Impressions of the Resident Evil 2 Remake: One Shot Demo

The Resident Evil 2 remake is right around the corner, and so Capcom have launched a 30-minute demo featuring a slice of gameplay from the full game, in which you control Leon Kennedy exploring the Raccoon City Police Department fighting zombies and solving puzzles to find a way to advance. As the "One Shot" title implies, you have one shot to play this 30-minute scenario; a timer starts counting down once you launch into the game, and once your 30 minutes are up you get booted out to the menu with a "Thanks for playing" message. You cannot start over for a new 30 minutes, unless you launch the demo on a new account.

I'm not a big fan of the 30-minute time limit, because I usually like to play these games pretty slowly, making sure I'm taking in all the details, exploring everywhere possible, and trying all of the outcomes. The side-effect of the timer is that I played the game a little differently than I would have a normal demo, since I was essentially rushing to get through as much of it as I could, and so my mind was less focused on the game itself and more on my playing of the demo. There's potential with a time limit in a survival-horror game to enhance the stress and tension, and to force more interesting decisions when it comes to risk-versus-reward, but I never really felt that in this demo, so it feels more like a marketing gimmick to stir up hype and get people more interested in the game.

The remake seems to have been done in the engine used for Resident Evil 7, so it has the sleek and smooth feel of RE7, but in a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective (a bit like Resident Evil 4) with Resident Evil 2-style puzzles and exploration. Resident Evil 7 already felt like a return to form for the series, with the Baker estate feeling reminiscent of the mansion from RE1, but RE2 seems to be taking it one step further in going back to the roots, which would make sense since it is a remake of RE2, after all, arguably the best game in the original series. So on first impressions, it seems like the remake will blend a bunch of different elements from three of the best games in the series.

My video review of the demo

The remake seems to emphasize puzzles and exploration more than the more recent Resident Evils, with a lot of backtracking and wandering into different areas to find key items that will be used in previously explored areas. The puzzles, so far, aren't all that tricky, and basically just amount to picture matching and recognition (the spade key will open the spade door, match the combination on the lock to the pictures in the sketch) but there's a hint of logical reasoning involved, like in realizing that you can cut some tape to open a control box now that you have a knife. This is the kind of stuff I'd like to see more of, but so far it looks like the puzzles will all be telegraphed "lock and key" puzzles, or "match the picture" puzzles based on obvious hints given to you by inventory or intel items. As such, none of the puzzles in the demo were particularly satisfying to solve, although one did take a few more minutes to figure out than I'd like to admit.

Combat is supposed to be the major improvement in the remake. Combat was always a little clunky and imprecise in the originals, with fixed camera angles and no way to accurately aim your weapon leading to a lot of pointing your character in the general direction and hitting the "shoot" button while hoping the target dies in time. With the remake's over-the-shoulder perspective, it's now possible to aim far more accurately, meaning success or failure lies more on your own personal skill with the combat system. While this does make the combat feel far more responsive, it also has the side-effect of making combat much easier -- in the demo I was able to land a 90% headshot rate, and basically never felt challenged or stressed by any enemy encounters. The zombies don't move very fast, or stagger around unpredictably enough to make headshots any bit of a challenge. The only time I took damage was when a zombie ambushed me from out of nowhere, or when I mistakenly thought I'd killed a zombie that later got back up.

Shooting a zombo in an office

The controls for combat feel a little weird, too, with a slightly floaty quality to the mouse aiming. I think it has to do with the fact that your character's arms (and therefore, the gun and Leon's head) move at a different rate than your camera and targeting reticle, so it always feels like Leon's lagging a little behind. It might also just be that it doesn't feel as tight or rigid as I'm used to from other, similar games like RE4 and Dead Space. The game has a ton of options and settings, which is a welcome feature for a PC game that often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to these console ports, but I don't think any settings will change the general feel of those animations and movements.

Besides that, the combat just doesn't feel weighty or satisfying to me. Part of that's the floaty feeling of the aiming, but the weapons (pistol, shotgun) don't seem to pack much of a punch; there's no recoil when firing the pistol, it sounds kind of like a capgun, and zombies barely react to being shot in the head. It worked out alright in the original games because of those low-poly models and the imprecise aiming (it felt logical that when the zombies didn't react, it was because your character wasn't landing critical shots), but in this game with the hyper-realistic and gory graphics, combined with the close-up view from your own character's perspective, it looks and feels weird when you land several headshots on a zombie and it just kind of flinches slightly. Their animations feel vaguely similar to the molded from RE7, but it kind of worked RE7 because they were, well, molded, and not regular humans being brought back to life, so it's easier to suspend disbelief that a black moldy blob could survive a bullet to the "head" than a zombie in RE2.

As I said previously, the combat never felt challenging or stressful to me, and that extends to the whole demo -- the only stress I felt was trying to finish the demo in under 30 minutes. It's supposed to be a survival-horror game, but I never once felt scared for my safety, or worried about what I'd encounter up ahead, or disturbed by any of the events. You only encounter zombies in limited numbers at a time (usually 1-3) which is normally what I prefer in these types of games because that usually makes each individual encounter more important, but the zombies in this demo pose no real threat, and the game loads you up with so much ammo and healing items that you could easily dispatch every enemy you come across with zero concern for conserving resources, or worrying about your health. Maybe that's just because it's a demo, and it'll be harder in the full game, but there was no way to tell from just the demo itself. Fortunately, the game seems to be using typewriter saves, but I'm assuming they won't limit your saves via ink ribbons like in the originals -- I encountered no ink ribbons in the demo, and you had unlimited saving in RE7 until unlocking harder difficulties, so Capcom may follow that precedent in RE2.

A safe room with typewriter and stash

I'm also not fond of the way the third-person camera randomly switches positions; sometimes it's off to the right of Leon's shoulder, other times it centers perfectly behind him. I think it can also zoom in a little closer or pull back depending on the environment, which is fine but I don't like it when it's centered because then your body blocks your view of where you're going. Plus, the game doesn't let you control when you use your flashlight, and I don't like the game turning my flashlight off because I like having that dynamic range when I'm exploring -- it helps to see, of course, but it just looks nice having a light illuminating a dark area. Even when the game turns the flashlight off, it's sometimes in rooms that are evenly lit with really dim light, or that only have a single desk lamp illuminating the room, to the point that I feel like having the flashlight on would be beneficial for the character.

Despite these criticisms, I enjoyed the One Shot demo overall, and it does seem to paint a promising picture for the Resident Evil 2 remake. I like how it seems to blend styles and elements from three of my favorite Resident Evil games, but it wasn't so gripping or compelling as to make me want to go spend $60 on the full game. I think if I were to play Resident Evil 2, I'd rather just play the original game for now, and come back to the remake once it's on sale and has had its routine share of updates and DLC already added to it, so that I don't miss out on those patches and extra content in my first playthrough. Still, Resident Evil 7 was such a great experience when it first came out, that I might possibly feel tempted to buy in and give the Resident Evil 2 remake a shot.