The Resident Evil 2 remake has been possibly the most-anticipated release in the Resident Evil series, considering how well the original game is beloved by fans. Ever since the first game got remade on the GameCube in 2002, fans have been clamoring for a similar treatment of the sequel, which many actually consider to be the better game. Two decades later, we finally have the Resident Evil 2 remake, but it's maybe not quite what people really wanted, at least not initially. Gone are the pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles, and awkward tank-controls that were so iconic and representative of the first three games; in their place we now have an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4 style third-person shooter perspective in a fully three-dimensional environment. While the shift in perspective may make it seem to have more in common with some of the more recent Resident Evil games, rather than the game it's supposed to be based on, the remake is definitely more of a classic survival-horror game in the vein of the original trilogy than a modern action shooter. In fact, it's probably the most old-school survival-horror game to be released by a major publisher since, well, Resident Evil 7, and the remake is even more of an old-school survival-horror than Resident Evil 7 was.
Before getting any further into this review, I should point out that I don't have a lot of familiarity or any sort of personal attachment to the original version. I didn't have a PlayStation growing up, and so my only experience with the original game was many years later when it got ported to the GameCube, but even then I only played for about 20-30 minutes before giving up and losing interest, though I have been replaying some of it lately to give myself some more context for the remake. I'm also not a hardcore super-fan of the Resident Evil series, although I have played a lot of them including the GameCube and DS remakes of the first game, plus Resident Evil 4, 5, 7, and the first Revelations. Although I don't have a ton of experience with the original trilogy, I really like the first game and have a strong appreciation for "classic survival-horror." I don't mention that to say that I'm any sort of credentialed expert, but rather to give you some context for my history with the series so that you can maybe better understand where I'm coming from with my thoughts and observations. Since I never truly played the original version, I'll be reviewing the Resident Evil 2 remake as basically a stand-alone title, although some comparisons to other Resident Evil games will certainly be inevitable.
Whereas Resident Evil 1 told the story of Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, and the rest of STARS Bravo Squad exploring the Spencer Mansion and encountering the early stages of the zombie outbreak (which as they discover was fueled by Umbrella Corporation's T-Virus), Resident Evil 2 takes place a little later and shows how the outbreak has expanded beyond the mansion in the Arklay Mountains and reached the neighboring Raccoon City. Rather than taking place in the confined spaces of a mansion and its surrounding areas, Resident Evil 2 has you exploring downtown city streets, the Raccoon City Police Department, and the city sewers before eventually making your way to a secret Umbrella laboratory, where they've been concocting a new strain of virus called the G-Virus. As with the first game, you get to play as one of two protagonists -- Leon Kennedy, rookie cop arriving at Raccoon City on his first day on the job, or Claire Redfield, sister to Chris from the first game who's come to look for him -- who meet at a gas station outside of town as they're both attacked by zombies. They head into the city together before getting separated when a tanker truck crashes into their vehicle, agreeing to meet up at the Police Department. From there, each character plays out their own separate scenario meant to complement each other as part of one greater story. When you finish one character's campaign, you can play the other's in a "second run" which will offer remixed level layouts, enemy placements, and puzzle solutions, in addition to showcasing each character's unique stories and side characters.
My video review of Resident Evil 2
While I found the gameplay strong enough to keep me constantly engaged all the way through and eager to press onward, the story didn't really help me much in that department because I never found myself actually engrossed by the story. The setup is a basic survival scenario where you're trapped in an area and have to find a way out while not getting killed by zombies, except without any characterization to make me care about the situation. There's not a lot of exposition before the game is dropping you into dire survival situations, and we no longer get to examine things from the character's perspective, bringing up a text description of their thoughts and observations which at least gave you glimpses into their psyches and personalities. Both Leon and Claire have a reason that gets them into town to become part of the main narrative, but the fact that they're involved in the story at all is almost incidental -- they don't really have a clear motivation either way until almost halfway through each character's respective story, when Claire meets Sherry and Leon meets Ada, and so until then you're just kind of aimlessly exploring the police department looking for keys and puzzle pieces to advance because you know you're playing a video game and that's what you're supposed to do. Even though the game gives you clear objectives of what you're supposed to be doing at all times, there's no over-arching goal guiding your actions from the onset, like for instance "rescue the president's daughter" or "find your presumed-dead wife."
The game makes it seem like your goal at first is to find a way to reunite with whichever character you're not currently playing, but then the game (and the characters themselves) just completely forget about that whole idea as they each get distracted with something completely unrelated that just pops out of nowhere. I can at least relate to and empathize with Claire's motivation to rescue and take care of Sherry -- you can tell that she cares, and that makes it easier for me to care, plus there are some decent character interactions between Claire, Sherry, Police Chief Irons, and Sherry's mother Annette -- but I wasn't as sold by Leon's naivete in trying to play the hero and bring Umbrella to justice with just the aid of one random woman he just met. His motivation feels more like generic good-guy protagonist stuff ("Umbrella bad, we must stop them") and shallow ignorance ("Yo Ada's kind cute and flirting with me, maybe once this is all over we can do some overtime"). I figured Claire and Leon's stories would intertwine a little more than they do, since they do actually bump into each other at various times in the original version, but except for one scene where you meet the other, who's locked out of the police department, you don't see or hear from them again until the very end of the game. While playing as Claire in my first run, I legitimately forgot that Leon was even in the game until I got a random radio call from him in the final sequence.
Meanwhile, each character's scenario has a random spot in the middle where you shift perspectives to another character -- Claire's campaign will have her shift over to controlling Sherry after she becomes separated from Claire, and Leon's campaign will have him shift over to Ada after he gets knocked unconscious. These sections come off feeling awkwardly forced, and I wasn't really a fan of either one. The shift over to Ada at least makes sense, since Leon's incapacitated and she's right there with him so the transition is fairly seamless, but switching over to Sherry is a bit jarring because they have to make Chief Irons call you over a phone so the switch doesn't feel quite so random and out of place. Ada's scenario plays fairly close to normal gameplay, except she's given a hacking tool where you're supposed to scan the environment for hotspots to hack, but this whole gameplay element felt shallow and gimmicky to me -- it's like they were trying to make it a puzzle, but in reality you just hold down right-click and follow a highlighted conduit to a hotspot multiple times. As Sherry you have to play more of a stealth sequence, since she's too small and young to really fight back, but her scenario falls into a weird lull where there's no clear objective other than "don't get caught." You're supposed to be escaping the place you're in, but there's a very particular script you're supposed to follow, and if you deviate from that script then you fail and have to start over, which is frustrating when you try to do something logical that apparently isn't in the script, causing you to have to sort of aimlessly trial-and-error your way into avoiding fail-states with no real indication of what the game expects you to actually be doing.
