Resident Evil 2 survives the horror of summiting a twenty-one year old apex. Time-worn mechanics, either left abandoned or considered obsolete, are accountably refashioned through an agile interface and a relentless commitment to creating tension. Resident Evil 2's pervasive sense of dread, the handshake between past and present, remains delightfully, gruesomely in place.
In the peaks and valleys of Resident Evil, it is difficult to find a more respected high point than Resident Evil 2. Hideki Kamiya’s entangled directorial debut expanded the scope of Resident Evil and set a new standard for the flourishing genre of survival horror.
In 2019, a new Resident Evil 2 has the same objective with a different plan. Objects of affection in 1998—cumbersome inventory management, eccentric puzzle design, and omnipresent zombies—are now targets of scrutiny. This Resident Evil 2 responds not by aiming in a safer and more commercial direction, but by focusing on its core tenets and applying a quality-of-life filter on every available lens.
If an element of Resident Evil 2 was present in 1998 it’s held accountable, in some way or another, in 2019. Resident Evil 2 has parallel campaigns for Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield. It also features their more difficult and remixed b-scenarios. Its icons—The Kendo Gun Shop, the moribund Raccoon City streets, the petrifying Mr. X, the G-virus lore dive, the forsaken Raccoon City Police Station, Ada Wong’s unfazed antics, and anthropomorphic soybean mash—are all present. Most importantly, modern Resident Evil 2 retains Resident Evil 2’s prolific fondness for inducing anxiety through alternating currents of tension and dread. It’s both a terrifying experience and an engaging game.
Resident Evil 2’s new opening is an accurate sample for the ensuing material. Either Claire or Leon, regardless of who you select, stop at a gas station before entering Raccoon City. Inside, they face off against their first zombie and learn how difficult it is to square a headshot and how gruesome it looks when their predicament goes south. Minutes later, when there are many zombies, Resident Evil 2 teaches the player that calculated avoidance is sometimes more sustainable than direct confrontation.
What happens next will be a point of contention. The slow run through the streets of Raccoon City is curtailed into a mad dash toward the police station. All of the expected landmarks—the wrecked school bus, the cars on fire, the garish 90’s graffiti—are present, but they’re more of a preamble than an opening act. Resident Evil 2 needs the player inside the police station and wastes as little time as possible getting them there.
It’s part of a larger point Resident Evil 2 aches to create. It is slavishly faithful in premise and promise, but openly defiant of antiquated and modern direction. It’s an action game with competent and challenging shooting mechanics, but it starves the player of a comforting amount of ammunition. Every room in the police station is a small puzzle and putting it together requires some logic and observation, but none of the time-wasting nonsense embraced by archaic adventure games. Resident Evil 2, a game obsessed with menace, violence, and despair, acts in motion with the utmost comfort and efficiency.
Progression in Resident Evil 2 remains identical to its namesake. The police station’s four floors act as a more capable version of the original Resident Evil’s mansion. Some doors are locked, some require special keys, and some require a bit of ingenuity. All the while, zombies pour in from windows (unless materials are found to board them over), and escalate in their menace as time progresses. Lickers and dogs join the fray and then everything’s a mess.
There’s a flow to moving through the police station. It’s organized by one of the most helpful maps I have ever used in a videogame. It displays individual rooms with their names, objects you may have passed over, which doors are locked, what open windows are boarded, and whether or not you’ve cleared a room of all its items. The distressed and labyrinthine nature of the police station (it’s now explained away as a re-fitted art museum, which makes excellent sense) would become confusing if every area weren’t visually distinct and appropriately annotated. On my first run as Leon I spent at least six hours collecting my bearings and making it through. As Claire, with a map in my head and without fear of the unknown, it took fewer than two.
Combat gives pause to progression. How much ammunition you currently have, how many zombies you think are left in the library, and your confidence in avoiding contact can all affect the development of a mental game plan. You need to head east and investigate the helicopter crash outside but also you just got the keycard for the weapons locker on the opposite side of the building. Is it worth the risk? Resident Evil 2 separates progression objectives from helpful incentives and frequently asks the player to assess the potential danger in bridging the gap.
In 2019, dozens of zombie games from Dead Space and Dead Rising, it’s difficult to create a new paradigm for zombie combat. Resident Evil 2 makes its case through a sincere application of gore and violence, a highly choreographed zombie shuffle, and (what I assume is) a touch of RNG. Approaching zombies can bob their heads in the slightest way and ruin a hesitant shot. They’ll put their hands up to block their face and you can shoot off their fingers to create a trajectory to their head. The scarcity of ammunition, especially for a Leon’s shotgun or Claire’s grenade launcher, renders every missed shot a piercing wound to the player’s heart. Feeling like you’ve wasted precious ammunition is gutting.
