Resident Evil 2 (1998)

This is a pretty big departure from the original game, in terms of tone and ambition. The original RE game is your quintessential claustrophobic horror game. Brimming with atmosphere. And it's fantastic for it. RE 2 has atmosphere, but it does play to a different tune in terms of its ambition and tone. RE 2 has an action movie vibe to it. And this is reflected in the general gameplay as well. It still plays like RE 1, in terms of the clunky tank controls and being resource starved. Traversing and puzzle solving. I didn't really find any of the puzzles to be that challenging, but overall exploration was engaging, the game looks much better than RE 1 did and in general there is far more detail in the environments and character models.

The "Police Station" is kind of silly. They do justify it narratively by stating it was a museum prior. I'm not complaining that the police station has secret doors, special keys linked to card suites and puzzles to solve. Just putting that out there. A mansion certainly fits those tropes more aptly.

Still the plot is more ambitious in scope, there are new monsters to fight and the game puts you under constant pressure. The concept of a B scenario is cool, especially at the time when people typically only bought a few games so you would typically replay your games. So having replayability in mind in both the gameplay and narrative are cool and well executed here. Though I personally don't really like immediately replaying games. It does kind of suck that crucial parts of the narrative are gate-keeped behind the B scenario. But as a compromise it's at least an interesting one, even if the B scenario still mostly plays out the same just with different cut scenes.

I do like how enemies don't respawn after killing them. I understand and do like the crimson zombies from the RE remake. I understand that they want the game to still have pressure and horror with the sheer amount of backtracking, but given resource limitations, I liked having the choice to sacrifice resources to make a hallway/room safe. The game does shake this up with certain events triggering new monster to spawn (a good thing), but in general I do like being able to make that choice. There is a ton of backtracking in this game, but the level design is still great. You are often given shortcuts and multiple paths through the environment that open up over time.

Like with RE 1, once you get to the third act of the game, it basically becomes a full action game. You still have to manage resources, but the game expects you to engage with combat.

Another decision they made (which was part of RE 1), that is honestly pretty brilliant, is the decision to make saving a limited resource. They give you plenty of save slots, but I did find myself pushing further to not unnecessarily use a save state. It's subtle but elevates the risk. By the end I had 3 ribbon inks left.

In general, this is a great sequel. It does everything bigger. The plot is interesting (I wouldn't say brilliant. Umbrella is cartoonishly evil and doesn't make sense, but it's still a fun cheesy action movie vibe) and it is more of what made RE 1 great, but with its own tone.

This Capcom title is a survival horror classic that built upon its predecessor’s foundation with greater ambition and polish, using a new setting, a zombie-infested Raccoon City, it follows Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield through two interwoven campaigns. The game impressed with its cinematic presentation, atmospheric pre-rendered backgrounds, and intense resource management. Its "Zapping System", allowing two different story perspectives, added strong replay value. Despite stiff tank controls and fixed camera angles, Resident Evil 2 remains a defining entry in the genre and one of the PlayStation’s finest horror experiences.

It builds up on everything that the first title did correctly, and tries to implement new ideas, such as more playable characters, on both of the already two playable campaigns, that while lasting for a short time, have a very unique gameplay mechanic and is important for the development of the main plot. This was the first RE title which introduced the "Nemesis" mechanic, which was improved on later titles, and is a perfect fit for what Capcom was trying to make, especially what they were trying to make the player feel, which is the complete opposite of being at ease. A classic must-play for the PlayStation platform, and for survival-horror fans in general.

The sequel also refined the pacing and structure of exploration, balancing puzzle-solving with bursts of sudden, nerve-wracking combat. The main map you can explore stands out as one of the most memorable locations in horror gaming, cleverly designed to loop back as new keys and tools are acquired. Enemy variety was expanded with the Lickers and other grotesque bio-organic weapons, each demanding different strategies and reinforcing the constant tension. Combined with a haunting OST and sharp sound design, the game masterfully sustains a feeling of dread from beginning to end.

