Much of the game takes place in a vast police station where you’ll have to hunt for obscure objects and combine them to open doors so that you can find keys to unlock new areas. Resident Evil 2 is kind of like the T2 to Resident Evil’s Terminator, with more enemies and a stronger focus on action, but many of the series’s arcane puzzles and mechanics remain. This remake sticks to the broad outlines of the original Resident Evil 2 plot, which is to say it expands beyond the first game’s creepy mansion and plunges you into a city overrun by zombies and other mutated monsters. The fact that the game plays so effortlessly makes it all the more stressful when you can’t find a single bullet anywhere. Similar to Resident Evil 7, items are scarce and death could be behind every door you open. You don’t have to fight clunky tank controls when you’re backed into a corner - like in Resident Evil 4, it’s pretty easy to blow off a zombie’s head with a shotgun - but you also never feel like an empowered, overarmed badass. Resident Evil 2 is an over-the-shoulder action-adventure game that dials down the pace and forces you to wallow in your own fear. Resident Evil 7 review: a bold and terrifying return to form Those two games were by far the best received in the series since the original Resident Evil 2, and it’s appropriate that they form the basis of the new remake. And really, how could it not be? The GameCube Resident Evil remake came out well before Resident Evil 4 revolutionized the action game genre, let alone Resident Evil 7’s bold first-person reassertion of the series’s horror relevance. But for all its graphical artistry and gameplay tweaks, it played more or less the same as the original, with 3D characters superimposed on 2D backgrounds and a charmingly 1D script. The first, 2002’s Resident Evil for the GameCube, was a visually astonishing reimagining of the first game in the series. This is the second time Capcom has attempted an ambitious Resident Evil remake. The result is one of the best games in the Resident Evil series.

But it preserves enough of the source material to feel like a respectful tribute.

It’s an intense, terrifying experience that rebuilds the game from scratch and doesn’t at all feel out of place on high-end modern hardware. Or they can go for something in between.Ĭapcom’s new Resident Evil 2 - which comes out this week, 21 years after the PlayStation original - is a more radical remake than most. They can throw the original game out of the window and use its concept as a framework for something entirely new. They can take a largely hands-off approach, preserving the experience as much as possible while making it more technically palatable for modern audiences. When developers decide to remake beloved games, there are several possible avenues they can go down.

Resident evil 2