February 9th, 2019
There are several large gaps in my video game experience, and one of them is the Resident Evil series. I started with Resident Evil 4 and never looked back, relying on spin-off titles like Umbrella Chronicles to keep me in the loop about Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3 without having to suffer through their fixed camera angles and auto aim. The remake of Resident Evil 2 (henceforth referred to as “REmake 2”) provided the perfect opportunity for me to fill in the gap of my Resident Evil knowledge, and fortunately it’s also really good.
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“Survival”: REmake 2 is probably the closest I’ve gotten to a true survival horror experience, though I haven’t played any of those lovely indie games like Outlast. Ammo is scarce, enemies are incredibly durable, your knives break if you use them too much, and it all comes together to create a very oppressive atmosphere. There are many instances where just avoiding combat is better than fighting, especially since enemies don’t drop anything upon death so you literally only ever lose resources when you engage them.
Graphics: There are a few problems with REmake 2’s visuals that I’ll cover later, but overall the RE Engine continues to look incredible. The lighting in particular is a real treat, and I’d recommend to everyone that they make sure to have the brightness settings set properly so you can have the full experience. Maybe even turn it down a notch or two further than they should be, just so that your flashlight truly is your only lifeline. The gore is pretty great as well, with area-specific damage when you shoot zombies and even the option to shoot of their arms and legs. Why would you want to waste ammo on their legs? Well…
Strategy: A big part of playing REmake 2 is realizing how durable the zombies can be. You will spend a lot of time retracing your steps through the police station and any enemy that you don’t kill will still be waiting for you where you left it, assuming it doesn’t chase you into an adjoining area, but the problem is that zombies just don’t die. You can shoot them three or four times in the head to “kill” them, but if their head doesn’t explode you can bet the zombie will get back up after a few seconds and come after you again. This can be alleviated somewhat with a shotgun, which is all but guaranteed to destroy a zombie’s head if you’re close enough, but shotgun ammo doesn’t grow on trees so maybe you shouldn’t waste it. This is where shooting off a zombie’s leg can be a useful strategy, as it only takes two to four bullets (depending on your aim) and it’s not like their legs grow back so you can easily bait them from one side of an area to get them away from what you want to do in that particular room. Granted, zombies crawling around isn’t much fun either, especially because you can’t stop them from biting you if they grab your ankles (for some reason), but if you’re in a pinch it’s a good solution. Another enemy type that you’ll run into later is blind, so you have to balance whether you want to waste the significant resources by killing them, or take your chances sneaking past with the understanding that they’ll still be waiting for you when you come back later.
The 4th Survivor: After you see the game’s true ending you unlock a bonus level called “The 4th Survivor” that follows HUNK, the last survivor of a PMC operator unit, as he tries to get out of the city. HUNK is essentially the Boba Fett of the Resident Evil universe, a character that shows up once, doesn’t say much, but is loved by tons of fans because of his look and his bad ass reputation. HUNK is known as the “Grim Reaper” or “Mr. Death” because he always survives, even when the rest of his team has been wiped out, and The 4th Survivor certainly makes you work for it. The level is essentially one giant puzzle, as you have a ton of weapons and healing items but no other pick ups throughout the run as you find yourself facing almost every enemy in the game at one point or another as you move through most of the game’s map. It pushes your game knowledge of REmake 2 to the limit as you weave through zombies and decide when’s the best time to use your limited ammo and grenades, which can get pretty damn exhilarating the first time you do it.
The map: Ripped straight out of Zelda, REmake 2’s map not only shows you where you have and haven’t been but also color codes rooms that still have items you haven’t picked up. REmake 2 has a lot of nooks and out of the reach areas that you might miss, not to mention lockers and safes that you don’t have the codes for when you first find them, so this is a welcome addition. One thing I do dislike about it is that you have to actually interact with a puzzle, locked door, etc for it to show up on your map, but it’s a small price to pay for this much information.
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Multiple playthroughs: In the original Resident Evil games they had this obsession with doubling the length of your playthrough by including two playable characters that you could run through the game with. REmake 2 sticks with this tradition by having two separate story modes based on your main character, with very few differences between them to justify the “extra content.” This returns to the Nier Automata problem, where you have to play through almost the exact same story twice to get the real ending, but I don’t have such a huge issue with REmake 2’s version of it for a few reasons. For starters our two different characters (Leon and Claire) get different weapons, which can affect their experiences significantly. Leon gets the shotgun I mentioned earlier while Claire gets a grenade launcher that lets her deal with stronger enemies a bit easier. Leon also gets the magnum earlier and a flamethrower to deal with a special kind of plant zombie, while Claire gets a machine gun and what I’m going to call a “taser rifle” that does absolutely nothing at all. REmake 2 doesn’t have too many differences between their two playthroughs compared to the original game, but it does have enough slight changes in enemy and item placement to keep you on your toes. Just don’t try to figure out why both characters are fighting the same boss in the same area and why a side character dies two different ways.