When you finish your first playthrough, the game strongly implies that you need to do a "second run" as the opposite character in order to get the true ending, because the ending you get from the first character is so abruptly underwhelming and unsatisfying, with Leon and Claire finally meeting up for the first time since the very start of the game and then talking for five seconds over black screen, while also giving you like a two second teaser that there's something else yet to happen. Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of overlap, since the second character will end up going through a lot of the exact same beats as the first -- solving the same puzzles (but with different solutions), finding certain items in the exact same places, fighting the same bosses, and having similar encounters with certain characters. That's all fine and good if you treat the second run as more of an "Arrange Mode" than a true "B Campaign," where it's essentially just a remixed version of the same scenario but with a new character who'll get different weapons, meet different characters, visit a few different areas, and encounter some things in different places, as if these two stories are happening in parallel universes, but the game really makes it seem like these are supposed to be two different perspectives happening concurrently in the same setting because it clearly shows that the other character was already present in the game world by the time you get to certain areas.
While playing as Claire, I entered an area and found some lickers eating the corpses of zombie dogs, and then when I played as Leon, the lickers were gone and I was ambushed by zombie dogs, meaning that by the time Claire got there Leon had already killed the dogs, and the lickers had come out to feed on the remains. There's a point in the game when Leon has to grab a key item from a vault, and when he gets there it's already unlocked with the item still there that Claire used to unlock it. When entering a room as Claire I got ambushed by a licker crashing through a window, and then when I went back as Leon I found that window already smashed, with no licker present anymore. Your first character gets rescued early on by Marvin, one of the surviving police officers who's already been bitten, and he urges you to leave him behind because it's too late to save him, and when you come back as the second character Marvin has already turned into a zombie. Office Elliot, whom you try to rescue in your first run, gets chewed in half by a zombie, and when you get to that same location in your second run he's already been chewed in half. Your second character will find that the control box in the main lobby has already been cut open by the first character, and will occasionally find notes left behind by the first character instructing you on what they've done and what they're up to. The list goes on, these are just examples off the top of my head.
Things like this indicate that the two characters are supposed to exist in the same world at the same time, but that idea is contradicted by the fact that so many other elements like puzzles, unlocked doors, boss battles, items, and so on get randomly reset between characters, requiring the other character to go through the whole ordeal all over again. For instance, even though Claire has already gathered all three medallions and opened the secret path beneath the goddess statue (Marvin is already a zombie by the time Leon gets there so we should already be at or past this point), for some reason the medallions are all moved back to their respective locations, and the wall that Claire blew up with C4 to get the maiden medallion has been repaired and has a new block of C4 on it. Even though Claire should have already repaired the clock tower, for some reason all of the gears are back in their original places when Leon gets there. Some things like this I can easily excuse because of gameplay requirements, but it's hard to suspend disbelief in certain other situations like when an important character dies twice in two different cutscenes, meaning there's no possible way that that could be just the other character's perspective on things because there's no conceivable way those two events could occur in the same universe.
As I understand it, the original version had a lot of overlap, too, but maybe not quite to this extent, and it did at least have the "zapping system" where certain specific actions that you took as one character directly affected the other character's scenario, like if you use the cord to repair the shutter controls as one character those windows will remain blocked off for the other, or if you loot everything in the armory as one character there won't be anything there for the next. In the remake, if you board up windows they'll be gone by the next scenario, and different weapons randomly and inexplicably appear in the armory depending on which character you are. The execution in the remake is just logically inconsistent, since it goes both ways about making it seem like the second run is meant to cohere with the first by referencing specific things that already happened in the first (and vice versa), while also implying that the two take place in alternate universes since so many things are either the same but slightly different or act as if they never happened at all in the other run. If nothing else, it just seems like a missed opportunity for Capcom to improve upon the original game. As it stands, it almost seems like they made the remake worse in this regard, but I can't vouch for that personally because I haven't played the original game in its entirety. These issues with the characters, story, and the two scenarios aren't deal-breakers for me by any means, but I feel like they are legitimate blemishes and shortcomings that could've been better.
As I said earlier, I found the gameplay so engaging that I didn't really care about the story too much while playing. Resident Evil 2 feels like genuine, old-school survival-horror dressed up in a modern skin. All of the classic staples of the original games are present here, including limited ammunition and healing supplies, inventory management, tough enemies that pose an actual threat, more enemies than you can afford to kill, backtracking through complex levels, using keys and other items to solve puzzles, needing ink ribbons to save your progress (at least in hardcore mode), and so on. I and many others trumpeted Resident Evil 7 as feeling like a true return to form for the series, and while I still think that's true considering where the series was coming from at that time (Resident Evil 6), Resident Evil 2 is even more of a return to form with more of an emphasis on puzzles, more elaborate level design, a classic story that deals directly with Umbrella and Raccoon City, and all-around greater difficulty leading to better survival-horror tension, thanks to the fact that, unlike Resident Evil 7, it can be played on its hardest difficulty right from the beginning. That should all make sense, though, seeing as it's based on the second Resident Evil game ever created, arguably the best in the series.
There's a good amount of exploration involved in this game, with plenty of satisfying backtracking. The police department is a fairly large and complex environment with three floors and multiple wings, plus multiple convoluted routes to get around it based on what areas you've unlocked. At the start of the game a lot of areas are locked off and require you to find keys, both literal and figurative, to gain access to those areas. It starts out relatively limited in scope with only ever one viable path to follow, but it quickly opens up as you unlock areas and soon have multiple ways to get from one side of the map to the other. All-the-while you're constantly encountering things you can't yet use, or can't yet access, and so that creates a fairly satisfying degree of engagement as you start piecing together what goes where and finally get into places that have been locked off for so long. I love that feeling of finally finding that key item I've been looking for, or realizing that this item I just picked up goes with another thing I have in my inventory which will let me do something new and open up all new possibilities. It also makes the environment feel more immersive when you have the freedom to come and go as you please -- you have persistent access to the entire map that you've unlocked, until you cross the point of no return near the end and head into the end game level.
