By 2019, the Resident Evil franchise was in a pretty good place. After struggling with its identity for nearly a decade, Capcom's excellent survival horror game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard put the franchise back on the map in the eyes of many horror fans, winning numerous accolades and selling over 12 million copies. It's only natural, then, that after rebooting the series with an original title Capcom would return to the familiar: in this case, a remake of the similarly excellent Resident Evil 2, perhaps the pinnacle of 90s survival horror. In my eyes, the Resident Evil 2 remake doesn't even come close to replacing the original, but I don't think any sane developer should have attempted to in the first place. Instead, it acts as a late-2010s complement to it, offering a modernized interpretation of the game with a drastically different vision yet still capturing similar feelings of tension and atmosphere as the original did. Resident Evil 2 remake carves its own path while respecting the source material, becoming an instant survival horror classic.
Part of why Resident Evil 2 succeeds as well as it does is due to the game design. In this case, Capcom truly understood what made the original survival horror titles so compelling on a gameplay level. Playing on the hardcore difficulty mode proved to be a thoroughly rewarding experience that could often be highly difficult yet never once felt like it was pushing me beyond my capabilities, nor like it was asking more than it provided. While the tank controls and fixed camera angles of the original game are long gone, the game makes up for the difficulty those could provide with new challenges, such as location-based damage and the need to properly align and aim your shots. Player movement feels perfect, giving you just enough delay and weight to make the player feel vulnerable but just enough responsiveness and speed to make maneuvering around monsters a skill to master, and mastering said skill is highly satisfying. A major improvement is the difficulty, something that was sorely lacking in the original, being oddly easy for a survival horror game. Enemies are highly dangerous and even a single zombie represents a major threat, which is the main reason why RE2R remains such a tense and stressful experience. I've had many otherwise perfectly planned runs ruined when I forgot to account for a stray zombie shambling around. Mr. X has been a massive point of contention among fans, with some deriding the stress he brings, though I consider him to be a massive gameplay revelation on the same tier as the crimson heads from the remake of Resident Evil 1. He fundamentally changes how you play the game and forces you to be stealthy, as gunshots, slammed doors, or even running can alert him to your position. I didn't find him unbearably difficult, in fact, I got a hang of him fairly quickly, but I can't discount the incredible amount of stress he adds to the experience, and this kind of stress is exactly what I want in a game of this genre. The RPD is a sprawling puzzle box that, as any good RE game should, feels impenetrably labyrinthine at the beginning but eventually expands and opens up as the player learns to best plan routes and unlocks new areas. Later areas such as the underground and the laboratory aren't nearly as expansive but are certainly unnerving in their own right. I also really appreciate the addition of lickers being blind, once again forcing stealth which can become additionally tense to avoid if you have Mr. X in pursuit. RE2R is a game that demands the player keep track of every move they make and it's a level of player immersion that I highly respect and wish more games accomplished. On a mechanical level, this might be a perfect survival horror game.
Resident Evil 2 isn't perfect overall, however, and while the game's flaws struggle to feel little more than marginal, they are at least moderate hindrances that prevent it from getting a perfect score from me. There's a lot of online controversy about how the game handles the dual scenarios, with many arguing they're exactly like one another. I disagree, after playing Leon A to Claire B, I found that both campaigns are reasonably different to make them both worth playing and largely felt in line with how the originals handled it. However, I was disappointed that most of the boss fights were the same, with only one or two appearing only in one campaign as opposed to the original which had a lot more variance. William Birkin G2 is a fairly disappointing fight, relying heavily on the arena's gimmick and the maneuverability you have in that fight is probably too limited, though if you conserved your ammo he won't be too difficult even on hardcore. I also disliked the G-Adults as enemies. Their large stature already makes them difficult to avoid, especially with their propensity to grab and poison the player, but considering how they almost always appear in groups it can lead to being stunlocked. At one point I had to basically daisy chain R/G/B herb combos to get by five of them in a row. These are relatively minor and fleeting issues, but they were noticeably frustrating when they did occur.
