The remake of the original 1998 groundbreaking game stays true to its roots when it comes to the survival horror theme, while also updating many of the game’s mechanics that are now outdated…
Resident Evil 2 has opened to an overwhelming amount of critical success with large video game critics, receiving a whopping 91% over on Metacritic.
It’s safe to say that Capcom’s new masterpiece is doing well for itself, but it hasn’t always been such a smooth ride.
In recent years the Resident Evil series has been stuck in a place of limbo, losing sight of its core audience. From the outright explosion-infested Resident Evil 6 to the highly anticipated Resident Evil 7 amounting to nothing more than Capcom’s answer to Outlast.
However, after spending a good amount of time with Resident Evil 2, skulking through the Raccoon City Police Department, gruesomely blowing zombies’ heads off and carefully managing my inventory like in classic Resident Evils, it’s clear this game has gone back to the series roots and been its best outing in years.
The plot follows Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop within the Raccoon Police Department. He along with Claire Redfield are stuck within Raccoon City during the outbreak caused by the release of the T-Virus. With Claire looking for her brother and Leon searching answers, the two team up.
The story itself is nothing mind-blowing on the scale of The Last of Us, but it is a solid foundation for a zombie survival horror game and it leads on well from the first Resident Evil game as well as sets up future games effectively.
With the grand and daunting, Raccoon City Police Department making a comeback in all its glory. Fans of the setting on the original PlayStation will be blown away by how detailed everything is.
With the shift to the three dimensions taking place, it no longer relies on a fixed camera angle for each hallway, lobby, or room. It uses shadows and lighting effects to allow for zombies to jump out at you from the dark crevices they are cooped up in. This is so much so that in some areas of the department the entire area is covered in darkness forcing you to use your flashlight creating tense moments where the undead could only be two feet away from you and you not even realising.
With the building itself essentially being a giant maze of blind hiding spots, shadowed off crevices and, often feeling like a rabbit warren with its corridors, the setting can give players that feeling of tension that gamers haven’t seen in a long while.
It’s also jam-packed with interesting puzzles that require you to manage your inventory efficiently as well as giving you absolutely no objective markers making you feel complete and entirely a one-man-army. What’s more, is it forces players to make a mental map of where they have been.
With all this against you, it makes you feel like not only are the infected against you but also, the department building itself.
This game makes zombies – the drooling, foot-dragging, shambling monstrosities they are (basically a representation of me at 7 am each morning before university) – fresh and exciting once again.
Shooting them in the leg will take a leg off but, you better make sure (as Zombieland once put it) double tap! As simply taking a limb off their blood-soaked fleshy meat bag of a carcass will not put them down for good.
With this in mind, it makes it all the more harder that you are in these enclosed walls within the police department, and turn a corner too slowly and you might be in for a nasty bite on your neck while not waiting for Leon or Claire to take their time with aiming and being too hasty might result in you missing all your shots. Worse still, you will be wasting precious ammo that you will undoubtedly need later on.
This and much more highlight the spectacular ways in which this game makes zombies fun again. They don’t have to run at you at break-neck speed, and they do not have to drive trucks with machine guns on the back (Resident Evil 5). There’s just something so satisfying to this well-polished back to basics originality that we’ve had for so long, but modern zombie games have entirely forgotten about.
Then there is the Tyrant. A large hulking pale mutant donning a trench coat and a hat (which you can shoot off) for whom gunfire is little more than an inconvenience, so wasting your rounds on this guy is entirely fruitless. Within certain points of the game, this monstrosity will come stomping out with one goal in mind: to kill you.
The way he walks slowly towards you gives me, personally, the heebie-jeebies. The emotionless, unflinching, movement coupled with the loud thuds of his size 20 feet as he pops out from at the end of the hallway is something rarely captured in gaming. Some have likened him to Michael Myers, and much like Mr Myers he is an unstoppable force where your best method of beating him is to completely evade him.
Resident Evil 2 amazes and terrifies through its many hours of sneaking through the police department. The enemy design shows a fresh take on a simple formula created long ago, the gameplay, as well as the shooting mechanics/gunplay, is dynamic and authentic with bullets impacting specific body parts accordingly, the environment is fascinating and, the game just oozes atmosphere.
By Joe Smalley