A year and a half after the release of Resident Evil Village, the first and last DLC for the game became available. Development took a long time, as Capcom did not originally plan to release any expansions for Resident Evil 8 at all. However, the game turned out to be so successful that the authors nevertheless decided to please the fans with additional content. How well they did it – we tell in the material.
Winters’ Expansion is comprised of three unequally important components: the expansion adds a third-person perspective to the main campaign, new playable characters in Mercenary mode, and, more importantly, the Shadow of Rose storyline. Actually, just for the sake of this four-hour adventure, you should think about purchasing Winters’ Expansion.
Shadow of Rose tells the story of the grown-up Rose Winters, the daughter of Ethan Winters, the protagonist of RE 7 and RE 8. From the moment of birth, Rose has certain superhuman abilities (the game does not really describe them), which give her a lot of psychological problems and prevent her from socializing with her peers. Wanting to rid herself of her powers, Rose participates in a strange experiment and comes into contact with the fungal organism Megamycelium. The girl’s mind merges with the fungus, and her consciousness is transferred to a kind of pocket universe, formed inside Megamycelium from the memories of people who had previously contacted him.
Capcom did not originally plan to release any expansions for the eighth Resident Evil
In itself, the tale of Rose, a young girl who does not accept herself for who she is, turned out to be quite tolerable. If you’ve grown fond of the Winters family, you might even shed a tear or two towards the end. However, the problem with the Shadow of Rose script is that it doesn’t move the canon of the series forward at all, so fans can safely skip this story and lose nothing. And it’s also upsetting that despite the fact that the events of Shadow of Rose actually take place in a fictional reality, the authors almost did not reveal the potential of the setting: the Megamycelium dimension turned out to be not surreal enough to deserve the status of a real nightmare. Play The Evil Within , where such things are implemented much more curiously.
As for the gameplay, everything is also somewhat ambiguous. Shadow of Rose suffers greatly from the fact that 90% of the expansion’s locations are carried over into the DLC straight from the base game with minor changes. And if you suddenly went through Resident Evil Village more than once, then here it will be especially difficult for you to get rid of the feeling of secondary. To make things worse, Capcom has filled the old rooms and corridors with completely uninteresting new enemies and bosses that do not even live up to the village lycans.
However, you can get pleasure from the gameplay of Shadow of Rose. For example, the first level, the castle, pleases with a metroidvanian design. After discovering new abilities and finding keys, you need to return to the rooms already explored in order to unlock safes or doors leading to new rooms. And the second level, the Beneviento mansion, well remembered by gamers back in the Village, this time frightens with new horrors, not much inferior in intensity to the hellish baby from the main game.
If you are very hungry for “Resident Evil”, then Shadow of Rose is quite possible to allocate an evening or two. It is unlikely that the new story campaign will delight you, but at least distract you a little. And if there are no such feelings, then it is better to save money for a remake of Resident Evil 4, which will be released in March next year.
Rating: 6.0/10