launch wasn't the end of support for RE: village, far from it. a few years after release it would continue to get support with things like a PS5 port, a gold edition physical release, a VR port and this DLC expansion all coming out for it. some of these I never engaged with like the VR port that requires a PSVR2 and the gold edition release that just equated to a code in a box and a standard release, but I did buy this DLC pack. it had tons of stuff that really sold me on the experience: a full new campaign, additions to my favourite mode in the series with its mercenaries: additional orders expansion and even a third person mode to the campaign which was the real big seller to me. it's something that fixed the big issue village had in my eyes and something i desperately wanted the first person games to have. it was pricy at £20 for the amount you got but I think in the end the quality of what you get here is generally solid enough to justify it, even with how much it reuses content.

the main crux of the expansion pass is "shadows of rose" a full mini resident evil game made using mostly reused assets from the main game. it uses a third person camera similar to he remake titles and has you play as rose 16 years after the events of the game. it's an interesting little addition since it's actually vastly different from almost any other game in the series in terms of how it makes its levels and the styles of horror it uses. at times it even feels closer to silent hill than it does resident evil and I think that's really cool. it sets it apart from the basegame in a cool way even with all of the reused levels and assets and makes it a worthwhile experience that alone justifies the cost of the DLC. I'll get the issues with it out of the way first though since there aren't many. the DLC is mostly reused areas, you do get a few unique chunks at the end and the coolest boss arena in the whole series, but for the most part it does have you running around the same castle, village and dollhouse that you played in the basegame. they do change some things like item placement and in the former they add some neat environmental puzzles and areas you need to purify to traverse which I do think adds a lot to the experience. i actually had more fun with this version of the castle, having to search for the flowers to unlock was really fun and the ways you could interact with the environment to cross corrupted rooms was so fun to play around with. the dollhouse also has a really cool segment where rose is small and has to traverse a huge version of the level from the size of a mouse. that was such a cool segment and i would love to play a full horror game like that! it never felt too repetitive or boring since i was pretty happy to be exploring these areas again, the castle especially just never gets old to me.

the gameplay has some additions too. you don't have access to Ethan's full roster of weapons and things like add-ons are limited but rose has her own power system that gets some good use in the game. you can focus in with her abilities to break flowery looking locks to open new areas and solve some really fun environmental puzzles. you can also use it in combat to stun enemies, reverse attacks like the defensive weapons from REmake and even use this cool long ranged tentacle attack later on for huge damage. it's on an ammo system that you need to refresh but it's not super limited and you get some fun use out of it. it makes her feel vastly different to Ethan and I think her combat system is a lot more fun overall even with her lack of weapons. there's also more pronounced stealth segments where you lose your weapon and have to traverse the environment with some line of sight stealth which I thought was really fun, it was very different from how stealth worked in the main campaign and it gave that half of the campaign some variety, though i wasn't a fan of how certain enemies could instantly kill you. the highlight of that being a segment where you need to collect items in the dark with enemies that can only move when you aren't looking at them. this is the main area where the games scares really got to me and gave me a jump so good I had to put the controller down for a few mins. it's probably the scare highlight of the game and one of the scariest levels in any of the games in the series. I loved that segment. there's even some fun boss fights like a puzzle boss against a series villain ad a final boss that might be one of the coolest in the series, it gets silly in the coolest way. though the other 2 boss fights i don't think were as fun or interesting. the game doesn't have a store system or the open village though, it's a lot more straightforward and less open than the campaign but I think it works really well for the pacing. it's a short game and it's over long before it overstays its welcome.