Unfortunately, as it is with many Resident Evil games, I feel like the game is at its best in the first half when you're still in the starting area, and goes a little downhill once you leave the police department. The parking garage is a relatively small area with just a few rooms and only a couple of key items -- while fine and serviceable, it's a bit simple and a little bland, and the whole area goes so quickly that it's over before you really get into it. The sewers are a bit bigger and more complicated than the parking garage, with one of the game's more elaborate puzzles, but the layout is a bit confusing and the two-dimensional maps make it hard to figure out how all the different floors and areas connect to each other. Plus, it's the only area in the game with poison effects, and it is a sewer, after all, so even though there's a lot of detail that makes it all look really good from a technical perspective, and some areas are even actually pretty artistic in their appearance, the whole area looks like literal crap. Conversely, the Umbrella lab is a little too square and well-lit. That makes sense, of course, since it is a research lab but it just doesn't seem to have the same charm or personality as other areas in the game, other than looking a bit like a comical caricature of a cartoon villain's lair.
In order to progress through the game, you'll have to solve puzzles in virtually every area. The majority of these consist of basic "lock and key" puzzles where you have to bring a specific key or special item to a particular place to unlock a new area, or to gain access to a new item, some of which might be new weapons to use in combat, or they might be yet more puzzle items that you'll require later. Some areas are marked as requiring a specific type of door key like a heart, diamond, club, or spade, while other areas require things like a fuse for the electronic gate, a knife to cut open a control box, a crank handle for the fire escape, and so on. For the most part, these are all completely straightforward and simple affairs, and could barely qualify as puzzles, although some of them do require a bit of recognition and memory recall to realize that "Hey, I found a jewel box with a missing gem slot in it, maybe the ruby I pulled out of the scepter will fit in here," or "This police badge looks kind of like it might fit in the lock box downstairs, but wait a minute it's also a USB drive so that's probably what I need to access the armory in the STARS office." So really, it's not complicated but there are at least steps involved in connecting the dots, which can be pretty satisfying.
The map helps with keeping track of these things like where you've been, where you've yet to go, what doors need what, where special interactable items are, what items you had to pass by but couldn't pick up at the time, and so on. It's a tremendous help when you find an item that you were looking for hours ago and need to remember where to take it, and it's also a nice reminder to be able to scroll through the map and see what things you still have yet to do, that you now might be able to do with newfound items. There's a part of me that wishes the map weren't quite so detailed, however, as I often spent a lot of time in the game simply staring at the map screen trying to figure out where to go, what route I should take to get there, looking for things I might have missed, and so on. It'll even tell you if you've looted all the items in a room, or if there's still things left to do -- turning the room from red to blue once it's "completed" -- which is an extremely convenient tool to prevent you from wasting too much time scouring environments or risking more health and resource losses by going back to check areas again, but I feel like that takes away from the survival-horror tension a bit when the character is able to psychically know that they're done in a room just by a single button press. It's a little minor hand-holding element that I'm sure some and even many people will appreciate, but it felt almost like a crutch to me, and I wish that it either weren't quite so helpful, or that I had the restraint to not rely on it so much.
Most puzzle solutions, likewise, are straight up given to you by things in the environment if you explore enough. Early on you're given a notebook that tells you the combination you need to unlock some of the medallion pieces, and you find random notes that just tell you what the combinations should be for certain safes and padlocks. Sometimes you develop a roll of film and it explicitly shows you a picture with high-lighted objects so that you know where a particular item is supposed to belong. While I'd say it's decently satisfying to get these solutions, since it does take some actual work to achieve them -- you have to explore and put yourself at risk in dangerous situations to find memos and tucked-away items and what not -- I have to say that I wish they were a little more vague about their solutions. I wish, for instance, that they would make you solve riddles, or give meager hints about what you have to do so that you can come to solution on your own, rather than having the game explicitly tell you. In the original game, getting one of the red jewels is a pretty simple matter of simply using the lighter on the fireplace to burn the painting, but there's nothing telling you that -- you just have to make an educated guess based on the title of the painting: "A sacrifice to the hell fire." I feel like the closest we get to this with the remake is when Marvin leaves a note telling Leon how to unlock his desk, saying that the combinations are in the first letters of his fellow police officers' first names, but he's still blatantly telling you "Hey, this is how you solve this puzzle, and the solution is conveniently on the name plates sitting right next to this puzzle."
Every now and then, you do get to bump into actual logic puzzles, however, and these do a fairly good job of challenging your brain and getting you thinking. There are a couple of puzzle boxes, for instance, where you have to deduce the correct sequence of button presses to open the lockbox, trying to make the green lights indicate in a counter-clockwise pattern, and also chess pieces in the sewers that require you to deduce the correct placement of pieces based on hints and clues like "The queen is across from the knight, but not next to the king, and the king and the knight are not on the same wall," and so on. There's a good section where you're using those chess pieces as keys to open doors and have to figure out the right path that will let you leave the area while also taking both chess pieces with you. One puzzle had me going for several minutes trying to figure out how to combine vials of some fluid to get them into the correct measurement. Sometimes you have to sit there and wonder about the plausibility of some of these puzzles -- why would scientists concoct a convoluted puzzle system to measure and pour substances when it would be far more efficient to just let them do that stuff manually -- and sometimes the game falls victim to "adventure game logic" where you have to do things in an exact, specific way, even when there should be a sensible alternative -- why do you have to make a complete, uninterrupted line of bookcases in the library, when you should be able to easily step over a missing bookcase -- but you need to have that kind of stuff for gameplay purposes and so that's something I can easily suspend my disbelief on, though it did annoy me on occasion.
While the puzzles and exploration are certainly a big part of establishing the game's old-school survival-horror feel, the resource management and deadly threat of the enemies are what really make the game stand out. Zombified enemies are seemingly everywhere in this game, and while they only appear in small groups most of the time, that's really all it takes to ruin your day because each individual zombie in this game poses a real threat, since it only takes a few hits before you're dead, or on the verge of death. So they deal a lot of damage, and they also take a lot of damage, too -- average zombies can take 10 bullets or more to kill permanently, and with you typically having 20-30 bullets at your disposal you can't afford to try to kill every zombie you come across. Which means, most of the time you'll be forced to simply avoid zombies by taking a wide berth around them. Most of the maps aren't really conducive for this, however, since they're generally designed around tight corridors, cluttered rooms, dead ends, and claustrophobic choke points, which doesn't leave a lot of room to maneuver around zombies. So when faced with a few zombies in a tight space, you have to shoot them a few times until they stagger, giving you a few seconds of freedom to run past them. This creates a lot of genuine stress and tension with every encounter -- you want to avoid shooting zombies to conserve your limited ammunition, because you'll surely need it for bigger threats later on, but you also don't want to get too close and risk taking damage so that you can conserve your limited healing supplies and defensive items. It all feels like a delicate balancing act, and that's where the survival-horror feeling is at its strongest.
