Project Resistance will be an asymmetrical multiplayer game pitting a team of four survivors against one devious Mastermind, a recent gameplay trailer revealed. An earlier teaser suggested some of the game’s mechanics, but only in a pre-rendered CGI trailer.
Resident Evil has had a fair number of spin-offs, but none of them has ever been as successful as the main series. Many of them have toned down Resident Evil’s traditional survival horror elements or tossed them out completely, some turning into first-person shooters and even light gun games. While even the most successful of them have generally only been mediocre, some have introduced elements that later got incorporated into other games in the series. Resident Evil 4’s active aiming system, for instance, can be seen as an evolution of the combat in Resident Evil Dead Aim. Resident Evil Outbreak even attempted to add online multiplayer back in 2003, and the poorly received Umbrella Corps tried it again in 2016, though both had a much different take on multiplayer than what’s been shown of Project Resistance.
Capcom first confirmed that notorious Resident Evil villain Mr. X to engage the other players.
Asymmetric multiplayer has been steadily growing in popularity at least since Friday the 13th: The Game putting their own spin on it. Project Resistance looks like it’s taking some interesting steps with the genre, giving the antagonist a substantially different role in the game rather than just giving them different kinds of abilities. While the Mastermind can control enemies directly, they primarily use a card-based system, which hasn’t been substantially detailed yet, to modify the environment the survivors are moving through.
While Resident Evil’s many spin-offs haven’t left much of a mark before, Project Resistance could be the one to break through. If it can use Resident Evil's tried and true ability to create tense moments and victories on the thinnest of the margins while making its unique take on asymmetric multiplayer fun for both sides, it could please an audience of players looking for their multiplayer fix that gives them more to do than running and gunning.
Source: Resident Evil/Twitter