The fidelity at which Resident Evil 2 is displayed benefits its macabre subject matter. Slashing the knife at approaching zombies makes realistic and gross cuts at the point of contact. Point-blank firing a shotgun to the stomach will chop them in half, spilling entrails everywhere, and then the zombie will crawl with its hands toward the player. Disgusting head wounds, copious amounts of blood and viscera, and overwhelming evidence of violence are in great supply. This could feel gratuitous and it could also feel like Resident Evil. That it has a tangible gameplay mechanic—the visual feedback is essential—qualifies it as essential. It’s part of the total package.
You can feel the machinations of Resident Evil 2’s unease at work. Sometimes heads explode in one shot and sometimes they won’t even drop until they’ve taken five. Sometimes they get back up and sometimes they don’t. Ammunition locations are static but (this is an assumption) the amount of ammunition they contain will be higher or lower based on your current needs. Resident Evil 2’s intention is to always make the player feel as if they may, very soon, be out of bullets. When my first run ended I had at least a dozen gunpowders, which can be crafted into bullets, in my item box. Same goes for health sprays. I didn’t need them, but Resident Evil 2 had convinced me, eventually, that I might.
It’s no accident that Resident Evil 2 doesn’t let the player settle into a groove. When you’re halfway done with the police station, Mr. X (formerly reserved for each character’s b-campaign) appears and stalks the player around the station. He invades areas I thought were untouchable and he never, ever stops. The thump of nearby footsteps signals its time to go, no matter where you are. Downing him is possible but it’s total waste of ammunition. Mr. X operates like Alien Isolation’s alien or Prey’s Nightmare, only it feels like he’s moving in real time and not a randomly or algorithmically generated nuisance. He’s yet another layer on top of an escalating stack of anxieties.
While the police station encapsulates what feels like an entire game, it’s roughly half of Resident Evil 2. Plowing through the sewers and teaming up with either Sherry or Ada provide a needed shift in pace and gameplay. Reaching the Umbrella labs, which demand an acquisition of three elusive key-bracelets, opens a different set of segmented challenges. The lab is where Resident Evil 2’s mobius-strip level design reaches its maximum and where enemies, new and old, feel their most threatening.
Claire and Leon also find distinction, among different friends and enemies, through their differing weapon options. Leon receives the shotgun while Claire receives the grenade launcher and its chaotic ammunition. Claire’s starter weapon is a revolver, as opposed to Leon’s pistol, which makes reloading significantly more time intensive. Every weapon, provided you’re able to find them, has a series of available pieces that expand the clip size or shorter reload times. These function as a truncated series of upgrades and negate latter Resident Evil’s cumbersome weapon shops and overabundance of firearms.
Coming to terms with Resident Evil 2’s basic organization can be a challenge. Like the original game, Claire and Leon operate 85% of an identical campaign. When completed, it opens their opposite B-campaigns. These function as explainers for what their other was doing around Raccoon City between their brief encounters. They’re truncated in both story and content, but contain surprises, both old and new, and are significantly harder. Additional scenarios, if you remember the absurd bonus content in the original game, are also available after finishing the A campaigns of each character.
Weakness is found in surprising places. The original voice work and localization of Resident Evil 2 was lovably Canadian and thoroughly amateur. This was fine because, in 1998, any voiced character was an appreciated novelty. In modern Resident Evil 2, voices are desperately unpracticed and conducted with scab labor. It’s disappointing in principle and in practice. The only possible rationalization is it adds to the late 90’s charm evoked by the original game. The lone exception lies with some of Leon’s distressed quips, specifically an instance where a zombie got back up and both Leon and I said “fucking hell” at the exact same time.
Resident Evil 2 is most effective when it forces the player to engage it from different and unexpected angles. With the escalating melee in the police station, the deluge of chaos in the sewers, and the rushed climax in the labs, it’s well equipped to do so. When I started Resident Evil 2 I held firm in my system of carefully eliminating zombies from hallways and abusing the save and reload feature. My play had to be perfect. After Mr. X showed up everything went out the window and I survived at any cost, unwilling to manipulate the game because I couldn’t deal with the tension of doing any of it over again. On my Claire run I only saved when I was taking a break because, despite the potential loss of progress, I found I got a rush from laying everything on the line.
It is incredible that Capcom R&D Division 1 was allowed to be make a game like this. As Resident Evil 7 took hard swings in virtual reality and in first-person, Resident Evil 2 doubles down on, in the purest sense of the term, classic survival horror. Hunting around the police station for essentials or incentives and struggling for survival against the undead feels like two different directions that were crammed and contained in a single, cohesive experience. That the development team was enabled to accurately reproduce a game defined by pre-rendered backgrounds and out-of-style principles—and they made it look like a modern, expensive product—deserves all the recognition it’s destined to receive.
Resident Evil 2 survives the horror of summiting a twenty-one year old apex. Time-worn mechanics, either left abandoned or considered obsolete, are accountably refashioned through an agile interface and a relentless commitment to creating tension. Resident Evil 2’s pervasive sense of dread, the handshake between past and present, remains delightfully, gruesomely in place.
