Resident Evil 2 (2019)

Whydeebyme?

Alright, class, we're talking about the zombie today. Now, what is a zombie? Going by the standard definition, a zombie is an animated corpse. Despite having experienced a terminal episode, it moves around on two (or fewer) legs. The zombie's conscious, waking mind is gone, replaced by the primary instinctual drives it knew in life: eating and shopping.

The problem with zombies is our popular culture has used them to the point of oversaturation. So we justify their continued utilization by coming up with hilarious ways to kill them, dismissing any modicum of respect for the enemy. “Psh, zombies,” says the protagonist. “I have twin miniguns built into my mech. What’s a damned zombie gonna do to me?”

Alright, tough guy, I’ll remind you. What did I say the first drive was? To eat, to feed. Zombies view the living as walking warm meals. They’ll bite into that mealbag at 800 pounds per square inch, snagging their teeth into the flesh, ripping free the gooey nourishment within. If there’s another zombie nearby, then consider yourself an all-night cafe. You are alive when they start to eat you.

We also forget that zombies have no pain receptors. Cook them with a flamethrower, or flay the skin from their bones; like rotting Terminators, they keep coming at you, unfazed. No pain also means tapping into auxiliary muscle power. They’ll grab you with strength no human, fresh or decaying, should possess.

Zombies…are dangerous.

Which brings me to the Resident Evil 2 remake, a game significant in that it makes zombies scary again. By Resident Evil 6, the series had devolved to where players punched and suplexed zombies in a conga line. RE2Make remedies that issue with a reset button, unleashing zombies that are as big a threat as Lickers or the persistent Mr. X.

I admit I wasn’t the biggest fan when RE2Make first landed in 2019. Considering how many times I’ve beaten the 1998 original, I hoped for something like the previous remake: the same basic game, but with an expanded map and plot. The new over-the-shoulder camera stuff already looked weird, but I could manage.

While RE2Make does adapt the same story, the game itself is completely different. Beyond the camera change, it moves away from the original’s gameplay even more than REMake did. The puzzles aren’t the same, and the locations demand more effort to navigate through. Capcom flips the familiarized order of progression, too. If you played through ‘98 RE2 as much as I have, you’ll have to relearn where to go and what to do.

The vast differences between the two versions gave me pause. What I expected wasn’t so much a remake as a remaster, which led to disappointment. But something clicked as I underwent this round. I get it now. I understand what Capcom was trying to do. I can even say they did a good job accomplishing that goal. Time is the missing ingredient I needed here.

A few months have passed since Resident Evil. The surviving members of the Special Tactics and Rescue Squad escaped the so-called Mansion Incident, where the billion-dollar Umbrella Corporation spilled a viral bioweapon that raised the living dead. But the mansion blew up, along with any evidence. It's S.T.A.R.S’ word against Umbrella, and the one animal more dangerous than a zombie, or even man, is money.

Now we arrive at a late night in September 1998—where you could go see Pecker, or ironically enough, rent Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. Rolling into Raccoon City is a young Leon Kennedy, here for his first day as a rookie police officer. At the same time, a 19-year old college girl named Claire Redfield arrives on her motorcycle. Her goal is to find her missing brother, Chris, the playable man character from the last game.

The two meet at a gas station, where they discover the Raccoon City locals are rather, let’s say, unfastidious in their choice of food. Umbrella, ever the connoisseur of bad PR, has leaked another virus. Except it isn’t limited to a house this time. The entire city has caught it, and zombies roam all over the place.

When a car accident separates Leon and Claire, they head toward the Raccoon City Police Department, a former art museum converted into precinct headquarters. The leftover décor, whatever the crew didn’t shove into the attic, serves as pretentious design flair. This aesthetic is especially creepy with monsters wandering the dank, ruined hallways and wrecked offices.

Like before, we have two separate, playable campaigns, where you can pick the boy or the girl. Whereas the Chris and Jill campaigns were more of a “what if,” Leon and Claire’s stories are meant to happen simultaneously.