Resource management is a big part of survival-horror since it plays such a strong role in providing both long-term and short-term tension. You can only carry so many items with you at once, since there just isn't enough room in your inventory to carry a full armory of weapons and an entire garden of herbs, in addition to the various key items you need to haul around, which means that you might find yourself in situations where you've run out of healing items or ammunition and have to desperately navigate your way back to a storage container, or press onward and hope you can find something useful. While in this state, you feel incredibly vulnerable because those items that you no longer have were basically the only things standing between you and a game over screen, and the game gets so much harder when you're out of resources. Even though you might make it through an encounter alive, you can still find yourself adversely affected by it, leaving you worse off than you were before if you ended up having to use too many resources to survive the encounter. There's also long-term tension you have to consider, you see, of making sure you're saving enough resources to get through future encounters -- if you're too careless or wasteful now, it could come back to hurt you later when you're in a difficult situation and don't have the resources to make it easier. You don't, for instance, want to be going into a boss battle with nothing but 10 handgun bullets and a single blue herb to your name, and it's entirely possible that you might back yourself into a corner, metaphorically speaking, and have no hope to advance the game any further. In general it's best to conserve ammo, which means leaving zombies alive in certain areas and thereby creating an element of strategy in deciding which ones are best to kill permanently, and what windows are best to board up, while also trying to remember and keep track of which rooms have what zombies in them. This makes exploration both exciting and rewarding, while also keeping up a constant layer of tension in the back of your mind as you monitor your supplies and hope you'll have enough to survive.
The horror tension gets ratcheted up with the addition of more advanced enemies. Lickers can move a lot faster than regular zombies, and also hit much harder, with some attacks I think even being one-hit kills if you aren't armed with a defensive sub-weapon like a knife or grenade, but they're completely blind and therefore can only hone in on your location by following your sounds, meaning it's best to move slowly and avoid firing weapons at other enemies so they can't find you. It's pretty nerve-wracking trying to move silently around the lickers while they slink around and make sudden movements that make you think they just became alerted to your presence. I love how the game basically forces you to slowly inch closer and closer towards certain death, and deliberately tries to evoke panicked reactions out of you by throwing those false positives your way, which will only make the situation worse if you do panic. And by that time, you're probably so close that you might not have room to run or aim your weapon properly, which ups the thrill even more. They don't seem to follow a consistent set of rules, however, which can make some encounters with them a little frustrating. The game makes it clear early on that they can't see, and so as long as you don't make noise you can safely walk around them, but then other times they randomly lash out at you, leaping from all the way across the room when you were clearly walking. I think some of them might be programmed to aggro you in a type of ambush, and others might just be lashing out randomly. The unpredictability makes them a little scarier, I guess, since you can never be totally confident that they won't attack you randomly, but it does feel cheap and unfair sometimes, considering how devastating a single hit from them can be, especially in hardcore mode where you have even less room for error.
Then we've got the tyrant, aka Mr X, an unstoppable, hulking monster of a man who continually patrols the police department once he's introduced, and once he catches sight or sound of you will pursue you through the level until you eventually lose him. He's big, imposing, and downright intimidating in your first encounters with him. By himself, he's not much of a threat unless he corners you in a dead end, because you can always out-run him, but his presence adds a timed element to the gameplay, effectively forcing you to rush through dangerous situations because he will likely kill you or severely mess you up if he catches you. Being chased by Mr X through a room full of zombies -- or worse, lickers -- is great for the horror vibe because you can't stop to deal with the zombies, you can't run from Mr X without alerting the lickers, and you can't walk slowly to sneak past the lickers or Mr X will catch up to you. Sometimes, you end up with all three in one area, which creates some of the most intense moments in the entire game because there's so many different variables all happening at once, each requiring a different strategy to take care of, but you just don't have the time or space to deal with them all at once -- it's literally overwhelming, and that's how survival-horror should feel. Some areas have environmental puzzles where you're trying to move objects in the environment, which would ordinarily be a pretty mundane task but becomes incredibly distressing once Mr X enters the room, because as usual you can't stop to focus on the puzzle -- you either have to lure Mr X away and come back, or try to kite him through the room making progress on the puzzle in small increments.
It's a nice touch that he remains a persistent threat in the police department -- he's always active somewhere, you just don't know where exactly, until you hear his footsteps start getting louder. Once you've gotten far enough in the game to trigger his appearance, he can show up pretty much anywhere at anytime, so there's a good deal of anxiety as you explore and hope he doesn't show up in a tough spot, and then surprise when you open a door and find him standing there waiting for you. If he were just a scripted event who only occurred in specific moments then I think the effect would be lost -- as it is, he feels like an organic part of the world. He does have a few scripted moments, however, like when he busts through a wall unexpectedly, plus a few occasions when he shows up in areas that he previously couldn't get into, which are really some of the more surprising moments in the game. Mr X won't follow you into save rooms and certain other dead-end rooms, so it comes as a shocking surprise when you run for the safety of the main hall, which had previously been a safe haven to escape from zombies and lickers, only to find him open a door and continue after you. This completely alters the dynamic of the game when you realize that your central hub is no longer safe and have to go further out of your way to access a save point or storage container.
Unfortunately, while Mr X feels incredibly menacing and imposing at first, the effect dulls drastically as the game goes on because you become over-exposed to his presence. It's a phenomenon that afflicts monsters in horror movies particularly, where they're scariest in the first half when you don't see them, and then they stop being scary once they get the full reveal and are on screen all the time. Essentially, as you become more exposed to something, you become more comfortable with it and eventually become desensitized to it. That's how I felt with Mr X, and the desensitization happened really quickly with me. After a very short while I realized he basically wasn't any threat at all, outside of a few scenarios, as long as I kept moving and minded where I was going -- most of the time he felt like more of a minor inconvenience than an intimidating threat, as I ran circles around him while just feeling annoyed that he was making me go out of my way, or making a simple task take way more time than it should. From what I understand of the original game, he was only present in the "B" scenario -- the second run -- which I imagine made for an interesting and refreshing change on the familiar formula. In the remake, he's present in both the first and second run, and shows up even earlier in the second run, which really just feels like too much exposure to me. He stopped being scary well before I'd finished my first run as Claire, which then made his increased presence in my second run as Leon simply tedious.
