Ranking The Resident Evil Games For The 30th Anniversary

As a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Resident Evil series, and to coincide with the most recent Resident Evil Requiem, I wanted to tackle not only the mainline rankings, but everything in between, too.

Ranking the Resident Evil series is something that I thought was going to be easy when I was formulating it in my head, but actually writing out my thoughts made it a lot more complicated, mostly because the side games, while mostly inconsequential lore-wise, I think, are where the franchise took its biggest swings.

The Resident Evil franchise has survived nearly every kind of creative pivot imaginable: from fixed cameras, co-op action, first-person reinvention, and vast remakes, and has somehow remained culturally dominant. What separates the best from the worst isn’t just nostalgia or innovation. Its identity, and while the strongest entries understand tension and pacing to make them great, the offshoots brought us some of the funniest, cringiest moments that weirdly endear them.

While the ranking is mostly complete, I did leave out the mobile phone games, along with the multiplayer-only games like Operation Raccoon City, Umbrella Corps and Resistance. They don’t do much to add to the lore, and they are incredibly forgettable. It’s better they are just left out of the conversation, but if you want to check out something that is worse than the lowest main entry, some of the servers are still online for them, but be warned, you are in for a bad time.

Also, for the more experimental games like Outbreak, Revelations and Gun Survivor, I ranked them with their sequels together since they are the same experiment. Especially looking at Outbreak, since Outbreak 2 had always felt to me like it was DLC in a world before DLC.

Here is my personal Resident Evil game ranking for the franchise’s 30th anniversary.

22. Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil 6 is the franchise at its most maximalist. Four interwoven campaigns attempt to deliver something for everyone: horror, action, espionage, melodrama. But the result is bloated and tonally scattered.

Horror is almost entirely absent. Set pieces overwhelm the atmosphere. Enemy waves blur together. The character campaigns stretch on long past their peak, which, when we are talking about the long-awaited meeting of Chris and Leon, and they are on opposite sides, almost begs the question of how they mess it up so badly. RE6 is the reason Resident Evil lost so much reputation, and playing it for anything more than forty minutes, it’s clear why.

21. Resident Evil Survivor (1 & 2)

The Gun Survivor spin-offs shifted Resident Evil into a first-person, light-gun-style shooter arcade genre. In theory, this perspective shift could have deepened immersion. Sadly, it was poorly implemented and never really had that rewarding experience that many all-time great light-gun games have.

The original Survivor’s story is particularly weak because of the amnesia tropes, thin characterization, and awkward voice acting, which really undermined the tension. There is just nothing really to take away from these games.

20. Resident Evil Gaiden

Gaiden is one of the strangest entries in the franchise. Combining top-down exploration with first-person, timing-based combat. They really asked, “What if we could make Resident Evil mobile back in 2001,” and they went all in with experimenting with what they could get away with on the Game Boy Color.

The combat system is the most unique of any of the games in the series, requiring players to aim within a moving bar to land hits, which feels disconnected from the tension-based survival mechanics the series is known for.

19. Resident Evil: Deadly Silence

Deadly Silence tried to adapt the original Resident Evil for the Nintendo DS, incorporating touch-screen gameplay into it. It’s technically impressive for a handheld Resident Evil, preserving much of the mansion’s design while experimenting with stylus-based combat sections.

But this adaptation felt more gimmicky than anything. It’s an interesting curiosity and a surprisingly faithful port, even if it isn’t the definitive way to play the original game.

18.  Resident Evil 0

Resident Evil 0, being a prequel to the original, digs into the fall of S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team and gives us more time with Rebecca Chambers, which should be a win. And to its credit, the tone is there. The train opening is still one of the more memorable starts in the series, dripping with atmosphere and that classic fixed-camera tension.

Where it starts to lose itself is in the partner-swapping mechanic between Rebecca and Billy Coen that could have been really cool, and may have been an early look at the co-op experiences we would be getting, but in practice, it turned into a lot of stop-and-start inventory juggling that kills pacing. There’s a solid Resident Evil game in here somewhere, but it’s buried under design decisions that feel more frustrating than forward-thinking.

17. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles & Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

The Chronicles games feel like Capcom digging through the Resident Evil archive and asking how much of it they can remix into something faster and more immediate. On-rails shooters were already a bit of a throwback even at the time, but The Umbrella Chronicles and The Darkside Chronicles carve out their own lane by retelling key events from across the series while filling in some of the gaps along the way.