One aspect that I think has improved somewhat from the original is the writing and how the game conveys its narrative. The original game has a great scenario and, for its time, was executed fairly well. Sure, the voice acting was melodramatic and campy, but the unnerving worldbuilding and engaging character dynamics carried the story. What the remake adds to the experience feels more natural. Part of this is due to great performances from everyone involved, but part of this is due to some very solid writing. The scenario is for the most part the same, but the characters, while mostly flat are engaging to watch and written convincingly and realistically. The dialog conveys the characters' personalities extremely well - Leon S. Kennedy's scrappy naivety and Claire Redfield's motherly nature as they both transform into survivalists and face horror with heroism. Certain supporting characters like Marvin Branagh and Chief Irons went from having relatively small roles in the original game to being fleshed out fairly dramatically, with Marvin's final scene perhaps the most tragic in the game. Irons embodies "dirty old man with a position of power" incredibly well and the memos that describe his taxidermy hobby are appropriately squeamish. I will say the memos aren't nearly as memorable as they were in the original and while they certainly serve their purpose, none of them really stood out to me other than those relating to Irons. It feels like they exist solely to give puzzle hints or point out mechanics for the most part, unlike the original (or even RE7) where they felt more natural. They still do a perfectly serviceable job of filling out the game's world setting, don't get me wrong, I just wish they were a little more ambitious in this department.
The original RE2 was a visual stunner for a late '90s console game, with its detailed pre-rendered backgrounds and cinematic (albeit quickly outdated) CGI cutscenes. RE2R hits a similar relative bar of quality, looking largely incredible and raising the bar from the already nearly photorealistic RE7. The moment you step into the reimagined RPD, the insane amount of detail the game packs into every environment is awesome to behold. Even nowadays, there are still plenty of AAA games that don't have environments nearly as dense and well-constructed as RE2R, and everything has a highly realistic sense of place. It all feels lived in and I was never unconvinced that this was indeed a place people regularly worked in. RE2R is a game that absolutely revels in details, such as the rain pitter-pattering on Leon/Claire's outfits and the realistic wetness materials. The lighting and use of darkness help to replicate a similar level of fear that fixed camera angles did. The game has some of the most lifelike human faces I've ever seen, with breathtakingly expressive facial animation and lip sync, the only exception being non-cutscene facial animation which is wooden (which isn't the biggest deal, as you'll largely be facing away from their faces when playing). The animation work is superb, with character movement having a surprising amount of different animations based on the environment, and I never thought I'd be impressed by running down a set of stairs. The game's gore and dismemberment system is disgusting and detailed, allowing for a wide variety of ways to blast apart zombies. The next-gen update implements a few different types of ray tracing which, while behind the curve technologically and a tad pixellated and smeary even on max settings, still improves upon the game's original screen-space reflections pretty heavily. It's plain to see that RE2R isn't a game that was designed with ray tracing in mind, but it still improves pretty heavily on the original presentation, if only due to removing the game's bad SSR implementation. Texture quality is probably slightly worse than RE7 but the difference really doesn't matter due to the third-person camera. The only real problem is, once again, the game's anti-aliasing, which is once again either too blurry or not effective enough. I ended up just sticking with SMAA due to the additional sharpness it provides but aliasing was a constantly present visual issue and the game's FXAA/TAA implementation is simply too smeary for my tastes. The game does support high-fidelity upscaling for additional performance but it practically murders image quality, as they used the earliest version of FSR instead of the more modern versions.
Despite that one problem, RE2R looks absolutely phenomenal on a technical level, but how does it compare artistically? All of the returning monsters are beautifully realized. From the zombies being the perfect showcase of the overly-detailed gore system, to the crimson naked muscle of the lickers, to the extremely detailed and beautifully animated G-Birkins, the monster designs are perhaps definitive interpretations of classic RE beasts. They gave Mr. X's design much more personality with his little fedora, his melted wax face, and dead glowing white eyes. The only designs I dislike are the G-Adults who don't look nearly as grotesque as prior games. In a more polarizing move, the game's color palette is fairly muted, avoiding strong contrast in favor of lighter black levels and a generally teal grading. In HDR especially this looks rather striking, giving the game a diffused look. It resembles horror films of the 1980s, especially those directed by John Carpenter and it's a look I really dig. I understand why there are mods that give the game a more conventionally modern look but I love how it looks right out of the box, personally. The modernized look of the characters is great, looking significantly more realistic than before, with goofy aspects of the original designs toned down or remote. If you are like me and miss Leon's goofy shoulder pads or Claire's strange wedgie pants, they can be acquired via DLC if you want.
The only glaring problem with this game on a technical level is that performance is highly variable. While RE7 had some strange dips to 40 FPS seemingly randomly, RE2R trades that for a framerate that varies heavily depending on the room. While the game, for the most part, runs pretty decently, there are core areas where I find performance unacceptable. The game's many tight corridors and smaller rooms run extremely smoothly at 100-120 FPS in native 1440p on maximum settings, but stepping out into the main hall immediately drops the framerate to 50 FPS or below. There are a few different rooms that have similarly egregious drops, but for the most part, I just didn't like the game going from 120 FPS down to 70 FPS so rapidly. G-Sync helped this feel less jittery but a game that is nearly half a decade old, with ray tracing less advanced than its contemporaries, should not be running this way on hardware that is newer than it. I don't mean to give off the impression that the game consistently performs terribly, in fact there are large stretches of the game I'd say performed great, but it happens too much to be ignorable.
