6 Best Resident Evil Spin-off Games, Ranked

The Resident Evil series has been around for several decades and has had an epic run of great mainline games. Fans who want to dig even deeper have had more than a dozen spin-offs that add to the franchise lore. These vary in quality (and whether they count in the canon), but a few of them take the cake as the best. In fact, a few of the spin-offs could be considered for the mainline series because of how much they add to the larger Resident Evil story.

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Here are the six best Resident Evil spin-offs.

6) Resident Evil: Resistance

I might be overrating this 4-on-1 multiplayer game, but it’s hard not to when it gave us the fan-favorite character: Martin Sandwich. The out-of-his-depth mechanic proved a valuable ally to anyone trying to survive the various Masterminds who were trying to take out the survivors.

More seriously, this experiment didn’t quite succeed as well as Capcom was hoping when it dropped alongside Resident Evil 3. The asymmetrical horror game did not gain a large audience, partially because it lacked dedicated servers and had some balancing issues. Still, I have to commend Capcom for trying, and when it was working, Resistance was a fun take on the RE formula.

5) Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

The Wii was all the rage during the mid-2000s. The motion-control-enabled console was popular with gamers, families, and even your local nursing home. With that in mind, it’s not a huge surprise that companies like Capcom were looking to take advantage of the craze. Thankfully for the Japanese giant, it already had some experience with a similar gimmick, which made bringing over its light-gun-style shooter relatively easy.

The Umbrella Chronicles was the first of two games in the Chronicles series, with this one starring longtime Resident Evil villain Albert Wesker as the narrator. You’ll play through the events of several early games from a new perspective, stepping into the shoes of everyone from Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield to Billy Chambers and Richard Aiken. Throughout it all, you learn new details about key events and characters, making this the perfect addition for hardcore fans.

4) Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

The Darkside Chronicles takes the series one step further. This time, you’re following the stories of Leon S. Kennedy and Resident Evil 4 bad guy Jack Krauser as they try to discover the mystery behind the deadly T-virus. If you want to understand Leon’s history leading up to RE2, Darkside Chronicles is a must-play game.

On top of that, it’s an excellent light gun shooter. The camera can be a little shaky, but everything else is top-notch. Solid visuals, great gameplay, and more than enough content help make The Darkside Chronicles an attractive package. Unfortunately, the HD collection that launched on PS3 isn’t easy to get your hands on because it was not released physically.

3) Resident Evil Revelations 2

Stepping back into the shoes of Claire Redfield after so much time away felt like going home to many longtime fans. Revelations 2 also lets you play as Barry Burton and his daughter, Moira, adding even more fan service to the mix. With so many great characters in the long-running series, it really is a shame we only ever see Chris Redfield and Leon these days.

Anyway, Revelations 2 is, like its predecessor, an episodic game that is a blast whether you’re playing solo or in co-op. All four episodes swap between playing as Claire and Barry, making sure you get plenty of both characters. Raid Mode is also back, giving you 200 new missions to tackle in bite-sized, run-and-gun gameplay. It’s a game filled with content that’ll keep you busy well past credits. The only thing holding it from moving higher is the lack of big scares and some backtracking issues.

2) Resident Evil Outbreak

Resident Evil Outbreak is the first entry in the series to try cooperative play and the first one to take players online. Because of that, it often feels ahead of its time. The infrastructure just wasn’t in place in 2004 to make a seamless cooperative survival horror game work, especially on consoles.

Had Outbreak’s brand of episodic Resident Evil missions dropped a decade later, it likely would’ve found a larger audience. It did well enough to get a sequel (which is also very good), but we haven’t seen the team go back to this well since. Hopefully, that changes someday. There’s something to the formula that really works; we just couldn’t quite see it in the early days of consoles jumping online.

1) Resident Evil Revelations

The first Revelations should be a mainline Resident Evil game, if for no other reason than that fans deserve more Jill Valentine in their lives. She’s the best character Capcom’s ever introduced, easily outshining Chris and Leon, but hasn’t gotten her due in recent years. Heck, you’re even forced to play as Chris for half of this game, which is always a drag.

It’s not just about Jill. Revelations largely takes place on an abandoned cruise ship, which is a perfect setting for a horror game. You can never quite see what’s coming while exploring these tight corridors, upping the horror factor to a level we hadn’t seen from the series for a few years. Did it, unfortunately, launch on the underpowered Nintendo 3DS, holding it back visually? Sure, but Revelations is so good, it doesn’t matter. This is an all-time great Resident Evil game, and we need to start treating it as such.

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