Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D

Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local Wireless, Online)

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Review:

Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D is a Third-Person Shooter released on Nintendo 3DS in 2011. This game packages up the content from the action-focused Mercenaries minigames from Resident Evil 4 and 5 and presents it as one cohesive handheld title.

The presentation here is generally good, though it may be more accurate to say that this game packages some genuinely impressive content in a really underwhelming package. The actual 3D gameplay is detailed with excellent environments and character models and overall looks great (if a bit dark). However, this is packaged in confusing and archaic-looking menus, and backed by some grainy and poorly-voiced instructions, along with ill-fitting energetic music, with these additional elements really cheapening the experience overall.

For the gameplay itself, the core gameplay here is at least in theory decent, with some good zombie-blasting action. However, the simple nature of the gameplay makes this feel like a lesser experience than a fully-fledged Resident Evil game. And all of that is if I ignore the massive Tyrant-sized elephant in the room – the controls in this game are terrible.

This game provides players with multiple control schemes, but none of them really make up for the fact that this is gameplay designed for a controller with two analog sticks, stuck in a game made for a platform that only has one. Yes, this is before the Revelations games and their support for the Circle Pad Pro (and later the New Nintendo 3DS and its second analog input), but even within this limitation, this game could have made better use of the touchscreen to enable aiming independent of movement – even at the launch of the original Nintendo DS we had something that worked for this in the form of the Metroid Prime Hunters demo.

There is another issue here as well, though this is hardly this game’s fault – the online servers for this game are abandoned at this point, meaning that if you want to take advantage of this game’s centerpiece multiplayer, you’ll need to bring your own friend (with their own copy of the game).

Even in its initial release, the poor controls would have made this an acquired taste at best, but now it’s hard to see it as anything but obsolete – if you want to play Mercenaries on a Nintendo handheld, you can simply snag a copy of Resident Evil 5 or 6 on the Nintendo Switch, and then you get a version of Mercenaries with a whole campaign attached to it rather than the scraps cast off from other games and cobbled together into some semblance of a full game, saddled with poor controls. Or, if you insist on getting Resident Evil specifically for your 3DS, get Resident Evil Revelations, which is a much better game with better controls and an experience closer to the console entries in the series. Resident Evil The Mercenaries 3D isn’t likely to be of much interest to anyone at this point.

tl;dr – Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D is a Third-Person Shooter that brings the Mercenaries content from Resident Evil 4 and 5 to Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunately, this feels like leftovers of other more complete games, and underheated leftovers at that, with some pretty bad controls and abandoned online lobbies. If you want Resident Evil on Nintendo 3DS, get Resident Evil Revelations. If you want to play Mercenaries, get Resident Evil 5 or 6 on another platform. But don’t bother with this.

Grade: C-

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