I'm also not sure that they mixed or recorded the sounds of his footsteps correctly. I keep reading comments online about how great his sound design is, with the nuanced mixing of his footsteps allowing you to pinpoint his exact location in the police department, but I could never get any sort of consistent read on his location based on what I could hear while playing, even while using headphones and enabling high dynamic range and surround sound options in the settings menu. The stereo mixing does a good job of indicating whether he's on your left or right, but not really whether he's above, below, in front, or behind you. The problem is that there seem to be only two different types of sound effects for his footsteps -- a loud and clear sound when he's in the same room as you, and a dull, muffled sound when he's not in the same room. Meaning, he could be pretty much anywhere and you have no way to tell. Sometimes the game even gets confused about what type of sound effect he's supposed to be producing and switches sounds even when you have a clear view of him. Maybe it's intentional, and maybe the sound mixing is supposed to be vague so that you never quite know exactly where he is -- just that he's close -- so that it builds tension as you listen to the footsteps and wonder when, where, or if you'll run into him, which can then make it a little startling when he appears. To be fair, it does have that effect sometimes, but most of the time I just found myself annoyed at the immersion-breaking lack of realism in not being able to tell whether he's a floor above me, or a floor below me, or around the corner and down the hall when it would be pretty easy to tell basic things like that in real life, especially considering how loud his footsteps are.
In hardcore mode, the need to use limited ink ribbons to save your progress creates a whole new element in the survival-horror feel by introducing a greater risk-versus-reward system. The core gameplay already has that element in the form of basic encounters -- do you use your resources preemptively to make things easier for yourself, like by spending a bunch of ammo wiping out a room full of enemies, which might come back to bite you later if you run out of resources, or conserve resources and risk making things harder for yourself now by just trying to maneuver around them -- but that element gets amplified by a significant magnitude when it comes to saving your progress because entire series of decisions compound on one another in a larger scale of risk-versus-reward when it comes to deciding when to use your saves. You only get so many ink ribbons in the course of the game, and so it makes you want to use them sparingly and strategically to maximize their efficacy. This can mean going 30 minutes at a time without saving, and then getting to a point where you feel like it would be a good time to save but you're in a pretty safe area and want to try to get just a little further before saving so that, if you die, you have less game to have to repeat, but then the longer you go without saving the more game you have to repeat if you die, and thus the more tense and dire each and every moment becomes. As with the resource management, it's a delicate balancing act that has you constantly engaged in making interesting decisions about what to do, where to go, and how to play, which all feels pretty consequential.
Unless you're a complete novice to Resident Evil and survival-horror games in general, then I have to give a strong recommendation to do your first playthrough on Hardcore mode because lower difficulties completely remove this entire dimension of survival-horror tension and strategic gameplay. With constant checkpoint auto-saves before new encounters or transitioning into new areas, and the ability to save your game as frivolously as you desire, the fear of death gets severely diminished when a game over screen only sends you back a few minutes, or in some cases, only a few seconds, drastically reducing the consequences of death and ruining a lot of the tension that comes with trying to go long stretches without dying. The limited save system also forces you to live with your mistakes more often, because if you screw up or do something stupid that results in a huge loss of resources, you can't save-scum your progress as easily because it would mean going back 30 minutes or more where you could possibly make other, worse mistakes catching back up. Plus, there's that whole aspect of having to decide how to portion out your saves, which is more tense when you're playing the game for the first time and don't know when or where the next typewriter is going to show up, or what would be optimal times to use ink ribbons. I suppose there's replay value in stepping up from normal difficulty to hardcore, but if you've already played before then you'll already know where all the save rooms are and what to expect up ahead, which makes deciding when and how to use your saves significantly easier, which almost defeats the point of the limited save system to me. With that being said, it would've been nice if ink ribbons could've been a separate option, so that people could have the choice to need ink ribbon saves without having to deal with the inflated health and damage values of the hardcore zombies.
The new over-the-shoulder perspective makes combat feel much more fluid and responsive, while also upping the intensity by putting you closer to the action. It's now possible to aim your weapons directly and precisely, which makes it easier to line up headshots rather than just pointing your character in the general direction of a zombie and hitting the "shoot" button repeatedly until it dies. Make no mistake, however -- while it looks and controls like a typical third-person shooter, and might seem to have been taking some influence from more recent Resident Evil games, this isn't really an action shooter. The classic survival-horror feel is still strong in this game, mainly due to the level design, enemy placement, and resource management -- putting you in tight levels that will require you to move back and forth between areas constantly, with inconveniently-placed enemies that all individually pose a genuine threat to your survival, and not giving you nearly enough ammunition to fight each and every enemy you come across -- but the actual combat also feels a lot like the old games, despite the modern perspective and controls. In fact, it's almost like they took the basic combat mechanics from the original game and just dropped them into a brand new, updated engine and made everything look and control better. And that, I feel, is a bit of a problem.
One main issue is that it feels like zombies take way too many bullets to make any sort of reaction to being shot in the face, sometimes needing as many as five headshots before they stagger, a sort of temporary stun lasting just a couple seconds, usually enough to run past them, and even more headshots before they fall down, where they usually stay dormant for a little longer before inevitably getting back up. If you miss one or two shots, or have a shot hit them in the fingertips while they're reaching out to grab you (which, by the way, I don't think counts as a headshot even if the bullet should realistically still hit the head after going through the fingers), that can mean firing almost 10 bullets before they stagger. It's not only an annoying waste of ammo, but it's incredibly frustrating when you just want to stun one stupid zombie so you can run past it and it ends up becoming this whole drawn-out ordeal. If a zombie is lunging forward to bite you, you can fire three shots at point-blank range right into its brain and it'll tank through those bullets and grab you anyway, making it feel like your bullets did nothing at all and that the game isn't responding to your actions. Actually killing a zombie sometimes needs 15 or more headshots while they get knocked down and get back up two or three more times. The actual number of shots required varies wildly, with some occasions when the very first shot yields a "critical hit" where the zombie's head explodes, or times when they stagger from each of the first two shots, but you never know going into an encounter if it's going to take one or two shots, or one or two magazines. In general, however, especially in hardcore mode, the enemies lean more towards bullet sponges which doesn't feel realistic and isn't very satisfying.
