What’s Good About Resident Evil 2 (2019)
So here we are on the last possible day for the Resident Evil kick before Village is released. If you’re reading this on the day of release, then Happy Resident Evil Village day! I hope the game is treating you well. Either way, I’m here to talk about the more beloved of the two more recent Resident Evil remakes: Resident Evil 2. It has mechanically done something that only The Library in Halo Combat Evolved and the first two Doom games have done and that’s to make me never take a shotgun for granted. And the main reason for this is because Resident Evil 2’s remake is an excellent example of the Survival Horror genre and a good example of why I’m making more of an effort to give horror as a genre a chance in games.
For context as to that last part, my favorite horror movies are David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly and John Carpenter’s The Thing. The things they have in common are a foreboding sense of dread and copious amounts of body horror. Resident Evil in the earlier entries (and also the remakes) have these in spades, usually in the form of zombies and mutant bioweapons. And the zombies in this game are more of a threat compared to the Resident Evil 3 Remake and a good chunk of that comes down to who you control.
The player characters, Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield are a rookie cop and a college student respectively as opposed to the former S.T.A.R.S. member Jill Valentine. The lack of a step dodge means both are more reliant on taking stock of their inventories and weighing whether it’s more worth paying the price of getting around enemies in either blood or bullets. Throw-in ammo placement gives you just enough to work with, an environment that gives you a lot of choices regarding how you navigate it, and other monsters that test this as well, and you have a very interesting gameplay loop to futz with. It got even more apparent when I finished Leon’s path and started Claire’s because I was playing it more like Dead Space than a traditional Resident Evil game like I did with the Resident Evil 3 Remake; shooting out a zombie’s legs to slow them down, shooting off arms to prevent them from grabbing me, etc.
I bring up the environment in one of those qualifiers because it’a honestly the star of the show. The Raccoon City Police Station in the first third of the game was a very interesting locale for me because I jumped into this right after finishing Resident Evil 7 and I now see where that game got a lot of its ideas from for the Baker Plantation House. The various themed keys and doors, statues that needed codes to unlock medallions that unlock secret passages, special parts for highly specific electrical grids, and so on make for compelling video game objectives. Even if they are highly impractical and nightmarish from a civic planning perspective (yes, I know it used to be a museum; no, that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous). You end up backtracking quite a bit so it leads to you finding out the quickest routes from point A to point B and it’s a thought process that I don’t take into account in games, but it’s great stuff.
And then there’s Mr. X. He is simultaneously the best and worst part of actually playing the game because he turns the dynamic of all I just mentioned on its head because you gotta juggle all of that while also solving puzzles and dealing with normal enemies. It can be a bit overwhelming, but at least he doesn’t burst into safe rooms and it leads to me learning his mostly scripted patrol patterns. He fulfills the role of “Persistent Omni Threat” better than Nemesis does in 3, but you eventually get so used to him being a thing that he stops being scary after a while, at least to me. The other two areas are far more linear than the police station and don’t offer up that same level of open pathfinding, with the middle third in the sewers being the most questionable, but it’s fine because Resident Evil Power Scaling has pretty much kicked in and you start getting more ammo, sub-weapons, and healing items than you know what to do with. And then Mr. X shows up and backhands some sense into you if you’re feeling too cocky, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that he was starting to wear out his welcome.
The one thing I wasn’t expecting to like as much as I ended up was the story and the way it’s presented. It’s a retelling of the events of RE2’s original story with some slight tweaks. While there are converging bits throughout the game, Leon and Claire go through their versions of the story; with the former helping Ada Wong (now using the cover story of being an FBI Agent) get to the bottom of things, and the latter finding and helping a girl named Sherry find her parents. The entire thing is played noticeably more straight-faced than what I’m used to in a Resident Evil game, but it manages to work. There’s at least one moment that is heartbreaking and you’ll know it when you see it.
If there’s one knock against the game it would have to be the game’s bosses. They sometimes feel more like you have to run around and unload all your ammo into them, which is a stark contrast to when I played Resident Evil 3make. Though to be fair, the majority of the boss fights in that game are usually against some variation of Nemesis, and those fights with Nemesis are really good.
Much like Resident Evil 3, the Resident Evil 2 Remake is a pretty good way of killing a few days (I logged around 7 hours when I first finished Leon’s Path and Claire’s around 4). While it may not be my favorite Resident Evil game (that’ll probably always be 4), and I may not like all of it, I respect the absolute hell out of it for being a great survival horror game.
And with that, the pre-Village Resident Evil kick is complete. Next week? Probably doing something different because I’ve only written about Resident Evil for the better part of a month and I wanna take my time with Village. Thank you for indulging me in the hyper fixation, see y’all next week.