Technically, this game pushed the original PlayStation very far, delivering detailed character models and dramatic cutscenes that heightened its cinematic ambitions. Both MCs are more than just playable avatars, their stories give emotional weight to the catastrophe unfolding around them. While modern players may find the controls dated, the deliberate movement and limited saves actually amplify the survival aspect. Even for today's standards, this title remains a landmark title that not only defined its era but helped shape the survival horror genre for years to come.

**Update: 2/11/2026 **

Been replaying all the old RE games in preparation for Requiem. RE 2 is a game I somewhat departed from the fan base consensus on. I found it pretty underwhelming on my first try, the police station, sewer, and lab just look kind of bleak and grey compared to the richness of both 1 and 3.

On replay, I still feel fairly similar; but I also have another complaint now - the game is too dang easy. It just dumps health items, ink ribbons, and bullets on you like candy. So it is quite hard to feel the intended “survival horror” experience.

That said, the exploration in the police station is well done. I do think the remake is a much better game overall, pretty much realizing what the original could have been. I am a complete die hard fan for the classic tank control style - it is my favorite genre - but even I can admit the remake is the better game.

It would still be in my top 7 of the series though, an important game historically and I don’t HATE it. It’s just not a favorite.

—-////—-:///——////—-////—-:///—-:///—-

I’ve played every RE title besides the original trilogy. RE 1 remake was my intro (besides RE 4 years ago), and I fell in love with the classic survival horror style. I’ve played many indies that emulate it, silent hill 1-3, code Veronica. But 2 just felt a bit middle of the road for me.

I played the seamless hd mod, that enhances the backgrounds. I enjoy the game a lot, but I prefer a bit more horror to the atmosphere, which this really doesn’t have. It’s bright and fairly plain.

I enjoy the puzzles, exploration, it’s all solid. The whole A and B scenario thing doesn’t really work for me, it’s just too much of the same. But I had fun and I appreciate its importance for the genre.

A 1998 survival horror video game developed and published by Capcom. The player controls rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy and college student Claire Redfield, who must escape Raccoon City after its citizens are transformed into zombies by a biological weapon two months after the events of the original Resident Evil. The gameplay focuses on exploration, puzzles, and combat.

I owned this game originally back in 1998, but I was still a young kid and thought it was scary. Plus the tank controls were hard. And as an adult, they still take some getting used to.

If you can manage the tank controls, the game holds up decently. The voice acting is not that great and the graphics have not aged well, but the game world is carefully crafted and the puzzles are engaging. There are plenty of scary moments. Exploring Raccoon City police department is tense and satisfying.

If you're used to running and gunning, there will be an adjustment period. The game is scarce on ammo pickups, encouraging the player to avoid encounters whenever possible and conserve ammo.

There is a bit of replayability if you do the A & B scenarios for each character, totaling 4 playthroughs. The true ending for the game can only be seen when completing the alternate B scenario.

This is one of my all-time favorite games. I loved it growing up and it's always been high on my list of favorite games in the Resident Evil series, even if it's one I haven't revisited much since. This year, I decided to finally give the impressive Seamless HD Project a try and wanted to share some thoughts on my initial and most recent experience with this beloved title.

Note: I'm not sure how to treat spoilers for a 1998 game that has been competently remade with both versions being widely played. I will try to add spoiler tags for some of the things that might be spoilery if you've never played this version, but won't worry about things obvious to anyone with even a cultural osmosis knowledge of Resident Evil. If you think you might play this game and never have, even if you've played the remake, I recommend not revealing the spoiler text below.

As a quick shout out, the Seamless HD project did amazing work on this. The original release looked great for its time and the fact its textures don't look too bad even today is a testament to its outstanding aesthetics. All of the screenshots I'm including are from that version (though note, those from cutscenes aren't really as touched up as I understand it), but I highly recommend following the link I inserted above to their site and clicking through the slider-enabled comparison shots to see how much better they got this game looking. True, some of the overly-defined edges do look a little awkward at times without the pixelation covering up some vague points, but on the whole, I found the new look really awesome considering it's just a fan-made touch-up of the existing PC version.

