Review for Resident Evil 2 Remake. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 25/01/2019
Resident Evil 2 Remake is Marylin Manson's Sweet Dreams: a more adult and darker reinterpretation of an old-time masterpiece, updated in a modern version with the humility necessary to pay due respect for the original work. The difference here is that it is not a musical cover, but a real makeover put in place by the developer himself: that Capcom which lately is giving us announcements worthy of taking us back to the golden age of the video game. The path to this new RE2 was winding and steep, but it was right: it would have been too easy to reproduce the game in HD, following the path of Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero.
But no: Capcom wanted to dare as never before, offering us a revised and corrected Resident Evil 2 according to modern aesthetic and playful canons, succeeding in the incredible feat of making an idea current and still damn fun with more than twenty years on the shoulders. In short, a great version of Sweet Dreams.
"Freeze!"
The legendary beginning of Leon Kennedy's adventure, after meeting and immediate separation from Claire Redfield, is engraved in the memories of longtime players: the protagonist's entry into the armory of Mr. Kendo and the brief dialogue with the shopkeeper before finding himself submerged by zombies are one of the most iconic moments in the entire Resident Evil saga. In the remake the situation is slightly different (Leon arrives at the shop in the company of Ada Wong, after having already passed the underground parking lot of the police station and after about 3 hours of adventure), but it is the perfect example of how the narrative chosen by Capcom winks at the past while offering a more adult and raw treatment of thorny topics such as love for loved ones, the sense of duty towards others, death.
The situation - and what happens in many other moments within the game - is conceptually the same that fans already know, but there is that something more that displaces even those who would be able to recite the lines of all the cutscenes of RE2. We deliberately remain vague so as not to spoil the surprise, but we guarantee you that Resident Evil 2 Remake offers many of those goodies that, if you are a longtime fan, will draw a stupid smile on your face throughout the duration of the adventure.
Although with partially or totally rewritten situations, completely new scenes and parts of the game - noteworthy is the terrifying quarter of an hour you will spend in the orphanage, to be explored as Sherry Birkin - we are talking about the 2 Resident Evil 1998: players who are approaching the brand for the first time may find themselves faced with a game that, although revised and corrected, for a millennial could be a little old. Not that this is a problem, on the contrary: it is probably the right compromise between old and new, able to satisfy all palates. Horror fans still look at Romero's films and the classics of the genre with extreme respect, and Resident Evil 2 is the perfect videogame counterpart. Wanting to continue with the cinematic analogies we could say that Resident Evil 2 Remake is to Resident Evil 2 as Ash Versus Evil Dead is to Army of Darkness: only the fans of the past are able to appreciate 100% the work done by the writers, but not for this a neophyte passionate of the most splatter horror grown up with The Walking Dead will not be able to be passionate about the story, even more than valid, of the adventure of Leon and Claire.
Going more specifically, to those who do not know what we are talking about, let's say that RE2 tells of the moment in which everything falls: the Umbrella Coprporation virus, capable of transforming humans into bio-organic weapons (zombies are only a weak first form of the mutation) was not eradicated with the destruction of Villa Spencer in the first Resident Evil, but instead reached the neighboring Raccoon City, infecting the population. The player is called to face the adventure as Claire Redfield, in the city to look for her brother Chris, protagonist of the first RE, and Leon Kennedy, cadet policeman on his first day of work. To complete the adventure 100% you need (at least) two runs, respectively in the role of the two characters: separated at the beginning of the game by an explosion, the two will end up exploring the same places but at different times, offering the player a broader perspective on the story and challenging him with different puzzles depending on the character in use.
The most intriguing part of RE2 is precisely this: once you have savored the main plot with one of the two characters, you can immediately start over with the other protagonist and, when entering the police station, you think you have to face the same situations, the game is immediately ready to displace with one novelty after another, suggesting that the actions taken in the first run and the events that you are already aware of are actually only part of the complex narrative puzzle. These are basically parallel worlds: Claire and Leon's stories don't intersect (deliberately) perfectly, but they offer two adventures in which some situations and scenes are identical regardless of the character in use: if you are playing with Leon, for example, you will meet Claire locked outside the gate of the inner courtyard of the police station, while playing with Claire you will find yourself facing the exact same situation but with reversed parts. Each of the two protagonists, then, has scenes, puzzles and parts of customized adventure, which you will not face with the other: in Leon's adventure, for example, you will also play as Ada Wong, while choosing Claire you will also use the character of Shelly Birkin, in a short but intense scene in pure Haunting Ground style.
