A definitive and correct ranking of the Resident Evil series
My housemate Ali and I own a duplex together; by which I mean, my wife Camille and I live in one unit, and Ali and her husband Greg live in the other. Normal enough arrangement, but the weird thing about this duplex is that it has a connected basement. We call it the friendship tunnel. And in the friendship tunnel: there’s an awesome TV…
Ali’s-Husband-Greg only plays single-player games in his office, and Wife-Camille only plays Snowboard Kids, so it’s just Housemate-Ali and me… and in the friendship tunnel, on our awesome TV, we love to play a wee vidjo game 2gether; ideally the game is co-op, but we’ll try pretty much anything. We just finished Expedition 33 (a true all timer); our next foray will be Split Fiction; we recently did Alan Wake II and Control (both great), but our favourite series to play, by a HUGE margin, is…
(RE9 is coming, babee! And it’s third-person again! So stoked!)
Over the last few years, we’ve played the whole main series (we also played a few of the spin-off series…, but the only one worth mentioning would probably be Resident Evil: Revelations 2, which is… fine). Our obsession started with RE4: Remake, and then we chased that high through eight other games, picking ‘em off one by one. No semblance of chronological order in sight, we just jumped around. We finished the final one on our list, RE0, earlier this year.
Anyway, that’s all just preamble, the point is: we ranked ‘em!
This series is hilariously flawed; those flaws are a big part of its charm… the highs are very high, and the lows are… usually interesting.
Below you’ll find a definitive and correct ranking of the nine mainline games. We largely played remakes and remasters; only one game per numbered entry is featured. I wrote a little bit about each, but I’ll happily talk your ear off about them if we ever meet in person.
Oh! And though this ranking is, as I said, both definitive and correct, I will provide housemate-Ali’s less-correct ranking as a postscript.
‘Kay! Here we go in the unintuitive order: best to worst!
#1 - RE4: Remake
(Played on PS5) - This game is perfect. It’s literally number 5 on my “Favourite Games of All Time” list (after Elden Ring, Binding of Isaac, Chrono Trigger and Mega Man 2).
Leon is dumb; I mean, quite literally, the character is not very smart, and I’m positive the game knows it. The world is on the verge of being overrun by an eldritch nightmare, and this guy is out here slinging brick-headed gems left and right. “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?”, “Your right hand comes off?” “Hey, it’s that dog.” That’s incredible; I’d even go so far as to say it’s audacious. What a beautiful idiot. I earnestly believe that Leon is one of the most underrated video game protagonists of all time. He’s just out there in those mean streets, spin-kicking dummies with the President’s daughter in tow. Love it!
Earnestly, now that Remake exists, there’s no reason to go back to the GameCube version (we tried). Remake is everything you remember RE4 GameCube being, but like, you only remember it being that because you were a kid, and you didn’t understand how the world worked, and you hadn’t had a divorce yet, and might’ve needed to pay taxes, but you definitely didn’t get your shit together to do so. The pacing of this update is perfect, the controls are tight, it has a ba-billion worthwhile unlockables, replay value is super high… the only two complaints I have are: the shooting gallery mini-game kinda blows, and the modern voice over for Ada is awful.
Otherwise, this is just a phenomenal video game wearing the skin of a camp classic B-movie. Incredible, truly.
#2 - RE5
(Played on Switch) - So this one gets a lot of points for being a proper co-op game AND because Chris Redfield wins the game by muscularly pummelling a ten-ton boulder emphatically and… sexually?… He’s definitely giving it his all, and we love him for it.
This game got a lot of flak when it came out for two reasons: one of those reasons was valid and remains valid… the other misunderstands the intentions of the game, and makes the incorrect assumption that what the critic may have wanted is what the designer intended and failed to achieve.
The common critique that I find invalid in hindsight is: this game is too action-oriented. True; the game does forgo many of the slow, survival horror trappings of the earlier entries in the series, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game… nor does it mean it’s a bad Resident Evil game. After nine (soon to be ten) entries, this series can now be understood to be a combination of survival horror-focused games and action horror-focused games. This one happens to be almost purely action horror, and that went against a lot of people’s expectations back then.