I mean, I get it: I was playing on "hardcore" mode and so of course the zombies are going to take more damage, and these aren't just ordinary zombies -- they're bio-organic weapons created by a super-villainous organization so they're supposed to be stronger and more resilient than a typical dead corpse brought back to life -- and that's also how it was back in the original games. I never felt like it was an issue in the original games, however, because they weren't really action games. That's not to say that this remake is, either, but its gameplay is way more action-based than the originals, where killing a zombie really took no amount of personal skill because all you could do was face the general direction of an enemy and press the shoot button over and over again until it dies. You had literally far less control over the character, and so the fixed camera angles and imprecise aiming made it feel like when a zombie took 7-10 shots before it fell to the ground, it was because your character was missing shots or not hitting critical body parts. It was kind of like how RPGs use statistical abstraction to represent action, where you're not the one actively swinging a sword, you're issuing commands and letting your character play out those actions. Which frankly was fine for the time that the original games were released, but with this remake now having hyper-realistic graphics and giving you so much more control over your character and making you feel more like you're the one in the game performing the actions, having zombies be bullet sponges "because that's how it was in the original" doesn't feel appropriate because you're mixing old mechanics with a bunch of new ones. It's a bit like remaking a 20-year old movie and recasting all of the characters, except keeping the original lead actor in the same role -- sure, he was in the original movie so there's legitimacy to that, but he's aged 20 years and no longer fits the part, and looks out of place.
It's also pretty annoying how zombies "play dead" in blatant defiance of real logic and game rules, just so the game can have "gotcha moments" when a zombie that you felt 100% sure was dead springs back to life to suddenly ambush you and knock off a huge chunk of your health. As you explore levels, you find a lot of zombified corpses littering the ground, and a lot of these will lie there perfectly still even as you get close and walk all over them, and even as you fire gunshots within inches of their bodies, only to decide hours later when you come back that they suddenly want to wake up or whatever to get you with a jump scare. If you shoot a zombie multiple times and knock it down multiple times, it'll sometimes lie there perfectly inanimate, even going into ragdoll physics mode -- a classically iconic sign that an enemy has been defeated -- only to come back to life later when you walk over their corpse, sometimes getting you in an instant grab as they chomp at your leg. It basically means that you have to shoot or stab literally every single corpse that you see, if you want to be sure, which is obviously not practical for your ammunition and sub-weapons, and is also just way too tedious. Really, it just feels like cheap manipulation -- it's something that sticks out to me as un-immersive because you can tell it's the handiwork of designers deliberately playing around with the rules and formulas to catch you by surprise and screw you over.
Their grab radius and tracking ability are a little generous in their favor, too, sometimes making it feel like being grabbed and bitten by a zombie is completely unavoidable even when it seems like you're doing everything correctly to dodge them. Sometimes you get past them and feel like you're in the clear, but then they're able to spin around on a dime and get you, or it seems like you should be well out of their range and then they get a second burst accompanied by a speed boost and actually outrun you for a moment to catch you. Sometimes you try to curve a wide path around them, and they track your movement perfectly and deftly cut the gaps to snag you. When they grab you, the game triggers a cutscene animation and takes all control away from you, but this nearly always triggers a half-second or more before they've actually grabbed you, which takes a split second of time away from you when you should realistically still be able to defend yourself. There's likewise a long recovery period as you get out of the cutscene, in which you still have no control of your character but other enemies are still capable of grabbing you again, leading to a chain-stun phenomenon where you get bit multiple times beyond your control. All of which is, needless to say, incredibly frustrating and feels incredibly unfair at times. Granted, sometimes getting bit or chain-stunned like that is entirely your fault for putting yourself in a position for that to happen, but it sometimes just feels so random and out of your control. It's possible, for instance, to bait them into their grab lunge, dodge the grab, and then run around them, but it's extremely inconsistent whether they're going to completely ignore you, or do a quick 180-turn-in-place, or slowly walk a wide circle to turn around, or do a second burst, or lunge straight or turn to keep up with you, and so on, which can make many times when they bite you feel annoying just because of how unpredictable it is.
There are also elements of "gameplay logic vs cutscene logic" at play, which is likewise a little annoying. While it routinely takes you a dozen bullets or more to kill enemies, any time anyone shoots something in a cutscene it either dies or gets knocked down and out in a single bullet, like when Leon shoots a zombie at the gas station, or when Ada shoots a zombie dog in the parking garage. When a zombie grabs on to you, you have zero ability to push it away or execute any kind of basic self-defense unless you have a knife or grenade in your inventory, and yet while escaping from the gas station in the opening cutscene Claire is seen pushing a zombie away, and later on Officer Elliot can easily throw a zombie off of him with one arm, while distracted. While Leon is routinely able to withstand massive bloody chomps and slashes from various enemies and recover immediately just by eating some herbs or spraying himself with antiseptic, he gets completely incapacitated when shot in the arm by an NPC in a cutscene. This kind of stuff isn't a huge deal but it definitely bothered me every time I saw something like that.
Then you've got issues where enemies will sometimes decide to hug the other side of doors, which creates a near-impossible situation for you to deal with. When you open the door, it'll push them back around the other side, which blocks your view and prevents you from shooting them, and if you try to run through the doorway they're so close at that point that they can easily grab you before you even see them. If the door doesn't push them back and they're just right in front of you, you might consider backing up a few steps to shoot them, but then the door automatically closes and blocks your shot, so you can't stay in the doorway to shoot because they'll surely grab you, and you can't back up to shoot because then the door will close. This whole issue would be solved if they could let you kick open doors to stun zombies who're in its path, like you could in Resident Evil 4, but you inexplicably don't have that option, here, even though the zombies can do it to you. It often feels like a lose-lose situation, purely because of a design oversight.
While I don't like how the combat feels in terms of the action side of things, I think it works pretty well in terms of survival-horror, which is probably what's more important, here. One could argue that it shouldn't have to take 12 bullets to kill a zombie -- make them take only three or four instead and compensate by giving the player one-third as much ammunition -- but there's something to be said about how much time it takes to kill zombies which makes fighting them in certain situations more prohibitive than the ammo costs. For instance, it would make it a bit trivial to get through certain sequences when you're literally swarmed by zombies, or when you have a licker or Mr X or zombie dogs chasing you and have to deal with a few zombies while running away, if you could stun zombies with a single headshot, and kill or knock them down in two or three. With Mr X having a near constant presence in the police department there's a definite emphasis on timed actions -- having only a limited amount of time to move through an area before he catches you -- and so the enemy design with them soaking up so many bullets works in making you spend more time dealing with them while other threats -- even other zombies -- creep in to get you. Likewise, the randomness in terms of how many bullets a zombie is going to take to stagger or go down, or which ones are going to come to life or whether one will come back to life, or how any random zombie will behave at any given moment, adds a lot of suspense and tension to each encounter because of the uncertainty -- you can't predict what's going to happen so the game keeps you on your toes in anticipation and catches you off guard a lot. Plus, the enemies being an unstoppable force that can take bullet after bullet and keep coming for you is I guess in the true spirit of survival-horror.