Purists could argue that in the original RE2 the actual runs were 4, as each character could face the adventure twice, which offered a different position of the objects and different puzzles: well, complete the game and you will have the same option also in the Remake, which will allow you to restart the game with some new features and an alternative ending, always respecting that perspective of the small alternative universes of the Capcom masterpiece.
Taking into account the amount of additional content, the new areas to explore and how passionate the adventure is, Resident Evil 2 Remake will keep you busy for at least a dozen hours (to be doubled if you go through the two campaigns a second time for scenario B) without ever showing signs of weakness or dips in the plot. And if you really want to once again reach the credits, be ready to start playing again as Tofu ... we can't tell you more about this mode, but the fans of the first hour (who know what to expect) will surely confirm that in such a prestigious edition of Resident Evil 2 could not be missing.
Goodbye door opening simulator
The real revolution of RE4, in addition to the change of camera setting, was also represented by the possibility of switching from one environment to another seamlessly. The first chapters of Resident Evil, scorned by gossips as "door opening simulators", forced you to watch the animation of the door opening of each room, an expedient devised to camouflage the loading of the portion of the game world in the limited space of storage offered by the first PlayStation. RE2 Remake, unless you are forced to reload the game following a game over, will practically never put you in front of a loading screen: all places and settings are connected and immediately explorable, just as it would happen in reality. This novelty greatly facilitates backtracking, present in a decidedly massive way, especially inside the police station, where keys and special objects are scattered around the four corners of the game world.
Retrieving items, exchanging them in the special trunks or saving the game, therefore, become much simpler and faster operations than in the past, revealing themselves to be the most appreciated feature of this modern RE2. In detail, we report the return of the typewriters and tapes necessary to save the game, but only if you choose to tackle the game at the highest level of difficulty: in the case of the normal or assisted level (with the latter also facilitating health recovery and helps target enemy weak spots) the game will automatically save when you reach a checkpoint and allow you to use typewriters whenever you want. Another welcome return are the trunks: starting with a decidedly limited inventory space - we strongly advise you to solve all the additional puzzles that allow you to find useful bags to increase the number of transportable objects - it is extremely convenient to be able to deposit useful objects in any chest to retrieve them from any other in the game world, also in this case limiting backtracking.
Coming to the actual gameplay, the few innovations are the ones we all wanted, and that are able to make a difference: it is obviously possible to move while taking aim, and enemies can be hit in different points of the body and even crippled, a feature foreseen in Resident Evil 1.5 but then abandoned in the development of the original Resident Evil 2. It goes without saying that the headshots will play a predominant role in most of the clashes, with a revival of the survival component as it has not been seen for some time: to take down a common zombie, three or four bullets can also be used, and even once on the ground. the undead (in name and in fact) does not necessarily stay down. In other words, take it into your head that you will hardly find enough bullets to kill all the creatures that stand in front of you: analyze the various situations, combine the resources collected to create ammunition, make no noise in front of blind enemies such as lickers, bar the windows to avoid enemy incursions and solve secondary puzzles to unlock weapon modifications will be fundamental operations to ensure survival .
Finally, to sharpen the sense of perennial suspense there is the Tyrant, a gigantic mutated monster that you can never knock down but only temporarily stun (and you will need two grenades to do so) that will follow you for the duration of the adventure. We admit that in some situations its appearance will make you lose patience, but on balance it is an element capable of further destabilizing the player's certainties, forcing him to suddenly change his way or strategy during a fight and adding that extra bit of healthy terror, of what it feels like to run wounded and bleeding with an unstoppable monster at his heels.