*spoiler warning* Moreso than the gameplay or anything else the story is the highlight for me, it's such a personal game and it's that kind of symbolic psychological horror that i just fall in love with. something similar to a more action oriented and less dark silent hill: shattered memories in tone and themes and i really like that. hell it managed to get me fully invested in Ethan in ways the other games never managed to do and made his appearances in other games retroactively better for it. in general i think it improves both 7 and 8 a lot in retrospect for me, it really makes it all come full circle in a way that i think is impressive. i don't even like 7 all that much but i think this at least made me appreciate parts of it more. rose as a protagonist is just great too, she has that heather energy where she clearly just does not want to be there and she has some really funny lines complaining about puzzles or just swearing at the villains and it's really entertaining to watch. it's such a different energy to the other series protags and i really liked her, Ethan too is amazing here and i love how he acts in he first half of the story. you even have some fun villains too with an evil version of the duke that hams it up to no end and the return of a villain that people seemed to really like in her own game, so i think that'll give people something they'll like even if i never cared for her much as a character. Miranda feels kind of wasted here though and doesn't have much to do in her segment, there's some fun lines there though and that final battle is amazing. the story just hit me in such a personal way with how Ethan and rose interacted and it had me in tears by the end worse than almost any other game in the series. as the owner of gods strongest daddy issues this is the kind of story that's easy to get invested in and this is one of the stronger ones I've seen for that, if that makes sense. i just adored this and for that alone it makes it probably my favourite of the recent new batch of resident evil games bar maybe 3 remake, this is the kind of game I'll probably be thinking back on for a long time.

the mercenaries this time is a little bit different. it's not really like traditional mercs at all and is a lot closer to the raid modes you saw in the revelations games with some extra roguelike elements thrown in here to give it variety. sadly I don't think the mode is really as good as either of those modes and is overall my least favourite take on the mercenaries concept, but I think it's still a lot of fun and the characters added in the DLC make it more than worth going through. this is technically part of the basegame but i skipped covering it in my coverage of the original since it had basically no content and by that point he expansion was already out and installed so it just made more sense for me to cover it this way. the original mode only had one character with Ethan and only 4 stages, one of which as basically a slightly different take on the first. there just wasn't a ton there to talk about compared to everything that got added to it. the DLC ads 3 extra characters as well as 2 more stages and this makes a good amount of difference to the lasting power of he game and i think really saves the mode for me. the mode with just Ethan was a little boring to play since he's so weak that enemies just end up being total bullet sponges and 4 stages with no real variances beyond your powerups just isn't enough variety to give it a ton of replayability.

so as far as the characters i mentioned go you have 4. Ethan plays how he did in the basegame. he has a ton of weapons which you can upgrade and swap between at will. he's very standard as a jack of all trades but also very underpowered. your first mission here will usually be a struggle as enemies can take tons of shots to take down and this is only made worse on the higher difficulty maps. once you start to get some good powerups he can be a solid character that's pretty fun to improvise with, something the other cast don't excel at as much. Chris plays similarly to Ethan but with less weapons, a rage mode and a better melee. he's pretty broken since this rage mode can shred even the boss enemies and his punch can generally two-shot most enemies on the easier of the two modes as well as fill that rage bar super fast. a good run with Chris can have you with so much rage mode that you're speeding through the map with it barely ever running out and it's a ton of fun especially with a fully upgraded pistol and punch. it helps that his weapons from the campaign are here and having them fully upgraded is a blast to play with, he's probably my second favourite character to play here.

my favourite character to play is easily lady dimitrescu, and not just for the obvious reasons, pervs. she plays the most uniquely of the cast in that she's heavily based around a style meter essentially. the thrill bar will fill as you damage and kill enemies and as it goes up you gain better abilities and with some upgrades even better stats but it can reset if you get hit. it's real risk/reward system but when you get a good run and do well you steamroll like nothing else and it is a blast. she has a ton of variety in her moveset too, a damage over time projectile with her flies, a summon with her daughters, her claws which work independently per hand and can both lunge and grab enemies and a huge AOE damage skill with her dresser toss. it makes her a very versatile character and one i adored my time playing. she's also the tallest and the game actually works that into her playstyle too with you needing to duck to get into buildings and stuff, it's neat. her VA is the best too, the VA shrieking and screaming when you get a high thrill bar really ads to the chaotic feel of her playstyle. heisenburg is the last and sadly he's pretty disappointing. he's got a playstyle based mainly in his hammer which can be charged for extra damage, two ranged options which can be charged and a summon that isn't as useful as dimitrescus. he's not a bad character to play and he's probably more powerful than Ethan overall but i found his projectiles to just feel too weak and the charge attacks were very slow and flow breaking for me.

