripped away here and make for a milquetoast, albeit brief experience. Nothing screams subtlety like punching off the heads of the molded like the Doom Guy (that’s sarcasm if you couldn’t tell). The only strong aspect of this DLC was the final boss, but the trek to finally get to Lucas feels like filler. My solution to this would be to unlock Lucas’s boss fight as a secret ending after the base game (playing as Chris for that one fight), but Capcom had to take the plunge into once again reveling in action-horror mediocrity.