The other critique, and one that remains valid, is that this game is racist… or, at the very least, it comes off as being racist. Look, Chris Redfield is a white cop. This game is mostly set in a fictional West African country that is overrun by some version of the T-virus. Chris Redfield shoots a ton of Black people in this game. Whether they are zombies or not, it’s a bad look. It was then, and it is now.
HOWEVER, if you can hold on to your own personal morals (which I distinctly hope don’t support cops killing Black people) and keep those sacred while playing this very silly action game, you’re gonna have a great time with your friend.
#3 - RE1
(REmake version - tried to play it on the original GameCube, tank controls are terrible, moved to the Switch) - This game is great (he said, hot-take-ing-ly), and the graphics hold up incredibly well, even after close to 25 years… but man oh man… gone are the days when I could hold space for tank controls. There’s an alternate control scheme on the more recent digital releases of the REmake version; earnestly, life’s too short, don’t be a hero, use the more modern control scheme.
Love the ink ribbon and resource management. The mansion is incredible, and the difficulty progression remains interesting throughout. The best Resident Evil games are often quite silly at times, and this one features zombie sharks, zombie plants and Jill Sandwiches… and, on top of everything, that dog jumping through the window holds (the fuck) up!! Great stuff!
#4 - RE8
(Played on PS5) - We generally dislike the series’ choice to switch to first person. Neither Ali nor I are big shooter guys, and neither of us can stomach VR, so we greatly prefer the third-person perspective.
With that in mind, it’s notable that this game ranks so highly on my (definitive and correct) ranked list. This is far and away the weirdest game in the series. There’s straight up magic a’happening; a lot of the monsters are things other than zombies (the whole first area is werewolves); there’s like a coven(?) being led by a large witch(?) lady (you’ll remember her as the one that made the internet very horny for a few weeks there); one of the main antagonists is a frog-ish-man, another is a doll, and another has Magneto powers…
It’s all very strange and never dull… AND there’s a merchant… god almighty! I forgot about RE4's merchant. RE8 shopkeeper isn’t even 5% as charming as the RE4 merchant (“Gun" rhymes with "fun" for a reason, stranger!), But buying stuff that incrementally increases your power levels and makes the little numbers go up always feels good.
Gets by on scruffy charm… I just wish you could play it in third person… WHICH! APPARENTLY! We will be able to in the upcoming Switch 2 re-release… who knows? Might spike this one into second place pretty quick. Stay tuned.
#5 - RE2
(2019 Remake/Remaster - played on Steamdeck, streamed to TV) - I like this game. Ali likes this game. But a lot of this game also just kinda slides off my memory. The police station is great… but every subsequent biome gets increasingly less effective, until you end up in some featureless chrome laboratory with an Akira-esque blob of a boss that no one remembers the name of. None of this game is bad, but I think a lot of this game is just okay.
I will say, this is far and away the best use of the invincible-boss-that-you-have-to-avoid-not-fight. Hearing the clomping footsteps of the invincible trench-coat zombie coming down the hall, you were just about to enter is terrifying every time. Unfortunately, the game never quite hits that same high or instills the same level of thrills.
I know this one is very well loved… but, I think maybe I missed the boat a bit by not having played it on the original PlayStation in the 90s.
Inexplicable big crocodile rocks pretty hard though.
#6 - RE7
(Played on PS4) - This is the scariest one by quite a wide margin. The whole Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets John Carpenter’s The Thing aesthetic is phenomenal. The house in the bayou is a great environment, and there’s an escape room section in this one that is (and may forever be) the pinnacle of Resident-Evil-Puzzle Mountain.
BUT, this one suffers the most, in my mind, from being first-person. It returns to the slower pacing of the oldest entries in the series, which is interesting and appreciated, but the action mechanics become markedly worse because of that first-person perspective. Everything feels looser and stiffer at the same time, somehow. It’s often a great horror game and occasionally a very mediocre shooter, so it just ends up feeling like a turbulent experience overall.
It’s not bad, but I’ll never love it as much as the third-person entries.