Mr. X: About a third of the way through the game on your first playthrough and possibly earlier on the second you’ll start being hunted by a Tyrant in a trench coat and hat. The game’s novelization refers to him as Mr. X, but in the game you really don’t learn too much about him beyond a journalist theorizing that he’s there to “clean up the mess.” All you need to know is that Mr. X is unstoppable and once you first encounter him he will NEVER stop hunting you through the police station. The best you can hope to do is either stun him, run away from him, or hide, but even hiding doesn’t really work unless you figure out the rooms he can and can’t enter. Fortunately he walks like an elephant so you can hear him coming a mile away, and his AI isn’t that great either. More than once I would play “ring around the obstacle” with him while trying to solve a puzzle or figure out where to go next, including a really ridiculous ten minutes as Leon where I was trying to solve a puzzle in the library and had to keep running up and down ladders to get some space between us. I appreciate what Mr. X is there for, and honestly the game gets a lot less interesting once you stop running from him, but when he’s so easily foiled he becomes more of a nuisance than a threat, especially on your first playthrough.
The second playthrough pistol: After you complete the game for the first time and start your second playthrough as the other character there will be a little extra scene at the start of the level and a secret room that gives you an upgraded pistol. This pistol fires .45s instead of 9mm and all 9mm ammo in the game is replaced by .45s instead, which should be a positive but instead has a whole host of other issues. The main problem is that the game has a crafting component but you can’t craft .45 bullets, so you need to hold onto both your starting pistol and your new one for when you run out of .45s and need to craft additional bullets. Then there’s also the fact that zombies appear to be stronger in your second playthrough, so the .45 acts like an equalizer that keeps zombies at two to four shots until “death,” rather than giving you any special extra bonus. It’s good intentions that don’t actually help you in any meaningful way, and I would have preferred that they just get rid of 9mm ammo entirely for your second playthrough, even though Leon’s Matilda gun is pretty great when it’s fully upgraded.
Inventory: No Resident Evil game has even tried to repeat the inventory from RE4, and that’s disappointing. Instead we’re left with just generic inventory slots with arbitrary ideas about what fills a slot, though it’s not quite as obnoxious as it was in Resident Evil 5. I’m just saying that a handgun shouldn’t take up as much space as a key, that’s all…and maybe when you get a bracelet in you inventory you could actually WEAR the bracelet instead of having it take up space in your pockets.
“Ghost Survivors” DLC: There’s new free DLC coming out for the game in about two weeks that is about three other returning/original characters and focuses on their struggles in Raccoon City. I’m not that enthused about it simply because one of the characters is just another member of HUNK’s unit, and why would I want to play as someone else in HUNK’s unit when I could just be playing as HUNK some more? We’ll see how it turns out, but it’s nice that it’s free.
Hated
Graphical errors: When a game engine is as good as the RE Engine it becomes painfully obvious when things don’t quite go according to plan in a visual sense. The physics get wonky in one or two parts, particularly when zombies are eating and you can clearly see their faces are a good six inches above what they’re supposed to be eating, and the character’s mouths sometimes don’t move when they’re talking. Visually the image of lights reflecting off of a surface will routinely just look like pixelated white blotches, and the goddamn fence that I’m posting below never failed to make me wonder who dropped the damn ball on those textures. There was also at least one time where every car in the parking garage looked like it was from a PS2 game, and the game very clearly drops the framerate on enemies that are more than twenty feet away from you, which can get real jarring.
Enemy variety: I’m not as mad about this as I probably should be, but there isn’t as much enemy variety in REmake 2 as there was in the original game. REmake 2 has maybe six enemy types and complete ignores some classic ones in the original games, like Crimson Heads, despite plenty of opportunities for them to appear. It’s not the worst thing in the world, since zombie games aren’t known for their high enemy variance, but I know early Resident Evil fans are disappointed.
Leon and Claire’s final weapons: The flamethrower and the taser rifle are crap, in my opinion. Sure, they’re great against the final strange zombie type enemy in the game, but that’s really all they’re good for which is quite disappointing for the game’s “final weapons” to be so damn situational.
Ada and Sherry’s sections: Leon and Claire team up with unique NPCs as a way to create more differences between their playthroughs, but neither actually adds anything to gameplay…up to a point. At a certain moment in the game’s story you’ll briefly take control of your NPC partner (Ada for Leon and Sherry for Claire) during their own brief side adventure. Both aren’t great, with Ada coming out slightly stronger of the two because she’s not an eight year-old girl playing hide and seek. In fact, Sherry’s section is so bad that players going for S+ rank on the highest difficulty recommend using one of the game’s limited saves right before that point, just so that you don’t lose hours of progress if something goes arbitrarily wrong.
REmake 2 is a very strong way to start out 2019, despite its occasional technical blemishes and cut features from the original game. The focus on survival rather than clearing rooms quickly becomes obvious, and the relative ineffectiveness of your basic weapons plus limited ammo creates a gripping and sometimes stressful atmosphere that I found to be quite enjoyable. The repetitive nature of the game’s design will probably frustrate some people, but if you don’t mind replaying games and being chased by a giant man in a trench coat, then I strongly recommend giving REmake 2 a shot.
