Just like the other games in the series, Resident Evil 3 throws you right into the thick of things, depositing Jill in the middle of a street filled with unruly undead, and armed with a handgun and minimal ammunition. If you’ve played the other Resident Evil games, you’ll feel right at home here. In fact, perhaps as a tip of the hat to veteran zombie killers, Capcom gives you a much wider area to explore initially and keeps the plot interruptions to a minimum early on. You’re also given a map of Raccoon City right away, making navigation all the easier.

Graphically, this game beats its predecessors, no contest. Sticking to the formula of computer rendered backdrops, you’ll see none of the nifty camera tricks Dino Crisis throws around here, but the level of detail is worth the trade. Much of the game takes place in the streets and buildings of the city, a theme that was touched on in Resident Evil 2, but not to this extent. In fact, RE2 felt an awful lot like the first game in layout, with the police station in place of the mansion. RE3 gives you a much broader range of areas and does a nice job of keeping the setting new and interesting at a steady clip. You will have to enter the police station for a little while, though, and check out some of the stuff Leon and Claire missed.

Nemesis deserves a 10 for sound. The series has always done a great job of setting up a creepy atmosphere, but the level of ambient sounds, the screams of helpless citizens in the background, and other little touches really take Nemesis’ scare factor to the next level.

Another theme that was experimented with in RE2 is brought fully into its own here. The scariest part of RE2 was in the second half of the game, when the seemingly unstoppable Tyrant hounded you at different points. RE3 makes that premise its theme—the Nemesis, a hideous figure that would give Tyrant bad dreams, hunts Jill relentlessly throughout the game. Worse, he can follow her through some doors and is armed with a nasty rocket launcher with which he is very accurate. As usual, running away is the best idea in many situations.

There are some new touches in RE3, which are both innovative and welcomed, and help maximize the replay value of the game. The inclusion of a dodge button as well as a quick turnaround makes the control a little less awkward than before. The colored herbs and ability to mix them together are still around, but now you can also collect and mix different types of gunpowder, and then use a reloading tool to refine different types of ammo from the powder. For example, refining Gunpowder A gets you 15 Handgun Bullets. But, if you combine two Gunpowder As to create a Gunpowder AA, and then refine it with the tool, you’ll get 35 bullets. Finally, the game includes several points where you’re forced to make a decision, which changes the outcome of the immediate situation as well as creates subtle differences throughout the remainder of the game.

Now for the hard part. Resident Evil 3 retains, exactly as in the last two games, both the ink ribbon/typewriter save method and the limited inventory/storage box. The save method I can live with; the game gives you plenty of ink ribbons and a save room is always relatively nearby. It’s the antiquated inventory system that irks me. Jill can carry her standard total of 8 items. When she’s full, nothing else can be picked up unless she stashes something in one of those magical storage boxes located throughout the game. I literally filled my inventory within 10 minutes of starting the game and had to search out the storage room to unload stuff and then backtrack to pick up all the items I had to pass up. This makes for a lot… no, an awful lot, of needless backtracking, a common practice used to lengthen the time it takes to beat a game (see Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver and the entire Tomb Raider series). You’d think Jill would be able to hold all of the keys in the game in her hip pocket and they’d count as a single item. Oh well…

Resident Evil 3 is more of the same with better visuals and the best audio in the series. I personally enjoyed RE2 slightly more than this game, but that’s like saying I enjoy Star Wars Episode 4 slightly more than I enjoy Episode 5: it’s a great game, if you liked the others, buy it.