Note: This review contains spoilers.
Resident Evil 2 is an incredibly well executed game. Animations are smooth, acting is solid, lighting is spectacular, and there is a sense of tension and dread throughout. I haven't played much of the original Resident Evil 2 outside of a few measly hours, but I do remember hating the tank controls (my opinion these days is decidedly mixed on tank controls) but loving the feel of the game. Largely, the sense of open hostility and horror from the original remains in the remake. Succinctly, Resident Evil 2 is probably what a remake should be. It feels incredibly modern, and is easy to pick up, yet challenging to beat and recaptures key aspects of what I remember and what I've seen played from the original. So, then, why didn't I love this game?
To be fair, I'm not in the least bit nostalgic for the original, but I wouldn't consider that much of a hindrance. I loved my recent play through of the original Resident Evil HD, so much so I gave it a 10 in my review, but this strikes me as altogether different. The story of Resident Evil 2 goes you are either Leon Kennedy, newbie at the Raccoon City police department who had his first day postponed and he wants to know why, or Claire Redfield, sister of Chris Redfield from Resident Evil looking for her brother, who find themselves in the middle of an all out zombie outbreak in Raccoon City and must take refuge in the Raccoon City Police Department. The amount of variance between the two campaigns is worth playing through the game twice, but I found that they didn't always line up with one another, and felt sometimes sloppily thrown together. The two bump into each other multiple times throughout the game, always with an awkward exchange of flirty pleasantries that always felt socially inept when draped with the zombie apocalypse literally gnawing at their ankles, but it is a Resident Evil game, after all. Regardless of who you choose to play as, you will first have to find the three medallions in order to take the underground passage to the parking garage, where you can enter the other wing of the police department. From there, you will need to find a way to get the key card (which is different for each of the campaigns) in order to exit the police station, and make your way either to the sewer opening (Leon) or the orphanage (Claire). From there, you will both end up in the sewer where you will learn of Umbrella housing a secret lab underneath the city where they experimented on the horrific G-Virus, the thing that created the horrible creature at the end of the first game. In either campaign you must go to the lab where either you are looking for the G-Virus (Leon) or an antidote (Claire), before escaping the facility before it self destructs. It's as standard as a plot can get with a Resident Evil game, but there are some nice unique bits depending on who you are playing as. As Leon, you will bump into FBI agent Ada Wong (who is really a secret agent for a rival corporation to Umbrella) looking for a way into the lab to retrieve the G-Virus. As Claire, you bump into Sherry, daughter of William Burken, the creator of the G-Virus, who becomes infected with it and must be cured by the one antidote deep in the Umbrella labs. Each version of the campaign has subtle differences in how each of the events develops, and also has unique set pieces, such as hacking with Ada Wong or stealthily avoiding the corrupt chief of police as Sherry. It's enough to keep each play through fresh and interesting, but if you're paying even a bit of attention, you'll realize that these two campaigns cannot canonically work together. In Claire's campaign, you see Sherry's mom die before she shoots Ada Wong in Leon's campaign, and both campaigns have you fighting William's various G-Virus infected forms in the same place, with the same destruction at hand. It may seem like nit picking to say this comes off as sloppy, but the game heavily incentivizes you to play through both campaigns to get the full story, even going so far as to give you an extra ending and final boss. It's a weird design choice having several major and obvious contradictions, favoring recycled gameplay over narrative cohesiveness, and it pulls you out of the game, which is a shame because the game has an incredible sense of immersive atmosphere.