#7 - RE6
(played the first campaign on Switch… put it down for eight months… returned to it on Swtich) Ali simply hated the Chris Redfield campaign on this one, which largely turns the game into a Call of Duty/Gears of War-esque action game with a red shirt companion who has all the charm of a coffee table (but who also kinda looks like my younger brother Devon… so that was odd). We liked the Leon campaign (we’re big Leon guys around these parts), walked away from the Chris campaign, returned to the Chris campaign after RE0 and didn’t hate it as much, liked the Jake campaign, and largely disliked the Ada campaign… but, in fairness, we may have just been tired of RE6.
No one can say this entry wasn’t ambitious… and though it was straight roasted by critics and fans at the time… I actually don’t think it’s as bad as history remembers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s SUPER uneven, and perhaps tries too hard to be too many mediocre things, when it should have tried to be one really good thing... But it’s also not all bad. As I said, Leon’s campaign is fun and strikes a nice action/horror balance; Chris’s is fine if you don’t mind a straight-up action campaign with somewhat clunky cover mechanics. Jake’s campaign is good (if unremarkable) and Ada’s section is admirably experimental… It’s just unfortunate the experiment fails in my estimation. Ada’s stealth mechanics are hit-and-miss, and the co-op partner is a red shirt through and through (no personality whatsoever; they are literally just a grunt).
It all evens out to an interesting but definitely not great experience.
#8 - RE3
Remake/Remaster - played on Switch) - Honestly, this probably deserves to be higher (though unfortunately it can’t be, because, as I’m sure you remember, this list is correct and definitive), but we played it pretty tight on the heels of RE2, and it’s kinda just a worse version of that game in my mind.
There’s another invincible boss (the titular Nemesis) that you have to run away from, but it sticks around for wayyyyyy too long, which kinda kills the momentum of the rest of the game. You spend so much of this game running away that any sense of agency that you might feel gets stripped away, and you just get a bit bored of this swole-blob-of-T-virus showing up and forcing you to use up all your grenades. On top of that, a lot of the environments are rehashes of RE2, and it all just sort of comes across as derivative and tired.
It might rise in my estimation if we were to replay it with a little more distance from RE2… but, I also don’t overly feel driven to give it a second chance. It’ll probably continue to languish here at the bottom of the list for another twenty years, at which point, we will replay the games with our heretofore unborn children, and they’ll convince us it deserves better.
#9 - RE0
(Played on Switch) - This one is awesome for about a third of its run time. The train sequence is incredible!! The gameplay loop of separate protagonists slowly unpacking their section of the train and passing things back and forth through dumb waiters feels truly novel. It also creates a sort of semi-co-op style of gameplay where one person can play Rebecca and the other person can play as… ummm… the muscular boy one… and, Stonks!
Unfortunately, the train eventually crashes, and you end up in a fairly poorly designed mansion environment, which transitions into an even more poorly designed laboratory environment that transitions to a snooze-worthy “Treatment Plant” environment… and by the time it’s all over… all you really remember is the train.
This is the only game in the series I kinda thought might be bad and uninteresting. The train lifts it up just enough above the waterline to keep it from drowning… but, like, it’s getting pretty tired treading water there.
And that’s all, folks. Let that church bell in the town square ring! I gotta get to bingo.
For the record, I’m bullish on RE9. First of all, it has Leon, but also, I have my fingers crossed that the team learned some lessons from the success of RE4 Remake, and they can marry those lessons to the improvements in aesthetics and style they found in RE7 and RE8. In my most hopeful moments, I imagine a future where it slots in above the dated-and-cringy-but-fun RE5, and the absolute-all-timer-flawless-masterpiece RE4Remake… but, who knows? If nothing else, it’s a new Resident Evil, and that’ll surely be better than Silent Hill II Remake… don’t @ me… that game is boring, and the characters are infuriating.
Much love, y’all. See ya in the friendship tunnel on February 27th!!!
PS: Here’s Ali’s less correct and not nearly as definitive ranking as promised
RE4
RE5
RE8
RE1
RE2
RE7
RE3
RE6
RE0
Honestly, it’s largely the same. So, you don’t have to scroll up and down: RE3 and RE6 have swapped spots (6 goes down, 3 goes up), and RE8 and RE1 have swapped places (8 goes up and 1 goes down). Even though I’ve been clinging to the bit that my list is right and any other is wrong… I could probably be convinced of those changes; it's a game of inches in those duets to me.