Bosses, on the other hand, are pure bullet sponges and don't contribute much to that argument of time-based actions or the tension of not knowing how many shots it's going to take to bring it down. It's to be expected that bosses will be tougher and soak up more damage than average enemies in order to show a sense of scale, with them simply being stronger and more powerful enemies, but except for one instance you have no sort of time sensitivity in boss battles and the game is sure to load you up with a ton of what you need right before the fight, so there's no real stress or tension in the fights. And pretty much all of them go on so long that they quickly get to feel rote and repetitive. The first boss which both Leon and Claire fight, plus Claire's fourth boss, for instance, are mindlessly simple affairs of simply running circles around an area occasionally turning around to take pot-shots at the boss. There's practically no risk of even taking damage as long as you don't stand there too long attacking, and so the whole thing is just an exercise in patience and tedium -- doing the same thing over and over again until the boss eventually goes down. The third boss is somewhat similar, except you're basically running circles around him instead of around the level, and the second boss is more of a puzzle boss that relies a little too heavily on tedious trial-and-error to figure out the exact timing and order of operation to make things work correctly. Once you understand the mechanics, the fight becomes incredibly simple and shallow, and figuring out the solution is just kind of frustrating. The fifth "bonus" boss you get at the end of the second run seems more like a spectacle boss that you basically can't fail, as if it's just there to look cool more than to pose any sort of gameplay challenge.
So really, the only boss that I actually kind of liked was Leon's fourth boss, because you have to fight him in such a small arena that progressively gets smaller and smaller and they don't give you Leon's super-powered end-game boss-killing weapon right away, like they do with Claire's fourth boss. Meanwhile, it's kind of lame that nearly every single boss in the game is just a slight variation on the same enemy, since you fight different stages of mutations of the same guy every time. The third boss, for instance, is kind of a decent fight but by the time it comes around I feel like I've seen and done this whole deal before, and the only real difference is that the level layout is a bit more open and the boss occasionally throws easily-dodgeable objects at you, and so it feels pretty similar to other iterations. In fact, literally every boss battle is just a matter of simply shooting at their big, orange, glowing weak points, which look like ginormous eyeballs, so there's no real subtlety or nuance in figuring out what you have to do. So ultimately, they all follow pretty much the same basic strategy and come off feeling disappointingly straightforward. They're not satisfying to fight because of interesting mechanics or unique scenarios, and they're not really menacing, difficult challenges to drive home the survival-horror tension, either, so they just feel like a complete missed opportunity.
Leon and Claire fight the exact same bosses throughout both of their scenarios (except for their unique final boss), and in fact their runs are actually pretty similar in most ways. I already touched on this earlier when discussing the story implications of the second run, but I have to stress here that there's not as much replay value as I had originally figured. I kept hearing in forum posts and reviews that the game has essentially four different campaigns and that, if you want to get the full experience you can do both of Leon and Claire's first and second runs (ie, LeonA ClaireB, and ClaireA LeonB), when in reality that just seems like a huge waste of time to me. Maybe in the original game there were enough key differences to justify doing four entire playthroughs (and it would seem to be, since from what I understand the Resident Evil canon is based around something that only happens in ClaireA, not LeonA or ClaireB), but in the remake if you've done a first and second run then I would wager a guess that you've seen at least 98% of what the game has to offer, because the two variables -- Leon or Claire, first run or second run -- are almost completely independent of one another. After finishing my second run as Leon, I went back to play his first run and felt like I had already seen everything by having already done a first run, and by having already played as Leon. The puzzles and level progression were the same as what I'd already done as Claire in her first run, while Leon had the same unique areas and side story cutscenes with Ada as in his second run. The only noticeable difference was that I actually got to see the conversation with Marvin as Leon. However, it followed the same structure as Claire's, while Leon said a lot of similar lines as Claire and Marvin even repeated a few lines, which really wasn't substantial to see. It's possible that there could be other minor differences but after playing through half of the game and not finding anything else I didn't want to sit through any more to find out.
The rest of the replay value is unfortunately based entirely around speed-running, which just doesn't strike my fancy. In true Resident Evil fashion you can unlock a bunch of extra bonuses like infinite ammo, an unbreakable knife, special weapons, and so on, mostly by earning certain rankings on different difficulties, but the rankings seem primarily determined by completion time -- the faster you beat the game, the better your ranking. I know that's been a series standard ever since the beginning, but I don't find any satisfaction in rushing to complete a game in as little time as possible. The rest of the bonus game modes like 4th Survivor (unlocked when you complete the second run) and the assorted Ghost Survivor scenarios (free DLC) are all short, 10-minute remixed game modes where you have to get from Point A to Point B using existing levels from the base game, but with different enemy placements and obstacles. I find it interesting how many different scenarios they're able to create from a relatively limited set of assets, and the Ghost Survivor scenarios at least introduce some new mechanisms like special enemy variants and item dispensers that let you take one of three items on offer, but it still feels like a bunch of variations on the same thing: speed-running through the same basic levels and against the same basic enemies with the same basic weapons that you've already experienced twice before in your first and second runs. Doing those areas a third and even fourth time in the bonus content just got to feel tedious and repetitive to me, and I felt no real desire to complete any of the bonus content. I basically hated the 4th Survivor mode, and while the Ghost Survivor scenarios do a little to improve upon that formula, it's disappointing that they're basically just more of the same. It might be ungrateful to complain about free content, but I just wish that it weren't all designed exclusively for speed-runners.
The game looks great, of course, which is no surprise considering how great Resident Evil 7 was in this department, and this game is being done on the same engine. The RE Engine does a great job with dim, moody lighting and strikes a perfect balance between being dark enough to actually depict darkness, while still providing enough illumination to see details in the environment and to tell where you're going. Light beams, like from your flashlight, look particularly good with their soft edges and the way that objects and the environment slowly come into illumination as you get closer. Then you've got all the fantastic little details like how characters react to stepping out into the rain, and later wipe excess water off their arms, their facial animations when they're dangerously wounded, having all of your equipped weapons visibly equipped on the character model (including seeing the actual straps holding a shotgun to your back), the gore system that shows graphic detail as zombies heads explode, the fact that the game remembers and keeps track of the damage zombies have sustained and where those zombies are positioned in the map, zombies tripping over other zombies, and so on. Unfortunately, it has some rough spots when it comes to the visuals. Reflections often look a little wonky, like they're being overly pixellated; gore on the character models sometimes looks like stickers slapped on their clothes; some textures and meshes get repeated a little too closely; some areas have a distinct filter over them which changes the color scheme and lighting drastically as you move in and out of them, which then looks incredibly distracting once you notice it; there's really not enough variety in zombie faces and looks, because you see a lot of the same faces and outfits and things everywhere you go; and Claire sometimes dangles her toes into the uncanny valley, in terms of her facial animations.
