Resident Evil fans are going to be eating well the next few years. With a new entry in the series which promises a dramatic return of names and places which have been molding in the shadows for decades, namely Raccoon City and Weapons Director Zach Cregger announcing details and potential leads for his upcoming RE movie, A new outbreak of excitement is building, and fans are going to get a different kind of “service” as well.
At the start of July, Capcom announced Resident Evil: Survival Unit, a mobile game which is planned to enter service sometime in 2025. Players will control an escapee from the villainous Umbrella Corporation. Escaping onto the streets of Raccoon City during the T-Virus Outbreak of RE 2 and 3, gathering beloved characters from the franchise and sending them on missions from your own “mansion.” With Shinji Hashimoto, one of the minds behind the character-mash up champion series Kingdom Hearts, attached as an executive producer, Survival Unit seems like it has great potential to tap into the, well, resident stars of the series.
One of the biggest draws to the Resident Evil Franchise are the characters. Ask any fan who they think of as the face of the franchise, and you’ll get a lot of different answers (a lot of those answers will be “Wesker.”) But with so many characters spread across almost 30 years of Survival Horror, many fans are still waiting to see their favorite characters team up, like Carlos Oliveira of Resident Evil 3 fame and series mainstay Chris Redfield. However, Resident Evil: Survival unit may be the chance fans have been hoping for.
From the S.E. Perry novels of the early 2000s to the various spin-off games such as the Resident Evil: Revelations series, RE’s characters have always been a driving element in fans’ enjoyment of the series. We all have our favorites, but Capcom is sometimes stingy with the juicy details. So having any more insight tends to make us as ravenous as any T-Virus carrier.
Capcom has whetted our appetites with recent entries in its CGI movies, with the latest, 2023’s Resident Evil: Dead Island giving us something fans had been clamoring for: Jill Valentine and Leon S Kennedy fighting monsters together, a first in the series. Seeing so many favorite characters in one place was a stunning sight, and showed what could be Survival Unit’s strength. Remember that “Mansion” we mentioned? Survival Unit’s website explains that the mansion will serve as a base where the various characters will live and interact, hinting at unheard of conversations between characters.
If players are able to build their dream team of zombie fighters, then they’ll swarm the game. In fact, they already are, as the game pre-register event has already been cleared. Over one million users have pre-registered. It seems as if Survival Unit is already spreading, and if we’re lucky, the game might answer some burning questions, such as how these characters talk to each other when there aren’t zombies breathing down their necks, and what exactly constitutes a “Jill Sandwich.”