One of the best things about Resident Evil 2 is just how much of a step up with was from Resident Evil (1996). I loved that first game. I played it soon after it came out (even though, at like 9, I probably was much too young for it) as one of the first games I played on Playstation 1 and it scared the hell out of me equally as much as it pulled me into its maze-like corridors. But famously, Resident Evil 2 cleaned up so much from the first game and made it bigger, better, and even more intense. While certainly not an action game, this entry moved Resident Evil just a touch more in the direction of something more cinematically in-motion than the often sluggish horror of the first game. There are more monsters, more weapons, bigger maps, better overall design, a bigger story, and so much more that demonstrate how to make a sequel of any game really pop, and it all moves at a very engaging pace.

One of the most impressive things about this title, even today, is the zapping system. This is where I'll employ spoiler tags as some of the discovery here is part of the fun (and the remake did this pretty differently so it may be news to newcomers). Full disclosure, I've never honestly been sure why it's called a "zapping system," but this is the system in which your decisions in your first playthrough (your A game) as one character will affect things in your second playthrough (your B game) as the other character. For instance, one such key decision is when you access the armory, you can choose to take either a sub-machine gun, or an inventory-expanding side pack. Both are exceptionally valuable but your character will only take one, opting to leave the other one for the other character you're not playing as. When you play your B route, whatever item you left in A will be your only option since it was the only thing left behind. This A-affects-B setup gives the appearance that your separate playthroughs are actually occurring simultaneously, rather than being fully independent stories. One of my favorite aspects of this A/B game system that I still think back fondly to today is that you only encounter Mr. X in your B game playthrough and would have no idea he's in the game until you start it thinking you know what you're in for only to suddenly encounter this gargantuan imposing figure lumbering towards you. Admittedly, otherwise the zapping system isn't perfect by any means. There's definitely substantial overlap in the playthroughs that makes it not completely align, and truthfully, making it completely make sense for fully independent but consistent scenarios would've probably limited the game tremendously in its routing to at least make it quite different, if not much worse. But the effort is noticeable and still works very well.

Piggy-backing on the zapping system, one trend in gaming since these older titles that I very much understand from a development perspective—but kind of resent—is the tendency to frontload development attention. Developers have a strong incentive to make an exciting beginning and middle of a game but when, by definition, the end of a game is going to be the least-experienced part, it is often the most rushed and slapped together segment, ending games on kind of an awkward low note. The tendency to put in significant content that gamers won't even see unless they finish the entire game once is just not something you see much anymore. At most, we get a new difficulty or mode that may be a fun new challenge, but isn't as interesting as something that would've required more development to make really fresh and intriguing and serve as a proper reward. This is no more obvious than comparing the zapping system to the remake of this game, which more or less dispensed with it almost entirely, likely in the interest of costs and simplification. As much as I love the implementation of Mr. X in the remake and find it no surprise they had him present from the get-go, a part of me would've loved to see the reactions from people starting B game thinking they know everything to expect only to run into that wall of a monster they'd never seen before—other than that, of course, these days it would be spoiled online within hours of release. Again, I think this shift has very reasonable motives that make some sense, but it is something I do love to see in at least some older games like this one where the tendency was less prevalent.

Somewhat controversially, I actually really like the story in this game. The voice acting is top notch hilariously awkward. And the story is often somewhat nonsensical if not overly simplistic with cartoonishly evil corporations that heavy-handedly criticize sociopathic corporate greed. But, weirdly, perhaps because I was so young when I first immersed myself in these games, I really appreciated this simplicity. I found it enthralling learning about not just the sci-fi virology and terrifying bioweapons, but also the shadowy symbiosis between government corruption (especially in the police) and corporate money. It's actually kind of funny that these very much M-rated games broke down a relatively socially complex interplay in a way that my rather young mind who barely understood these social structures could comprehend quite easily. Much of this is achieved by hand-waving and suspension of disbelief that weirdly contribute to a sort of real nightmare irrationality to the story that enhances the discomfort of these games.

But this approachability is also because the games have a surprising focus on straight-forward and enjoyable characters, good and bad. The villains, while often over-the-top or one-dimension, are clear and distinct with internal conflicts that are easy to follow. The heroes are altruistic normal people: a rookie cop so far untainted by his department-to-be's rampant corruption and politics, and a college student who picked the worst day to check in on her brother. But at every turn they look to help other people survive this awful night, despite being constantly threatened and scared out of their minds (though yes, these early games could've made the main characters a lot less ridiculously stoic when acting out fear). Claire especially has always been one of my favorite video game characters despite the fact that she's frankly a quite simple character in most respects. The game's treatment of story and character is all rather straight-forward and overly simplistic, with a touch of visceral Survival Horror feel that makes it approachable but, in my opinion, still much more than just a shallow B-horror flick.

