Artist Spotlights - Natalia Trepenok

Resident Evil 2 (1998 Dual Shock Edition) Review

Resident Evil 2 is a beloved game from my childhood that I’ve recently revisited. It was my introduction to the world of horror games, I had watched some other kids play it at a friends birthday party, and he later let me borrow the Leon disc to play at home. It is a sequel to the first Resident Evil, which I’ve actually not yet played - making this game in introduction to the franchise as well.

In it, you play as Leon and Claire, who both head into Racoon City on the same fateful night, getting themselves caught up in a full-blown zombie apocalypse. Claire is here looking for her brother after he went missing after the events of the first game. Leon is a rookie cop on his first day of the job (and while I don’t much care for real life cops, he’s thankfully a likeable character, much more interested in keeping civilians safe than murdering them in cold blood like a real life American cop would).



The game-play is quite simple and enjoyable, you navigate through the story by exploring your environments, fighting enemies, collecting items and solving the occasional puzzle. The combat may take a little getting used to, as your characters use “tank controls” and thus can into bad situations if you don’t react quickly to threats. There’s an option to set your controls to auto-aim whenever you ready your weapon, which I’ve found to be very helpful because another thing than can sometimes make combat tricky is how the game’s camera works. This game uses per-rendered backdrops, a clever workaround for the graphical limitations of the time that let games have much more detailed scenery. The downside of this is sometimes camera angles will be as such that you can’t see an enemy until they’re up in your face, and other times you’ll be able to see them but they’ll block the view of your own character. Also keep in mind that sometimes you may still want to switch back to manual aiming, as there are some parts of the game where your character will be surrounded by enemies and the game will auto-aim at the monster that *isn’t* about to take a bite out of you. Other than the combat, another strategic part of the game-play is inventory management. You can only carry so many items at once, so you’ll always have to decide how many weapons and healing items you want to keep on you. Whenever your inventory is full, you can make use of chests that are scattered throughout the game. These chests are apparently gateways into some sort of pocket dimension, so you can access the same items from every chest you find.

The game’ s audio, for the most part, is fantastic. The music is very atmospheric and memorable and many of the monster sounds are delightfully creepy. One issue I did have is that the dialogue is often drowned out by the music in cut scenes, a very odd issue for a game that has so much polish and care put into it. Thankfully, you can go into the options menu and lower the music levels. I’ve found that setting the music to 60 and the SFX to 100 makes cut scenes easier to hear.



(minor story spoilers start here)

The Story-line isn’t perfect, you’ll occasionally get a weird or silly bit of dialogue, but there’s also a lot of entertaining and memorable characters. I found Sherry to be a likeable and endearing character that I cared about and wanted to keep safe, I also found Marvin to be a very sympathetic character. The police chief, on the other hand, is the most evil character in the game, arguably more of a true monster than any of the mutated creatures you’ll encounter. Sadly, he’s probably the most real-world accurate police character in the game. Claire and Leon are both likable people, though Leon is given some rather silly moments in the script, such as one scene where he talks about a person he’s only known for a couple hours as if they’d been a life-long friend.

(spoilers end here)



Speaking of story-lines, this is also one of the places where Resident Evil 2 especially shines game play-wise because it has a ton of replay value. Both Claire and Leon get their own story campaign with unique events, paths, items and character interactions, and there’s actually an unlock-able campaign for both of them! If you manage to do really well with their campaigns, you may even unlock secret weapons and extra playable characters…

As far as any technical issues go, there does seem to be an unfortunate problem where if you try to play this on a PlayStation 3  like I’ve been doing,  several cut scenes in the game are prone to freezing the game, even if your discs are in good shape (I can’t find any significant scratches or smudges on mine). Because of this, I recommend playing this title on a PS2 or PSOne if possible or you may end not being able to finish some of the story campaigns.

In closing, the game is a survival horror masterpiece in my eyes, even if it does have a few flaws. Lots of replay value, challenging but fair game-play, and a great creepy atmosphere awaits you in Raccoon City…“Everyone’s gonna die!”