Another point of contention has been the soundtrack, largely led by series veteran Shusaku Uchiyama but featuring contributions from a number of composers. RE2R went in a similar musical direction to RE7, with the game's original score largely being ambient and quietly mixed. Although the original game's score is iconic and difficult to match in memorability (which the remake's score does not, unfortunately), I do think that RE2R's score sounds largely very good and complements the game's atmosphere very well. The game's subtle use of musical queues gives it a low-key feel and I won't lie, the generally subdued nature of the score did make the game feel more realistic than the original. The score has an airy feeling, which makes areas like the RPD main hall feel gigantic and expansive. I enjoyed the electronic parts of the soundtrack, which feel crunchy and nostalgic. I could imagine portions like that appearing in a PSX game. The orchestral themes, such as Collapse and Last Judgment sound fantastic, taking elements from legendary film composers such as James Horner, with the anxious strings and urgently pounding brass pushing me into anxiety like no other. Like RE7, I felt that the subdued nature of the soundtrack did lend it a realistic atmosphere where the music could often be confused with the game's sound effects, but I don't think it's as effective as it was in RE7 for one reason: consistency. Although like RE7, RE2R's score is largely supposed to blend into the environments seamlessly, it's not nearly as present and certain tracks that should be universal constants simply are not. I feel that certain rooms, such as the RPD main hall or the various save rooms should constantly have their ambient themes playing, but they only play a handful of times and no more. This does rob the game of some of its atmosphere, as I think the musical association with key areas in a game with a ton of backtracking is fairly important. Despite the lack of consistency, it's still a very solid and often effective score that I enjoyed both in-game and on its own, even if it lacks the memorability of the iconic 1998 score.
Resident Evil 2 remake doesn't replace the original game. Very few, if any, remakes do. Nor does it supersede it. Rather, the game matches many of the original game's qualities, but in different ways that feel both refreshingly modern and nostalgically classic. The near-perfect survival horror game design, anxiety-inducing horror, fine-tuned difficulty, improved storytelling, highly detailed visuals, and rock-solid atmosphere nearly make me forget about a handful of the game's somewhat annoying sections. It does certain things better than the original, and it does certain things worse, so it's really a give or take on which game I prefer. An immediate modern classic, Resident Evil 2 is the game that should be held as a benchmark for all survival horror games going forward.
Part of why Resident Evil 2 succeeds as well as it does is due to the game design. In this case, Capcom truly understood what made the original survival horror titles so compelling on a gameplay level. Playing on the hardcore difficulty mode proved to be a thoroughly rewarding experience that could often be highly difficult yet never once felt like it was pushing me beyond my capabilities, nor like it was asking more than it provided. While the tank controls and fixed camera angles of the original game are long gone, the game makes up for the difficulty those could provide with new challenges, such as location-based damage and the need to properly align and aim your shots. Player movement feels perfect, giving you just enough delay and weight to make the player feel vulnerable but just enough responsiveness and speed to make maneuvering around monsters a skill to master, and mastering said skill is highly satisfying. A major improvement is the difficulty, something that was sorely lacking in the original, being oddly easy for a survival horror game. Enemies are highly dangerous and even a single zombie represents a major threat, which is the main reason why RE2R remains such a tense and stressful experience. I've had many otherwise perfectly planned runs ruined when I forgot to account for a stray zombie shambling around. Mr. X has been a massive point of contention among fans, with some deriding the stress he brings, though I consider him to be a massive gameplay revelation on the same tier as the crimson heads from the remake of Resident Evil 1. He fundamentally changes how you play the game and forces you to be stealthy, as gunshots, slammed doors, or even running can alert him to your position. I didn't find him unbearably difficult, in fact, I got a hang of him fairly quickly, but I can't discount the incredible amount of stress he adds to the experience, and this kind of stress is exactly what I want in a game of this genre. The RPD is a sprawling puzzle box that, as any good RE game should, feels impenetrably labyrinthine at the beginning but eventually expands and opens up as the player learns to best plan routes and unlocks new areas. Later areas such as the underground and the laboratory aren't nearly as expansive but are certainly unnerving in their own right. I also really appreciate the addition of lickers being blind, once again forcing stealth which can become additionally tense to avoid if you have Mr. X in pursuit. RE2R is a game that demands the player keep track of every move they make and it's a level of player immersion that I highly respect and wish more games accomplished. On a mechanical level, this might be a perfect survival horror game.