The shooting is solid enough, especially if you’re playing co-op, but it lacks the weight and tension that define the mainline games. These are highlights reels more than fully realized experiences, fun in short bursts and interesting as a way to revisit the series’ history, but not something you point to when defining what Resident Evil does best.

16. Resident Evil Dead Aim (HEAR ME OUT)

Ask any Resident Evil fan, and the Gun Survivor offshoots are bad. BUT! Give a disgruntled teenager a lightgun, some zombies to shoot on a boat and the buttchugginest rock credits theme I’ve ever heard, and I call that a win.

Resident Evil: Dead Aim is a weird one, even by spin-off standards. It sits somewhere between a traditional light gun shooter and a mainline Resident Evil game, letting you move around environments in third-person before snapping into first-person for shooting. It’s like the game mechanically that comes before Requiem, but thankfully, that came WAY later, once lessons were learned.

Set aboard a cruise ship, it taps into that familiar isolated horror setting the series does so well, but the tension never fully lands because of how disjointed the gameplay feels because of its forced swapping. Even if the story does dig into those early days of camp, it just doesn’t hit the same. THAT SONG THOUGH.

15. Resident Evil 3 Remake

The remake of Resident Evil 3 is polished, cinematic, and mechanically tight. Gunplay feels satisfying, and Jill is characterized with more emotional depth.

But, even with how compact the original was, the remake felt even more truncated. Entire sections from the original are absent, reducing the sense of exploring a town on the verge of collapse. Not to mention Nemesis’ redesign is, personally, one of my least favourite designs in Resident Evil.
 

14. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (Original)

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis looked at the Mr.X mechanic introduced in RE2 and turned it into a whole game.

Nemesis and his sudden appearances, rocket launcher in hand, looked to inject panic into otherwise controlled exploration. The live-selection choice system added a sense of choice that ultimately didn’t really matter, but it did alter certain encounters. It leans more heavily into action, with increased ammunition and explosive environmental tools.

It’s weird, though, that after the expansive Resident Evil 2, it felt more compact, much more in line with the spin-off Gun Survivor series at the time, and while Nemesis is iconic, the overall structure lacks the intensity that really let RE2 pave the way, even if it did bring back fan favourite Jill Valentine.

13. Resident Evil Revelations & Resident Evil Revelations 2

The Revelations titles tried to steer the series back toward horror while still holding to the more modern balance of action. Revelations 1’s cruise ship setting is its greatest strength, with tight corridors, ocean isolation, and grotesque, slimy enemy designs. Being a 3DS exclusive on release definitely hurt it at the time from becoming an all-time great, even more so, trying to play it now.

Revelations 2 leans more heavily into character dynamics between players and the characters on screen. Being another co-op outing, each group has its offensive character and support character, which, when playing as the support character in a Resident Evil game, never feels great isn’t the best decision.

Its episodic structure adds cliffhangers that encourage momentum, even if the pacing occasionally feels uneven. Which is unfortunate, as it was the first game to feature Barry as a main character since the original Resident Evil.

12. Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 fully embraces the blockbuster action that Resident Evil 4 slowly pushed us towards. Designed from the ground up for co-op, it prioritizes spectacle over isolation and horror. Played split screen or online with a friend, it can be genuinely fun trying to coordinate inventory, covering each other during boss fights, managing crowd control, and deciding who gets to pick up the free guns found during the campaign can be a chaotic and more often hilarious stop and debate moment, which does hamper the momentum the game tries to build on.

When you are playing with the game’s AI-controlled Sheva, it’s…fine if not weirdly isolating in a way that doesn’t convey horror, but just how paper-thin Chris was as a boulder-punching character in 2009.

Visually, it was stunning at release. Set pieces are massive, enemies swarm in large numbers, and the scale dwarfs earlier entries. The Wesker confrontations lean into comic-book intensity, pushing the series further into action-thriller territory. But horror becomes secondary, and thus began a dethroning of the Resident Evil series as the end-all be-all horror series.