the stages are all reused from the campaign but they're solid stages. the castle and the village are for sure the highlights and both work great for the missions but i don't care for the factory level at all, it's too large and sprawling for the way this mode works with its slow and hidden enemies. it's always a slog to play and it's the only one I never go back to replay. the way this mode works is more linier than your usual mercs mode with stages not being playgrounds for fun combat and being just straight rushes to the end with enemies spawning in fixed areas. it has things strewn throughout like power ups and time increases and a combo meter that you need to try and keep up for maximum score and finding them can be pretty fun. it's slower and less fun with nowhere near the amount of replayability and it can be very slow at times which i think makes it a lot less fun than your usual mercs mode. enemies spawn in the same areas every time and they only try and find you if you're in the same room as you, add to that how slow or small they can be and how some are hidden lying on the ground waiting for you to find them and it can sometimes be frustrating to get that 100% kill count for a stage in some of the larger ones since it takes so long to go out of your way for a lone enemy that you end up running the combo meter down. it's not bad but when i compare it to say, resi 5 mercs which i have at least 100 hours in it really struggles to compare. the power ups are nice though and it was fun to experiment with builds across different runs, though there isn't enough variety for it to really make you come back in the long term especially since the combat just isn't as strong and the stages aren't as fun to replay.

the game had two composers working on it. with Shusaku Uchiyama as the lead composer and Nao Sato as a co-composer. the former being known for his work on other titles in the series like resident evil 2, 4, 2 remake, darkside chronicles and operation racoon city as well as other games like mega man 8&10, PN.03, under the skin, DMC4 and most recently exoprimal and dragons dogma 2. the latter worked on other titles like monster hunter rise, kunitsu-gami and resident evil requiem. both very solid lists of games. the score itself is great in the moment and works really well for the tone, especially in those dollhouse segments, though it's not super listenable. a trait shared by both village and the 2 remake. that said there are some standout tracks here even still. "run, rabbit, run" would fit right in an early resident evil game. "dolls" is one of the better ambient tracks and the track "mama mia" makes good use of it as well. "the core", "fight Miranda", "power transfer" "I did this for you", "his grave" and "end credits" all rounded out the OST for the campaign. for mercenaries you have a few good tracks like "mercenaries title" and one of the OST standouts "mercenaries-village", the other characters and areas also have solid themes though I didn't seem to find them on the OST, so they may just be reused from the main campaign. mercs on the whole has the best of villages music I think.

the last thing the expansion gives you is a third person mode for the campaign but this mode just isn't that great, i think it's a more fun way to play but things like a weird camera that doesn't let you see ethans face just make it more awkward than it should be. it almost ends up feeling like first person with a wider FOV and ethan in frame with how it even forces you to go into first person sometimes for some cutscenes. it's not bad but it is a little disappointing. the DLC on the whole will run you about 4 hours for shadows of rose, 3-5 hours of mercenaries if you just play every stage and unlock the main cast and maybe another run through of the game in third person if you decide to do that. that's about the length of a normal game so i feel that the asking price is pretty fair, especially since these days you can easily get it for under £15 and the gold edition physical does come with a free code for it. there is no real physical release for it though, even the switch 2 version is just a key-card and that's a real shame i think, shadows of rose at least deserves a real release. it's also generally on the easier side compared to the basegame, though mercenaries mode can really be a tough time depending on the character and mission. recently the series continued with resident evil requiem, which is a damn solid game in its own right, sadly rose wasn't in that one so we've yet to see the series really follow up on her in a meaningful way, i do hope they one day give her a full game of her own. the expansion was directed by Kento Kinoshita who also worked on some of capcoms best games like dragons dogma and its expansion, auto modelista and several monster hunter games in the span between G all the way to portable 3rd, after this game he would eventually go on to work on dragons dogma 2!. i recommend the DLC pretty easily, everything here is at least worth experiencing and if you already like the basegame then it's really an obvious get i think. it's more of an already good game and it's additions really round out the experience in a way that makes it feel really complete.