Leon deals with being a rookie at the worst possible time. Now I’m not a cop myself, but I imagine the police academy doesn’t train you to deal with zombie invasions. In a normal situation, Leon’s list of first-day problems might have included locating the coffee machine. Instead, it’s teeth and claws.

While seeking out an escape method, Leon runs into the mysterious Ada Wong. She claims she’s an FBI agent investigating Umbrella’s hand in the zombie menace, but it’s obvious she’s hiding something. The two engage in some will-they-won’t-they as the journey continues. Of course, it’s hard to pull off any one-night stands when you’re in the middle of Hell. Leon wants to live up to his job title and save survivors. Ada tries her best to maintain her sociopathy, but Leon’s good nature warms her colder heart.

Unlike Leon, Claire is more of an everygirl, with the exception that Chris probably taught her self-defense. As she also faces a predicament she wasn’t expecting to deal with, she meet her own unique characters. First there’s Sherry Birkin, a child whose neglectful parents are connected to Umbrella and the current shenanigans in progress. Then there’s RCPD Chief Brian Irons, whom Claire discovers has an undeclared second job as a serial killer.

Oh, and I can’t leave out the abhorrent monstrosity chasing Sherry around. He gains a new, more disgusting and powerful form every time he casts his skin off. Claire’s relationship with Sherry is comparable to the Ripley/Newt plot from Aliens, albeit without that construction crew mech suit.

There are moments where the player switches to either Ada or Sherry, depending on the campaign. In contrast to the original version, they’re given more to do than build a crate bridge. Ada solves puzzles with an Arkham Asylum Detective Mode scanner-thing. Sherry has to play hide and seek from the creepy-ass police chief, mirroring a child abuse PTSD nightmare.

In all aspects, RE2make is bigger, with more to do. Rooms like the RCPD library require more interaction from the player. The sewer system, once a handful of nondescript hallways, is instead a sprawling labyrinth. Formerly optional puzzles become obligatory stopping points. And background characters like the gun shop owner or zombie-bitten cop Marvin feel like real people now, no longer delegated to a few cornball lines.

The switch to third person over-the-shoulder might’ve fooled unsuspecting players into thinking this would be like the original Resident Evil 4. But RE2Make isn’t a loot shooter. The new perspective contributes its own set of challenges, and that’s after the player is made to feel helpless.

That helplessness begins with RE2Make’s zombie. In the PlayStation originals, zombies were prevalent, and stronger in numbers, but they were never a major cause for alarm. They were always slow moving, never much for improvising their attacks. If you engaged them instead of running around them, they hit the floor after about 5-6 shots. Sometimes they played dead(er), waiting for you to walk by so they could munch your ankle.

In RE2Make, the game assigns randomized hit points to every zombie encountered in the game. That means they’ll either go down in a few pistol shots or keep standing up. The most relieving moments are when their heads explode in brain-splattering critical hits, meaning real luck was on your side.

Zombies are always hungry, always looking for an opportunity to bite into some meat. They will take a chunk out of your character whenever they step into your hit box, with no ability to shake them off until they’re satisfied. Since their aggressiveness is also randomized, any zombie too close to you is always a danger. And that’s just an issue when one zombie is in the room. If you find yourself in a tight corridor with two, three, or four of these things, you might end up in real trouble.

Furthermore, RE2Make does away with those PlayStation loading screen doors. Zombies can follow you from room to room now. The one you avoiding killing in the hallway can sneak up behind you, ready to ambush you with a surprise attack if you didn’t swing the camera around.

But as usual, the zombies are just the beginning. You’ll also face the Licker. Crawling on four legs, head like a Xenomorph, wet brains exposed, Lickers are disgusting abominations. Though they are blind, sound draws them straight to their prey. That means using the run button in a Licker-infested hallway is out of the question. So, too, is using a firearm. And there’s always more than one Licker lurking just out of sight, which means taking a chance on shooting one could end in disaster. The best strategy with Lickers is walking past them, but there’s always the question of whether of how much space you have to squeeze through.