Resident Evil 2 isn't perfect overall, however, and while the game's flaws struggle to feel little more than marginal, they are at least moderate hindrances that prevent it from getting a perfect score from me. There's a lot of online controversy about how the game handles the dual scenarios, with many arguing they're exactly like one another. I disagree, after playing Leon A to Claire B, I found that both campaigns are reasonably different to make them both worth playing and largely felt in line with how the originals handled it. However, I was disappointed that most of the boss fights were the same, with only one or two appearing only in one campaign as opposed to the original which had a lot more variance. William Birkin G2 is a fairly disappointing fight, relying heavily on the arena's gimmick and the maneuverability you have in that fight is probably too limited, though if you conserved your ammo he won't be too difficult even on hardcore. I also disliked the G-Adults as enemies. Their large stature already makes them difficult to avoid, especially with their propensity to grab and poison the player, but considering how they almost always appear in groups it can lead to being stunlocked. At one point I had to basically daisy chain R/G/B herb combos to get by five of them in a row. These are relatively minor and fleeting issues, but they were noticeably frustrating when they did occur.
One aspect that I think has improved somewhat from the original is the writing and how the game conveys its narrative. The original game has a great scenario and, for its time, was executed fairly well. Sure, the voice acting was melodramatic and campy, but the unnerving worldbuilding and engaging character dynamics carried the story. What the remake adds to the experience feels more natural. Part of this is due to great performances from everyone involved, but part of this is due to some very solid writing. The scenario is for the most part the same, but the characters, while mostly flat are engaging to watch and written convincingly and realistically. The dialog conveys the characters' personalities extremely well - Leon S. Kennedy's scrappy naivety and Claire Redfield's motherly nature as they both transform into survivalists and face horror with heroism. Certain supporting characters like Marvin Branagh and Chief Irons went from having relatively small roles in the original game to being fleshed out fairly dramatically, with Marvin's final scene perhaps the most tragic in the game. Irons embodies "dirty old man with a position of power" incredibly well and the memos that describe his taxidermy hobby are appropriately squeamish. I will say the memos aren't nearly as memorable as they were in the original and while they certainly serve their purpose, none of them really stood out to me other than those relating to Irons. It feels like they exist solely to give puzzle hints or point out mechanics for the most part, unlike the original (or even RE7) where they felt more natural. They still do a perfectly serviceable job of filling out the game's world setting, don't get me wrong, I just wish they were a little more ambitious in this department.
The original RE2 was a visual stunner for a late '90s console game, with its detailed pre-rendered backgrounds and cinematic (albeit quickly outdated) CGI cutscenes. RE2R hits a similar relative bar of quality, looking largely incredible and raising the bar from the already nearly photorealistic RE7. The moment you step into the reimagined RPD, the insane amount of detail the game packs into every environment is awesome to behold. Even nowadays, there are still plenty of AAA games that don't have environments nearly as dense and well-constructed as RE2R, and everything has a highly realistic sense of place. It all feels lived in and I was never unconvinced that this was indeed a place people regularly worked in. RE2R is a game that absolutely revels in details, such as the rain pitter-pattering on Leon/Claire's outfits and the realistic wetness materials. The lighting and use of darkness help to replicate a similar level of fear that fixed camera angles did. The game has some of the most lifelike human faces I've ever seen, with breathtakingly expressive facial animation and lip sync, the only exception being non-cutscene facial animation which is wooden (which isn't the biggest deal, as you'll largely be facing away from their faces when playing). The animation work is superb, with character movement having a surprising amount of different animations based on the environment, and I never thought I'd be impressed by running down a set of stairs. The game's gore and dismemberment system is disgusting and detailed, allowing for a wide variety of ways to blast apart zombies. The next-gen update implements a few different types of ray tracing which, while behind the curve technologically and a tad pixellated and smeary even on max settings, still improves upon the game's original screen-space reflections pretty heavily. It's plain to see that RE2R isn't a game that was designed with ray tracing in mind, but it still improves pretty heavily on the original presentation, if only due to removing the game's bad SSR implementation. Texture quality is probably slightly worse than RE7 but the difference really doesn't matter due to the third-person camera. The only real problem is, once again, the game's anti-aliasing, which is once again either too blurry or not effective enough. I ended up just sticking with SMAA due to the additional sharpness it provides but aliasing was a constantly present visual issue and the game's FXAA/TAA implementation is simply too smeary for my tastes. The game does support high-fidelity upscaling for additional performance but it practically murders image quality, as they used the earliest version of FSR instead of the more modern versions.
