As I'm sure most of you who read my reviews know, I am a pretty big fan of the Resident Evil series. So far, I have played RE1 HD, RE2 original and remake, RE3 og and remake, RE4, RE7, and RE Village (review on that after I beat the hardest difficulty). I now have another game to add to that list, and you guessed it. Code: Veronica X. I'm going to go ahead and spoil a little bit of the ending, but I'm just going to say I absolutely despised the second half of the game. Actually, pretty much the whole game.
There are many reasons why I don't like CVX, so I'm going to start by saying that the level design is SO BAD I brought it up in my Video Game Design class. This occurred because about halfway through the first half, a miniboss became an almost regular enemy. I had to face two guys that take a full clip from the handgun each every other room with little healing items and not a lot of ammo. You may be thinking, "Oh but you're probably just exaggerating, I mean it's not like you can't dodge their every attack." Ah you haven't played the game then. The Bandersnatch (just learned their name) can hit you from across the room, and of course they don't flinch when they take damage, which is the ABSOLUTE WORST. That means that you will take damage if you're not constantly moving after like 2 shots then you will get hit. I probably died 30 times on the first quarter of the game on normal difficulty. Let that sink in. This was just an example, but the sheer amount of backtracking through the HUGE map of the game is also just such a blatant show of padding for time. I do understand the game came out 21 years ago, but still. Resident Evil 2 (1998) at least has the decency of small amounts of backtracking.
Another thing about Code Veronica that really pushes my buttons is the stupid, stupid story and abominable voice acting. While Resident Evil 2 -came out 2 years before this game- had an actual decent reason for splitting the main characters (Leon and Claire) up, like a car blowing up and being separated by a wall of actual fire, Code Veronica X has the main characters (the same Claire and Steve, later Chris) just leave each other for no reason whatsoever with the exception of one time. One time an important character close to Steve dies and he has to mourn, whatever. But every other time, Steve abandons Claire with the dumb excuse of "You'll only slow me down" with the world's oldest sounding 5 year old dubbing his lines. Here's the first time the two meet, and the description really says it all: https://youtu.be/evhpDDN4Dp8
The last thing about my least favorite Resident Evil is that the game is at the weird inbetween of pre-rendered backgrounds and the great 3D of Resident Evil 4. Overall, the game is just not worth the 10+ hours of frustrating bosses, so bad it's terrible voice acting, and lazy backtracking. 1 ant out of 5.