The Resident Evil franchise has been back to brilliance ever since Ethan Winters shared a tasty meal with the Bakers in Resident Evil 7 biohazard. Ahead of the release of RE9 next year, it’s also coming back to mobile devices in the form of Resident Evil Survival Unit, slated to release globally in 2025. We had the chance to play a demo at the Brasil Game Show — and an answer to the question about how many Claires, Jills, and Leons one needs to make a good Resident Evil.
Survival Unit is being developed by JOYCITY for iOS and Android. As the nameless protagonist, players follow a parallel timeline to the key events of Resident Evil. It’s a base-building strategy game where you send a group of Resident Evil characters from throughout the series into various missions. Even so, Survival Unit is Resident Evil in name only, and bombards players with references to other, better games. It’s a bit like a little kid who is wearing their parents’ clothes to pretend they are someone else.
The build we played during the Brasil Game Show put us right at the beginning of the game. Our protagonist wakes up wearing a hospital gown and must investigate dimly lit corridors and abandoned rooms. To progress, we had to solve a puzzle and restore the energy in the area by fixing an electrical panel. With the door unlocked, we finally arrived outside, where we were saved from a wave of zombies by Claire Redfield.
Survival Unit is not trying to reinvent the Resident Evil formula, and directly invokes the early titles in the series. You have the traditional fixed camera. A not-very-charismatic white male protagonist. Puzzles and zombies! All of these scream “Resident Evil.” But the challenges are frustratingly simple. Finding the missing metal piece didn’t require thorough exploration, and instead felt more like busy work. The zombies feel like ornaments placed in the game to give it an identity. The combat and multiplayer are central to the strategy gameplay loop of Survival Unit, but we didn’t have the chance to see them in depth. We played the initial fight, where there wasn’t much room for complexity. It was basically pressing a couple of buttons and watching Claire explode zombies.
Survival Unit takes an unconventional approach to the horror side of the franchise. Producer Shinji Hashimoto explained that the team designed the game to be played in short sessions, making the traditional horror experience tiresome and strategy a more suitable genre. “The horror comes from situations where you feel ‘oh I didn’t know that,’ ‘this is something new! How do I fight it?,’ or ‘I made a mistake, now my strategy is not working.’ Especially when you play in multiplayer, when you make mistakes and other guild members lose because of you, it is also a very interesting situation that invokes horror.”
More than horror or strategy, Survival Unit is a fan-service game. The segment we played winks unceremoniously to longtime Resident Evil fans at every turn. Loading screens present the classic door-opening scene. The first zombie you find feasts over a body on the floor, and it menacingly turns its head to you. You leave the building for a street where abandoned cars, screaming victims, and zombies are all over the place.
Resident Evil Survival Unit plays fast and loose with canon, letting you put Claire, Jill, and Leon together in the same group and buy weapons from the infamous Merchant from Resident Evil 4. There’s merit in games whose only goal is to celebrate the original material and don’t take themselves too seriously — but Survival Unit falls short of a serious Resident Evil experience.
