Capcom took a good game and made a great game. This goes beyond the call of an ordinary remake, reimagining the spaces and places of Resident Evil 2 into a slickened, very modern third-person shooter that keeps all of the working ideas about the game and makes the rest that much better.
This is a terrific reimagining, even tonally changing the story and delivery to create a more reasonable and consistent throughline for the character arcs. New rooms and items have also been expanded and the way the police station, underground, sewers, and labs have been created, it feels like a consistent wraparound space, truly interconnected, and not a series of static rooms and camera angles used to create impressions of dimensions and space.
The game runs like a dream now, taking an aging and archaic system of play and modernizing it so it would be agreeable to everyone. The key is that it is still very much about preservation but the game now feels well-balanced, whether or not you have stockpiled ammo and herbs.
It sells the big moments in the best way. The bits with Mr. X are tremendous and his path finding/warping logic through the level systems, is interesting. Likewise, the design feels more organic for the player, as the interaction with the spaces is squared off and the rough edges are sanded down, then brushed with a fine coat of polish to hold all the changes it.
The game feels great and makes an old design feel immediately relevant and new. It is with the same spark that REmake entered the conversation as the best-ever Resident Evil, that RE2make now levels up the original second game to be near the front of the pack.
Some old design decisions remain, both with charm and some repetition and necessary backtracking. You still need to switch your brain into a different mode to accomplish Resident Evil puzzles, which often require running between points of interest, juggling inventory management, and bringing key items back to the right spaces. That formula doesn’t always feel compelling but it’s also tremendous that they left it untouched. That was the right thing not to modernize, and so, they did literally everything else and left the mechanical framework in place. That’s a great compromise and the right one for the developers to make.
This is a terrific reimagining, even tonally changing the story and delivery to create a more reasonable and consistent throughline for the character arcs. New rooms and items have also been expanded and the way the police station, underground, sewers, and labs have been created, it feels like a consistent wraparound space, truly interconnected, and not a series of static rooms and camera angles used to create impressions of dimensions and space.
The game runs like a dream now, taking an aging and archaic system of play and modernizing it so it would be agreeable to everyone. The key is that it is still very much about preservation but the game now feels well-balanced, whether or not you have stockpiled ammo and herbs.
It sells the big moments in the best way. The bits with Mr. X are tremendous and his path finding/warping logic through the level systems, is interesting. Likewise, the design feels more organic for the player, as the interaction with the spaces is squared off and the rough edges are sanded down, then brushed with a fine coat of polish to hold all the changes it.
The game feels great and makes an old design feel immediately relevant and new. It is with the same spark that REmake entered the conversation as the best-ever Resident Evil, that RE2make now levels up the original second game to be near the front of the pack.
Some old design decisions remain, both with charm and some repetition and necessary backtracking. You still need to switch your brain into a different mode to accomplish Resident Evil puzzles, which often require running between points of interest, juggling inventory management, and bringing key items back to the right spaces. That formula doesn’t always feel compelling but it’s also tremendous that they left it untouched. That was the right thing not to modernize, and so, they did literally everything else and left the mechanical framework in place. That’s a great compromise and the right one for the developers to make.