I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's bad, but it's definitely not great and parts of it are certainly bad. Aesthetically it's nice, brilliant in parts, but aside from the Beneviento house and a couple of other minor segments, it's not even close to RE7 in terms of building atmosphere and tension. The story is inane but some parts are funny in a dumb B-movie kind of way.
The big problem is the combat, which is straight-up trash. RE4 (which people like to compare the game to, and which it does draw on in some areas, unfortunately not including combat) had brilliant combat, level and encounter design based around tactical movement and crowd control, having to avoid getting cornered or surrounded while manipulating enemies into forming clusters that can be roundhouse kicked to the ground after a carefully placed shot. It also had great enemy variation (shield guys, enemies with dynamite, chainsaw men, enemies randomly spawning Plagas upon death etc.) and combined those enemies in ways that made for interesting, dynamic and tense encounters.
Then you have RE8 where you fight what are functionally the same enemies for pretty much the whole game (the vampires/ghouls behave identically to lycans except being slower...), and that almost never require any other tactic than "keep slowly backing away while dumping shots into their heads". Timing blocks is never even remotely challenging because enemy attacks are slow and extremely generously telegraphed. There's no real crowd control element or any need for tactical movement. Almost every encounter is the same and they are all boring, especially given that the enemies are all extreme bullet sponges (at least on Hardcore, which is the setting I played on). Barricading could have been an interesting mechanic given competent enemy and level design, but instead makes combat even more boring — enemies always stagger when shot in the head through a barricade, so you can literally just stand there and shoot them in the head over and over each time they step to the barricade to attack it, interrupting their attack every time until they die. Also, there were numerous occasions in the game where I found that while backing away from enemies, they would reach an invisible wall where they just wouldn't pursue you anymore and instead start slowly walking away, at which point I could just keep shooting them in the back of the head. And that wasn't the result of me actively looking for exploits, I came across this spontaneously each time. One time it even happened with a midboss!
Everything about the combat mechanics, enemy behavior and level design (as far as it relates to combat) is just incredibly sloppy and thoughtlessly designed. Now, RE7 also had shit combat, but that game managed to be awesome by having very little of it (until the last parts of the game, which are also its weakest) and emphasizing other things that were wonderfully executed. RE8, on the other hand, wants to be this action-packed combat rollercoaster where you kill endless hordes of monsters, and when that's what you're going for you really need to have your shit together when it comes to combat design. This game, unfortunately, absolutely doesn't.
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