Despite that one problem, RE2R looks absolutely phenomenal on a technical level, but how does it compare artistically? All of the returning monsters are beautifully realized. From the zombies being the perfect showcase of the overly-detailed gore system, to the crimson naked muscle of the lickers, to the extremely detailed and beautifully animated G-Birkins, the monster designs are perhaps definitive interpretations of classic RE beasts. They gave Mr. X's design much more personality with his little fedora, his melted wax face, and dead glowing white eyes. The only designs I dislike are the G-Adults who don't look nearly as grotesque as prior games. In a more polarizing move, the game's color palette is fairly muted, avoiding strong contrast in favor of lighter black levels and a generally teal grading. In HDR especially this looks rather striking, giving the game a diffused look. It resembles horror films of the 1980s, especially those directed by John Carpenter and it's a look I really dig. I understand why there are mods that give the game a more conventionally modern look but I love how it looks right out of the box, personally. The modernized look of the characters is great, looking significantly more realistic than before, with goofy aspects of the original designs toned down or remote. If you are like me and miss Leon's goofy shoulder pads or Claire's strange wedgie pants, they can be acquired via DLC if you want.
The only glaring problem with this game on a technical level is that performance is highly variable. While RE7 had some strange dips to 40 FPS seemingly randomly, RE2R trades that for a framerate that varies heavily depending on the room. While the game, for the most part, runs pretty decently, there are core areas where I find performance unacceptable. The game's many tight corridors and smaller rooms run extremely smoothly at 100-120 FPS in native 1440p on maximum settings, but stepping out into the main hall immediately drops the framerate to 50 FPS or below. There are a few different rooms that have similarly egregious drops, but for the most part, I just didn't like the game going from 120 FPS down to 70 FPS so rapidly. G-Sync helped this feel less jittery but a game that is nearly half a decade old, with ray tracing less advanced than its contemporaries, should not be running this way on hardware that is newer than it. I don't mean to give off the impression that the game consistently performs terribly, in fact there are large stretches of the game I'd say performed great, but it happens too much to be ignorable.
Another point of contention has been the soundtrack, largely led by series veteran Shusaku Uchiyama but featuring contributions from a number of composers. RE2R went in a similar musical direction to RE7, with the game's original score largely being ambient and quietly mixed. Although the original game's score is iconic and difficult to match in memorability (which the remake's score does not, unfortunately), I do think that RE2R's score sounds largely very good and complements the game's atmosphere very well. The game's subtle use of musical queues gives it a low-key feel and I won't lie, the generally subdued nature of the score did make the game feel more realistic than the original. The score has an airy feeling, which makes areas like the RPD main hall feel gigantic and expansive. I enjoyed the electronic parts of the soundtrack, which feel crunchy and nostalgic. I could imagine portions like that appearing in a PSX game. The orchestral themes, such as Collapse and Last Judgment sound fantastic, taking elements from legendary film composers such as James Horner, with the anxious strings and urgently pounding brass pushing me into anxiety like no other. Like RE7, I felt that the subdued nature of the soundtrack did lend it a realistic atmosphere where the music could often be confused with the game's sound effects, but I don't think it's as effective as it was in RE7 for one reason: consistency. Although like RE7, RE2R's score is largely supposed to blend into the environments seamlessly, it's not nearly as present and certain tracks that should be universal constants simply are not. I feel that certain rooms, such as the RPD main hall or the various save rooms should constantly have their ambient themes playing, but they only play a handful of times and no more. This does rob the game of some of its atmosphere, as I think the musical association with key areas in a game with a ton of backtracking is fairly important. Despite the lack of consistency, it's still a very solid and often effective score that I enjoyed both in-game and on its own, even if it lacks the memorability of the iconic 1998 score.
Resident Evil 2 remake doesn't replace the original game. Very few, if any, remakes do. Nor does it supersede it. Rather, the game matches many of the original game's qualities, but in different ways that feel both refreshingly modern and nostalgically classic. The near-perfect survival horror game design, anxiety-inducing horror, fine-tuned difficulty, improved storytelling, highly detailed visuals, and rock-solid atmosphere nearly make me forget about a handful of the game's somewhat annoying sections. It does certain things better than the original, and it does certain things worse, so it's really a give or take on which game I prefer. An immediate modern classic, Resident Evil 2 is the game that should be held as a benchmark for all survival horror games going forward.