Don't believe the poor reviews (unless you hated HOTD or Time Crisis!) 7/10 doesn't mean "okay"! It means "Great!"
Things like Dr. Marcus's youthful form are absent to the game, instead, the designers replaced him with a leech-formed form of him before he was assassinated by Birkin and Wesker. Some of the story from the originals is left out, like Barry Burton. It should be said that really the only negative things that happened to me are the fact that often you'll enter a mission, kill 2 or 3 zombies, then encounter a loading screen. You won't again, but it seems silly that you'd load right after you enter. The other thing is that I had no idea about how to use the First-Aid spray. What it really does is grant you an extra life. We didn't know that and learned that the hard way.
The weapon leveling system is more like RE2 than RE4. You upgrade aspects like in RE4, but have no control over which part you'd like to upgrade. You accumulate "Stars" for completing levels with an array of grades on areas like "Objects Destroyed" and "Critical Hits". These stars upgrade ONE ASPECT OF THE WEAPON AT A TIME. This is a little frustrating when you want your Sub-Machine gun to do more damage than your grenade launcher (Which is awesome).
The graphics really aren't bad. Reviewers said that the game had pre-RE4 graphics...that's wrong. The game's graphics are like
RE4-point-5; like the difference between House of the Dead 2 and House of the Dead 4 (Wicked awesome).
The game takes a page from RE4 with action commands which are a little difficult to do at first. The buttons need to be pressed several times, which I found out the hard way. ****Haven't beaten it yet.
Enough TALK, GO BUY IT! 9.5/10