11. Resident Evil Outbreak (File #1 & #2)

Outbreak was ahead of its time in a way that feels almost tragic. Cooperative survival horror in 2003 that had no voice chat and only simple commands you could constantly yell at either AI partners or randos in your online lobby. The scenario-based storytelling was ambitious beyond what the PlayStation 2’s online infrastructure could reliably support.

The infection timer was a brilliant mechanic that added constant tension by watching your percentage tick upward, encouraging efficiency and teamwork. Each scenario felt like a slice of Raccoon City’s collapse from a more civilian perspective, which let us see the outbreak in a way we hadn’t seen before

But technical limitations held it back. AI companions were inconsistent. Load times were painful. Online matchmaking was cumbersome. In another era, Outbreak might have been genre-defining, but needless to say, a modern way to play Outbreak outside of PS2 emulation would be outstanding.

10. Resident Evil Code: Veronica

Code: Veronica feels like an attempt to be the true continuation of what Resident Evil 2’s narrative was building to by pushing the Redfield storyline forward in an over-the-top way that became synonymous with the series, expanding the Umbrella mythos beyond Raccoon City and deepening the series’s almost operatic tone. Its gothic island setting and Antarctic facility give it this weird theatrical flair that stands apart from its predecessors, and mostly anything that came after it.

The atmosphere is thick with melodrama from start to finish, with over-elaborate villains, grand monologues, and stylized environments that feel almost decadent. It embraces its camp but pairs it with genuine tension. Some of its puzzles and resource management scenarios are brutally demanding, forcing careful planning.

9. Resident Evil 4 (Original)

Okay, hear me out. This is going to get a lot of hate. But growing up with Resident Evil 1-3, I felt like Resident Evil, while cool, didn’t feel like Resident Evil to me, especially at the time. Its focus on cheesy on-purpose one-liners and action-heavy sequences made me miss the zombie-filled corridor times of yesteryear. It also started what I consider to be the fall of old school Resident Evil (4,5 and 6)

That being said, Resident Evil 4 came out like an explosion and changed gaming forever.

The third-person over-the-shoulder camera was a dramatic shift, giving the player the ability to fully explore the environments visually. That said, time has exposed its excessive QTE-heavy sections that interrupt the momentum, some late-game encounters lean heavily into pure action chaos, and the campy tone undercuts the horror in a real way.

But the tradeoff changed gaming history for the better.

8. Resident Evil Village

Resident Evil Village is one of the more wildly creative entries, shifting tones between gothic horror, psychological experimentation, and action spectacle. It truly feels like a better version of Resident Evil 6 in all the best ways by having the four distinct areas be their own arc.

Lady Dimitrescu’s castle is a standout, but each region experiments with genre conventions. It’s bold, sometimes uneven, but rarely boring. Not to mention the shift back to RE7 when we enter House Beneviento‏‎, and it houses the scariest thing in modern Resident Evil.

Village trades the intimacy it built up in RE7 for variety, and while it doesn’t always land tonally, its ambition keeps it compelling. It feels like Capcom is testing how far the series can stretch without snapping to the point of Resident Evil 6 again.

7. Resident Evil (1996)

What can be said about Resident Evil that hasn’t already been said? It is foundational.

The Spencer Mansion is this unforgettable masterclass in overarching environmental puzzle design that the series tries to remember how to do with almost every release. The looping corridors, locked doors, and, who could forge,t the traditional crank puzzles? It forces players to memorize the mansion’s layout in their minds. The voice acting is famously campy, but the structure is tight. Ink ribbons made saving meaningful. Every zombie encounter felt costly.

6. Resident Evil Remake

Resident Evil Remake is a great blueprint for how you revisit and remake a classic without changing what made it special in the first place. Capcom doubled down on the identity of the original and refined it with a level of care that still feels unmatched. The Spencer Mansion is more memorable and suffocating with the dread that drips in every room.

The visual overhaul alone was staggering at the time, and still to this day looks incredible. The addition of Crimson Heads turns every zombie into the potential of a long-term problem, forcing you to think ahead like Resident Evil games haven’t done before. Lisa Trevor’s inclusion added this layer of human tragedy and horror that grounded the mansion in something unsettlingly human. Even the smallest changes, like defensive items, subtly shift how you approach encounters without ever tipping the balance too far.