Finally, there’s Mr. X, a seven-foot-tall gray Smurf in a trench coat. After becoming active, he will stalk you all over the map, and the only escape is to run while he strides close behind. Shooting at him is a futile waste of ammo.

Mr. X can’t follow your character into save rooms. But even then, hearing his footstep clomping just out of sight is unnerving. Every time he gets too close, his “Danger” music erupts, like he’s carrying an invisible boombox on his shoulders.

RE2Make’s difficulty comes in three flavors, Assisted, Standard, and Hardcore. Standard is the middle ground between Assisted and Hardcore, utilizing a hidden difficulty adjuster. The way it works is that if the game determines you are doing too well, it increases a value to make the game harder. The value determines how much HP enemies have, how much damage they deal to you, and how unpredictable they are. Zombies at the higher difficulty value act grabbier, with increased frequency.

On the other hand, the game lowers the difficulty if it thinks you’re doing awful. I’ve never been a huge fan of this. I don’t like the idea of a game helping me win, like I’m five and Resident Evil is a tee-ball coach placating my failure. Yeah, sure, we all won the trip to McDonald’s. If I accomplish something, I want to know it’s because I earned it for real. But whether I’m doing too ‘good’ or too ‘bad,’ at some point I will die and need to reload my last save.

Hardcore locks the difficulty value at a higher value. As a result, the enemies are tankier, and far more unpredictable. Both Leon and Claire are limited to one zombie bite before it’s Game Over. In other words, Hardcore makes the game, yes, harder.

But it isn’t just about providing a challenge. All of these tougher issues work in tandem to make 2Make scarier. When danger might be creeping up behind you, when shooting at it means wasting more bullets, the surrounding police department becomes that much more oppressive. In the real world outside the computer screen, goosebumps travel up your back in the dark.

As much as this game gets right, there are odd quirks here and there. First is the cute, comical way Leon and Claire fucking swear every time a bastard zombie tanks their goddamn fuckity bullet. At every other moment in-between, they swear worse than I did when a boss surprised me with an instant kill attack.

The two also barely interact with each other compared to the original, as if, outside the intro, they are total strangers. Where they once entered the same room or communicated via radio, they now wander the zombie-infested world alone. It’s a wonder Capcom had them meet at all in this version.

This leads me to the worst part of RE2Make, the mishandled A/B scenarios. In the PlayStation original, finishing one character’s disc unlocked a B scenario, which differed from their A scenario in significant ways. There were alternate story events. Performing actions as the first character, such as taking certain items, meant that second character couldn’t have them. Best of all, it was easy to match up the scenarios and determine where both characters might be at a given time. It was like Leon and Claire were working together, even if they weren’t next to each other.

In RE2Make, the B scenario is a last minute, slapped in feature to satiate the fanbase. It does not function at all like it used to. B is just that character’s A scenario with the difficulty ramped up. The puzzles are harder, and Mr. X shows up earlier. That’s it. Story events don’t change in any way. Beyond the alternate character leaving some lazy notes and bullets in a few places, they don't influence the other’s run at all. I struggle to put my own headcanon together of how they connect.

It hurts worse whenever I hear the song featured in the game, the one that claims there’s “two sides to every story!” Like it matters anymore. Instead it should go, “by the way, we met at the beginning.”

Despite those setbacks, RE2Make is still a great game, with a lot of love put it into it. It is most certainly not the same game as the PlayStation version. From the new camera to the gameplay to the routes, it veers in many new directions. But it sticks to what counts in all the right ways, while also offering a treasure trove of replayability and bonus content.

All the same, I am wary. Next up is the Resident Evil 3 remake, and I have a feeling I’m going to be sad afterwards.

Final Rating: *** ½