It sounds pretty good, too, with excellent voice acting that blows the original game's acting out of the water and a rich, thick layer of ambient sound to immerse you in the settings. I'm not a big fan of the gunshots, however, as they tend to sound pretty mild, high-pitched, and somewhat muted to me. Guns are insanely loud in real life and have more of a "boom" to them than what this game does with its basic pistols, which sound a bit like glorified cap guns to me. As I mentioned previously, I also don't think the sound recording and mixing on Mr X's footsteps is very good, as there aren't enough different types of sounds or nuanced enough mixing to get a good enough idea of where he actually is when you hear his footsteps. The music, meanwhile, is practically non-existent. I guess they were going for a more subtle, subdued, ambient, "atmospheric" sound for the remake, but the effect is that you go long stretches of the game feeling like there's no music whatsoever, and generally speaking whenever it kicks in it's so generic that it may as well not even exist at all. The save room music is good, for instance, but only seems to play the very first time you discover a save room, and then never comes up again when returning to that location. The only tracks I actually noticed and enjoyed in the remake are Mr X's theme, and the shredding guitar track that plays in the Tofu Survivor bonus scenario. The original 1998 soundtrack that you can buy and play with as a $3 DLC completely outshines the remake's, and actually adds tone to certain scenes that were completely missing it with the remake soundtrack. It's a little shady, however, that you have to pay $3 for that option, and that it isn't included in the game as an unlockable for beating the game, for instance.
Other aspects of the game's technical design and implementation bother me, too. Movement feels slightly unresponsive to me, as sometimes your character will make gradual diagonal and circular turns and will other times make sharp cuts in a straight line. When trying to take a wide curving turn around the zombie, I hit a strafe key while turning the camera to look at it and the character ends up dashing right into the zombie. And whenever you trigger that little dash move, it locks up your controls for a second or so, while also moving you further out of your way than you intended, which can spell disaster for you. I think it's supposed to be there as a quasi-dodge move, but the fact that it's so easy to trigger while doing what feels like basic movement is not ideal, since it pops up so unexpectedly so often. Climbing up and down ladders happens automatically, when it seems like that should be something you'd rather have to activate manually, and it took me more trial-and-error than it should've to figure out how to change directions while on the ladder, if I accidentally used one. Sometimes the game is a bit finicky about your positioning when trying to pick up items in the environment -- sometimes I had to bump the character around repeatedly to find the exact spot that would let me actually pick up an item, or I'd be standing right in front of something and left-click, only to find myself interacting with the thing behind me because I was apparently closer to that than the thing I was facing -- and I don't appreciate how the Tab key closes your inventory normally, and then sorts the inventory when you're in your storage chest, because they gave the same button two different functions in similar windows.
The PC version has a rather extensive options menu and takes a lot of considerations into making the game feel properly-adapted for keyboard and mouse controls, but it has random artifacts of consolitis that feel weird and out of place. The weapon selection hotkeys, for instance, show a typical controller plus-pad interface, but then actually assigns them to the number row (as you'd expect for a PC game), except it defaults your first weapon to the 2 key, then the next into the 4 key, then 1, then 3, which is highly illogical to me when it would just make more sense to go 1-4. When interacting with your inventory, you have two separate cursors visible on screen -- one following your mouse movement, and one that stays locked onto the item grid, as if that's left-over from console navigation. The map does something similar, where it shows your cursor and lets you click to drag the map around, but then also brings up what looks like a joystick crosshair that you have to position to actually highlight something on the map, instead of just hovering over it with your mouse. Sometimes the mouse gets locked up if you accidentally move a picked up item to a different slot while trying to click on the "combine" option in the drop-down menu, thus requiring you to use the WASD keys (ie, directional inputs like from a controller) to move it back to the correct stack.
I've leveled a fair amount of criticism against Resident Evil 2 in this review, but I need to stress that a lot of that is basically just nitpicking. A lot of these issues are minor and don't really affect the game in a significant way, and sometimes just amount to wishful thinking. It would've been nice, for instance, if the two characters' campaigns could've been a little more differentiated, or just been more consistent one way or the other about whether they're supposed to be concurrent perspectives in the same timeline, or if the puzzles relied a little more on vague clues and riddles to solve instead of simply finding the solutions through exploration. Other things I got used to and they stopped bothering me after a while. I was pretty annoyed by some of the zombie mechanics during my playthrough, for instance, but realized in retrospect that it was actually working in the game's favor in some ways -- even if it didn't feel right, it was doing its job. Some things do feel like genuine issues, however, like the fact that you're over-exposed to Mr X throughout both the first and second runs to the point that I feel like he stops being an intimidating threat way too quickly, even if he does a good job of keeping the mechanical pressure on you, and the boss battles are pretty lame all across the board.
The Resident Evil 2 remake feels like a pretty faithful remake and adaptation of the original game, from what I can tell based on the hour or so that I've played of the original, even though a lot has been radically overhauled in the process of bringing a 20+ year old game back to life. As much as I love the style of the original games, with the fixed camera angles and tank controls, I appreciate Capcom deciding to do something different with the over-the-shoulder perspective instead of going for a true one-to-one remake. After all, the original game is always going to be there, and it still holds up really well, so I don't feel like we really needed to take that approach a second time. Don't get me wrong, it would be great to have more modern games in the style of the original Resident Evil games, but I'm totally fine with this remake deviating from that formula, if only for the sake of variety. As it stands, I really liked the Resident Evil 2 remake -- it's a great rendition of old-school, classic survival-horror design elements, but dressed up in a modern skin, and should satisfy fans of the original game as well as those who're brand new to the series. Despite that high praise, I have to admit that it's probably only my fourth favorite Resident Evil game, coming in behind Resident Evil 7, the original REmake, and Resident Evil 4. It's a good, solid game, but it just didn't capture my interest as much as those other games. Each of those games had me fanatically obsessing over going back to unlock everything possible and to experience every little thing that I could; with the Resident Evil 2 remake, once I finished it I was pretty content to be done with it, and just couldn't get myself motivated to get into the bonus modes or go after all the unlockables. Those things aren't necessary to enjoy or recommend the game, but I think does show that I really just didn't enjoy this game as much as some of the others. Still, it's an easy game to recommend, and I hope future DLC will do even more to improve my opinion on it.
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