None of the environments are nearly as interesting to explore as the Spencer Mansion, but they are far more detailed and consistent. The mansion was a labyrinth of secrets, traps, and puzzles, where as the Raccoon City police department just isn't. There are a few puzzles here and there, keys to find and supplies to scavenge, but it felt a lot more redundant than the mansion felt in the previous game. That said, I liked the police department better than all the secondary areas of Resident Evil. I enjoyed returning to it to unlock a new couple of areas after finding a key outside the station, and I especially liked that there were exclusive areas depending on which character you chose to play as or which play through you were on. On average, Resident Evil 2 had a more consistent quality between its various areas, outside of the Sewers, which I found far more obnoxious than fun or tense. The Labs had a fun sense of exploration in the late game, and the orphanage, however short, was eerie and had one of the most terrifying set pieces in the game with Sherry's brief playable section. The sewers had two things going for it: the Ada Wong section of Leon's story, and the chess piece puzzle. The Ada Wong section sees you hacking panels to unlock doors, break ventilation fans, and escaping an incinerator before it burns you alive. The chess piece puzzle has you finding chess-shaped electrical plugs around the sewers and having to arrange them based on a riddle on the wall, whose solution changes depending on which play through you are on. Everything else was pretty awful. The enemies in this area are far more the bullet sponges than in any other area. The zombies throughout the game can take clips of ammunition, but the trade off is that they can occasionally be averted or you can shoot off their legs making them far less mobile. Even the lickers, who can do an insane amount of damage, can be snuck past since they are blind. The G-Virus monstrosities in the sewer, however, are large and often take up the entire width of whatever hallway you are trying to get through, and in at least one section, you have to face four of them in a row. It feels like the game is deliberately trying to suck ammo from you, and just before a boss fight as well. For both play throughs of the game, I entered the sewers boss fight with minimal health and very little ammunition because of having to deal with the rest of the sewers. It doesn't help that the sewers are largely long corridors of (literal and figurative) waste that, while they don't slow you down too much, take far too long to traverse. It's a slog.
Enemy variety is pretty scant here, but it didn't feel like more enemies would really enhance the game. You've your basic zombies, your atrocious G-Virus things, the quick zombie dogs, and the formidable lickers hindering your path at every turn, adding tension and survival horror supply management on who is worthy of taking out, and who can be avoided. It's pretty tense stuff, but none so tense as Tyrant, or Mr. X. Tyrant, without hyperbole, is not only one of the best parts of the game, but one of the scariest, most intense mechanics in any game I've played. Tyrant appears at roughly the half way point of the game, a massive mutant that cannot be killed. Much like Daddy in Resident Evil 7, Tyrant can be taken out temporarily by exchange of a considerably weight in ammunition, or you can attempt to avoid him. Unlike Daddy, however, Tyrant doesn't stay down long. Gunshots and running attract him to your place, and wherever he is in the station, you can hear his massive, thundering footsteps. Some of my fondest memories of this game have me hiding out in a save room, waiting for those thumps to quiet down, peaking out the door only to see him lumbering right outside, waiting for me. At one point as Clair, I set off some C4 to grab one of the medallions, which causes a zombie to drop down from the ceiling and attracted a licker I had slipped by earlier. I quickly switch over to some heavier weaponry to try and take out the licker, but before I even have him down, let alone the zombie just behind him, the door slams open and Tyrant makes a b-line straight to me. It was a frantic hail of fire rounds from my grenade launcher and some quick - snorting? smoking? - of red and green herb mixture while ducking through the nearest door, thundering footsteps following me down three flights of stairs until I had scrambled into the safe room, just in the nick of time. That kind of improvised set piece is the magic of playing video games, and Tyrant was built for it. I've heard quite a bit of grumbling about how annoying Tyrant can get after awhile, but I never had that happen during my two play throughs. Tyrant is, for the most part, used sparingly, only showing up when you're almost done with the police department and at other key moments. The lone exception to this is in the second play through, where he is roaming around from the moment you enter the police department main hall. Understandably, Tyrant may not be to everyone's taste. He's a menacing, terrifying inconvenience if you just want to solve puzzles and scavenge, but I found his presence invigorating in a game I was starting to feel was a bit too much like a lighter version of better games before it.
Resident Evil 2 is frustrating in that it is fun but not particularly satisfying, dramatic but not exactly put together, and all-in-all a good game that falls short of being truly great. All the pieces that could make this game on par with the fantastic Resident Evil 7 are there, you can see them and their moving around, occasionally interlocking with one another, but they always miss something - some move or placement that would give a sense of fulfilled potential. They made it look great, they made it fun, but they didn't make it memorable outside of a solid game with some great ideas that deserved a somewhat better game. Maybe there's too much history to this series, or maybe I shouldn't have played it so soon after Resident Evil 7, but Resident Evil 2 made me excited for the prospect of a Resident Evil 3 remake, but also made me want to take a break from the series for awhile.
7.5
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