I've told people on numerous gaming forums for years that Resident Evil became (mostly) an action based franchise with some horror elements left intact, as action oriented, Call of Duty styles are what appeals to the masses.
Yeah, generally this has been my thoughts on it too, for the most part.
I play a lot of horror games but I am very picky about them, and for me personally the moment you give me the ability to blow up the monster it aint scary anymore. Honestly to a point even the really old RE games fall into that trap for me, like, ammo and such may be limited in them but you still CAN shoot the heck out of the monsters.
I actually watched a video from Josh Strife Hayes who did a big analysis/review sort of thing on the original Silent Hill game, and he made exactly that same point, that the horror in the game was really good right up to the moment when the game gives you the axe, at which point it falls apart because now the most dangerous thing in the town is the player. That's usually how survival horror ends up being for me personally so I tend to usually just avoid it.
Though there are some games that can add combat in without breaking the horror element.
Here, lemme show something here, my two all-time favorite moments in any horror game, which actually are combat-related, but absolutely not in the way that games like RE do it. This one is something special.
Both of these are short videos of boss fights in the same game, and, well... just have a look:
This, to me, is how combat should be done in a horror game. In fight scenes in games like Resident Evil, they play out more like traditional horror games, particularly boss fights, which are really just... yeah, just typical video game boss fights, with attack patterns and quick movements and such.
But this? This is different. If you try to fight a boss like you would in RE, you *are* dead. You cant win that way. And the way everything behaves sort of prevents that anyway. Dealing with these monstrosities involves a lot of very careful, slow movements in levels where absolutely any object could be a monster in disguise, as the bosses are not the only things in them. That PC monitor or table might abruptly jump up, morph into some horrid meat thing, and go berserk at you. The more violent you are, the more agitated things get... not just the monsters, but the level itself (which means that combat is best avoided unless desperate... it's always better to run and hide). And of course the bosses too. So in both fights, it's not just this action-packed back and forth... I have to be careful about every moment, and at any time things could go wrong and lead to total panic. There's multiple moments in both videos where I just turn and run. Particularly that second video... that was one of the only moments in all the horror games I've ever played that actually got a physical reaction and a yelp out of me. That moment where I fire at the wall the first time and it... gets up. That part got me good, I'll admit. What really made it even more wild was that the reason I shot it was that I realized that it was actually the boss, hiding as a sort of wall mimic. I KNEW it was there. I knew it would react. It still absolutely startled me anyway. And THAT is amazing.
I cant see any other horror game ever matching that moment for me. I actually liked these moments so much that I took the name of one of them. I've mentioned many times on the forum that I chose the name Sophie for myself, but in many places the actual full name I use is Sophie Carre. Carre is the name of that... whatever it is, the boss in the first video.
I wish more horror games that have combat would be more like that one.