A RE2 that tastes like RE4
Capcom's intention, speaking of the technical sector, was clear right away: Resident Evil 2 Remake would have had the virtual direction of Resident Evil 4, the watershed between the REs with a fixed camera and the subsequent more action incarnations of the following chapters. We could spend entire paragraphs analyzing how much the new course undertaken by RE4 has influenced the disappearance of the survival component typical of Resident Evil, which has subsequently become more and more action and less and less scary (and only resumed with the recent RE7, but that's another story. ). The fact is that at the time of Resident Evil 4 it was simply fantastic: from the color palette to the animations of the enemies, everything was consistent with the new virtual direction and gave the impression of being ahead of its time, and it is no coincidence that the following survival horror - we mention Dead Space and The Evil Within above all, just to pull out a couple of big hits - have followed the same path. That type of camera, with the protagonist almost always framed at three quarters and placed to the side of the screen, is the perfect solution to bring Resident Evil 2 on the consoles of the current generation, blending past and present in a graphically appealing way.
Obviously, apart from the change of framing, the graphics engine and the environments have been rewritten from scratch: the level of detail is light years ahead of the original game, already well done at the time considering the technical limits imposed by the first PlayStation. If once there was a miracle in front of the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds and the technical realization of the main characters, the "new" Resident Evil 2 promises to amaze as much as it did then: the polygonal models of Leon and Claire are wonderful, as is the police station - which despite the presence of the sewers and underground laboratories remains the main focus of the whole experience - has been redesigned with the same obsessive attention to detail that the they have made immortal. Exploring the environments of RE2, whether you are at your first or second encounter with Capcom's masterpiece, is always a unique sensation, between the excitement and anguish that only a game of this kind is able to give. Going from a normal office to a library that seems to have come out of Castelvania is an indescribable timeless sensation, which, incredible as it may seem, is never forced: the stuffed animals, the bloodstains, the long corridors and the paintings on the walls ... every element is put there for a reason, and the feeling of finding yourself wandering around the meanders of Villa Spencer is at times so strong as to make you appreciate even more the horror component of Resident Evil which, as demonstrated by the first and seventh chapter, gives the better than himself when he imprisons the player in the gloomy rooms of a gigantic building.
Graphically, the RE Engine obviously gives its best on PC, but also on consoles it defends itself very well: if on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One you have to be satisfied - so to speak - with a Full HD resolution, on PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X you get to 1620p with a stable framerate of 60 FPS, all with special effects and graphic finishes specially designed to make the most of the available hardware, now with few secrets for developers. Polygonal models aside - whose Japanese style of character design is always recognizable despite the Western contamination in the style of the settings - to hit the mark are the bloodiest scenes: Splatter is a key component in Resident Evil 2's way of scaring, and the gore-edged scenes are far more terrifying with the remake's photorealistic detail. If already a licker or a zombie attacking suddenly scared PsOne, you can well imagine how they will make you jump on your chair in this polished version, in which lights and shadows play the lion's share for a virtual direction that brings back in vogue a horror component that hasn't been seen in video games (at least talking about triple A) for at least a decade.
Finally, the localization of texts and dialogues in Spanish should be noted. As much as we purists once again prefer the voices of American actors, the dubbing is above the average of many other titles, faltering only during a few bars, in which the tone of the voice of the protagonists does not fully reflect what is happening on the screen. Nothing to complain about instead regarding the music and sound effects, which in headphones support 3D audio: we challenge you to play with headphones without wearing a sweatshirt for the chills that will come behind your back.
Resident Evil 2 Remake confirms expectations and does not disappoint (at times exceeding them) expectations. From now on the concept of remake will be evaluated using the Capcom title as a yardstick: the Japanese software house was incredibly able to update one of its best survival horror titles, proposing it in a modern key without distorting it, even enhancing it moreover, the features that made it a masterpiece of the PsOne era. To be avoided only if you don't like the genre or if you prefer splatter all action and shootings. If not, it's a great excuse to get close - for the first or the umpteenth time - to the best survival horror of all time.
► Resident Evil 2 Remake is a Horror-Survival game developed and published by Capcom for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 25/01/2019