It’s deliberate in a way the series rarely allows itself to be anymore. Slow, methodical, and completely confident in the tension it builds. There’s no excess here, no need to modernize for the sake of it. It understands exactly what Resident Evil is at its core and leans into it fully, which is why it still holds up not just as a remake, but as one of the clearest expressions of the series’ identity.

5. Resident Evil Requiem

Resident Evil Requiem is a game that feels like the culmination of every game before it. In the same way Resident Evil 4 once reinvented the genre and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard recalibrated the franchise’s tone, Requiem managed to synthesize the best of both worlds into this incredibly fluid, hard-hitting and horrific experience.

Exploration rewards curiosity in a way that RE Village wished it had been able to hit with its more open nature. Hunting down raccoons, opening all the containers as Leon, it all just feels good to do. Partially because even with this, the atmosphere is thick with unease, and the game resists the temptation to overexplain its horrors. It trusts silence, and it works.

Not to mention it feels like the first game in the series that makes our long-loved heroes finally look at everything that’s happened to them in a meaningful way and accept what they’ve managed to accomplish since then. I have never been more excited for the next entry in a series than I have now, wanting to see what the culmination of everything has been.

4. Resident Evil 4 Remake

Resident Evil 4 had an impossible task: reinterpret one of the most influential games ever made. Instead of replicating it beat for beat, Capcom deepened it. In Resident Evil 4 Remake Combat feels heavier. Leon feels more human and vulnerable.

The village sequence regains its terror by making the opening of the game more grounded. The castle benefits from much stronger pacing, and even the smaller story moments land with more weight. Overall, they managed to make the game a much more cohesive experience, even if it does still lean too far into the action in the latter half of the game.

It doesn’t come close to eclipsing the original’s industry-shifting release, but it refines its ideas with modern design sensibilities.

3. Resident Evil 2 (Original)

Resident Evil 2 expanded Resident Evil beyond a single mansion location horror. Yeah, in RE1, we got the lab, the gardens and so forth, but it was all compacted into a smaller location. But with Resident Evil 2, we got Raccoon City. It immediately felt larger, more desperate, and more alive than the Spencer Mansion ever did.

The A/B scenario system, where you play as one character first, followed by the next, seeing the situations from their standpoint. It gave players a sense of playing through the complete story, adding to the fact that whoever you chose to have route B would have to fight against Mr.X to keep things fresh and even more dreadful was an incredible decision. The better fixed camera angles amplified dread even more, and the pacing struck a near-perfect balance between puzzle-solving and survival tension.

While modern controls have aged past tank controls, Resident Evil is one of the few old-school horror games where the controls, while slightly frustrating, are a good implementation of the control scheme. Not to mention its atmosphere remains powerful. It was the moment Resident Evil became a sprawling saga.

2. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard did the impossible. It rescued Resident Evil from the depths of mediocre hell. After the maximalist chaos of Resident Evil 6, the shift to first-person claustrophobia felt like the radical shift the series needed to pull back fans and introduce newcomers to the series without necessarily having the twenty-one years of ridiculous lore baggage.

The Baker estate is one of the most cohesive settings in series history. It’s intimate, grotesque, and grounded in a way previous entries rarely were. Jack Baker stalking you through narrow hallways is as tense as anything the franchise has delivered.

The latter half leans into action more than some would prefer, but the tonal reset cannot be overstated. RE7 restored vulnerability to the player and re-centred horror as the driving force behind the series. It proved that Resident Evil could evolve without abandoning its DNA

1. Resident Evil 2 Remake

Resident Evil 2 Remake remains one of the most impressive remakes ever made. It modernizes a genre-defining classic without sanding away its edges. The way they made the RPD into this almost living puzzle box and somehow amplified the already great puzzles that were in the original was astounding. It also set the tone and started the journey of Capcom firing on all cylinders for Resident Evil. It showed the longtime fans like myself that there was a passion and fire behind the team creating Resident Evil in a way we hadn’t seen in a long time.

It was also this evolutionary step in their “Hulking Thing Chases You” system that we saw in Resident Evil 2 classic, Resident Evil 3 classic, and more recently in Resident Evil 7 with the Baker family. Mr. X’s dynamic presence transforms backtracking into dread, backed by the fearful hulking steps that the sound team just nailed home.

This is the blueprint for what we see modern Resident Evil being, and seeing how they can faithfully adapt fan favourites into something new and powerful.