One of the great things about gaming these days is that DLCs can expand games beyond their original incarnations. You can get many hours of gameplay well beyond after you’ve seemingly done everything there is to do with a game. If you are a diehard of a popular title, then there is no doubt that more will be coming before long. Resident Evil is one of the most popular Capcom games, and over 75 million copies of the Resident Evil franchise have been purchased since the first game in 1996.
These games have taken us from cities and deserts, to research facilities, and even to a small Eastern European village. Resident Evil Village is the sequel to the top-selling game in the franchise, Resident Evil 7. In it, the returning protagonist Ethan Winters is fighting to find his baby daughter after his wife is murdered by a mysterious group of mercenaries. Throughout the game he battles the mercenaries, vampires, Lycans, mutants, and a collection of other enemies. He even comes across his own daughter’s head in a jar, although she is somehow still alive. Along the way, he picks up regenerative powers and destroys the malevolent Megamycete, a fungus that was absorbing the village.
The Winters’ expansion provides a little something extra of everything that gamers have grown to love about the franchise. Here’s everything you need to know about it.
You Can Play as Rose
Rose is Ethan’s baby daughter in Resident Evil Village. In a post-credits scene, we see her as a teenager. In the DLC, you can play as Rose as she navigates the village and explores strange new powers that she seems to have inherited from her parents. This is a fun way to see how Rose turns out after the events of the original game, considering you only see her as a baby at that time, other than the post-credits scene. Unlike the original game, this new story is played from a third-person point of view.
New Characters
There are several new characters to play with in the expansion. This section of the expansion is called the Mercenaries Additional Orders. With these characters, you can explore new maps called the Bloody River and the Bloody Village.
Chirs Redfield is one of the new playable characters. He has been a hero in other installments of the Resident Evil franchise, but in Village he leads the team that kills Ethan’s wife and kidnaps Rosemary. Playing as Chris gives you incredible strength, speed, and attack skills. You also have a large arsenal to choose from to blast away enemies and advance through the new stages.
Heisenberg is a villain in Village who can manipulate metal. He has a hammer that acts much like Thor’s, with electrical conductivity and extreme power. You can grab enemies and throw them using the hammer’s magnetic field creation abilities, and also order a fighter jet to come and help kill hordes of enemies.
Lady Alcina Dimitrescu is probably the most famous character to come from Resident Evil Village. She is possibly a vampire, who along with her daughters Bela, Cassandra, and Daniela can wreak havoc on her enemies with her claws and her teeth. The more she kills, the more her Thrill Gauge rises, which gives her extra speed, strength, and devastating additional moves. It is when the gauge reaches its pinnacle that she can call on her daughters to help slaughter even more enemies in the fight.
Third-Person Mode
Were you to play through the Resident Evil Franchise, you’d find that the games are played from different perspectives. Some are in first-person, and some are in third-person. Village is played in first-person mode, which means that you see things from the eyes of the character that you are controlling. There is no additional viewpoint that you can have. However, with the Winters’ expansion, you can play the game entirely in third-person mode. This gives you a whole new look at the game and an entirely new way to play. For many who loved the original, they will enjoy just as much going through the story mode and facing the same obstacles they’ve dealt with before, but finding them more challenging.
While every game in the Resident Evil franchise can be classified as survival horror, each one expands on the mythos of the series and creates new aspects to the story. This is a big part of why the games are so popular and have given birth to a huge movie franchise, animated films, comics, novels, a live-action television series, and even stage plays and musicals. Even with all of the extra media, the DLC expansions like Winters provide richness and depth to playing and experiencing the games.