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Capcom has announced that Resident Evil 7 has shipped over 2.5m units worldwide. The latest entry in its flagship survival horror series launched on Tuesday in the UK, garnering high scores across the board from a number of critics.
Meanwhile, the franchise as a whole has now reached a cumulative sales figure of 75m units since the first game was released in 1996, cementing its place as one of Capcom’s most established franchises.
Capcom has been bullish about the launch of its latest survival title, with EMEA marketing director Antoine Molant telling MCV back in December that the company was aiming for 4m sales on Day One worldwide. Capcom has yet to announce any exact sales figures for the game, but all eyes will no doubt be trained on whether it does indeed hit that ambitious 4m mark.
Unlike previous entries in the series, Resident Evil 7 marks a return to the series’ trademark survival horror roots, ditching the more action-orientated gameplay of Resident Evil 5 and 6 for a tenser kind of atmosphere.
It’s certainly gone down well with critics, with The Guardian‘s Simon Parkin calling it "a masterclass in terror" that’s "breezily new, yet quintessentially in character with its illustrious forebears." Andy Kelly over at PC Gamer also praised its attempt to reinvent the franchise, stating "it takes an industrial pressure washer to the series, blasting off years of accumulated filth and grime", leaving a "lean, polished survival horror that borrows from its legacy but isn’t afraid to look to modern horror games for inspiration, too."
Not all critics were quite so convinced, however, with Eurogamer‘s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell saying that "at heart it’s a fairly pedestrian species of bogeyman – a series of peekaboo jolts and serviceable gun battles strewn across a sumptuous, cohesive environment, constructed with no shortage of craft but not a whole lot of real imagination."
Resident Evil VII is out now for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