I won't go too much into the gameplay specifics as I've ranted a lot already and they're fairly well-known. But everything that I love about old school fixed camera Survival Horror is done exceptionally here. There's a wealth of inventory management, balancing scarce resources with keys and items needed for a slew of item puzzles. There's a fairly large and thoroughly varied map full of distinct and evocative set pieces, many of which you can examine for flavor text that supports the environmental storytelling without ever getting in the way. A number of boss fights act more as puzzles in saving the right resources than a test of your quick reflexes. There are classic bizarre and unrealistic puzzles with clever solutions (though one or two more challenging ones wouldn't be unwelcome) that would baffle anyone who found them in a public building of all places. Even if I feel the games up to Resident Evil 0 were all quite solid, I've always felt this one was done just a bit better, a bit tighter.

So I come to the End Boss of this review (see what I did there?): does the game hold up today? Honestly, yes and no. Much of what I loved about it was still very much there. The nostalgia factor was through the roof, which I pretty much expected given my history with this title. The HD touch-up also made the revisit all the more fresh and pleasant. I didn't really feel let down to a significant degree and on balance I would say yeah, it holds up. My only caveat is that it didn't hold up quite as well as I'd hoped. For one, the game was far shorter and easier than I remembered. This is unsurprisingly true of most any game I beat at 10 years old, but it was a bigger difference than I expected. I barely died at all and found little trouble managing resources. This is partially because even 20 years later, I know the game decently well and recent remake experience is more relevant than you might think. But the game is pretty short even by this genre's standards at the time, which was not part of my memories of the game. Each of my playthroughs were around 3-4 hours long and while I went slightly faster than I might normally since I played them on stream with a friend, I was still very much taking my time, reading all notes, looking for hidden items, examining the environments, etc. This is not so bad considering part of the experience is that you should definitely play both A and B games, but still, I was expecting at least 5 or 6 hours from each and was a little surprised there wasn't much more to it. But while this dampened my nostalgic opinion of the game slightly, I still very much enjoyed revisiting it and any disappointment was not significant.

This remains one of my favorite games. I have a hard time guessing at how it would be to play it today for the first time, whether you've played more of the series or not. But for me, my initial time in the creepy halls of the RPD with Leon and Claire have always been cherished—if frightening—memories. Replaying it in 2023 is all the more interesting as revisiting a classic influential game brings to mind lots of issues regarding how games have changed, how they've taken or improved from our library of older titles, and how there is an appeal to both. But most especially, despite how much I love a lot of modern games, this was a potent reminder of how much I miss some things.

My other Resident Evil reviews:

• Resident Evil (1996) - ★★★★★
• Resident Evil 3 (1999) - ★★★★★
• Resident Evil: Survivor - ★★★
• Resident Evil: Survivor 2 – Code Veronica - ★★
• Resident Evil Remake - ★★★★★
• Resident Evil 2 Remake - ★★★★★
• Resident Evil 3 Remake - ★★★★★
• Resident Evil 4 VR - ★★★★★
• Resident Evil 4 Remake - ★★★★★

After Resident Evil (1996) was a huge success, a sequel was unavoidable, and just two years after its release, Resident Evil 2 hit the shelves.

I played the DualShock Version, which adds the vibration function, analog control of the Dualshock controller, and a mini-game that you unlock after beating the main story with both characters, which is a nice addition if you don't have enough Resident Evil 2 in your life. However, you don't miss anything important if you play the vanilla version, so don't worry about what edition is better.

Now, regarding the game, as soon as you start playing you will notice that the graphics and gameplay are a lot better than in the first game. The sensation of walking, attacking, and avoiding zombies is much smoother and satisfactory, and I was shocked at how much they improved everything in just two years and the same console. In my opinion, you need to play both games not just to understand the story and references, but to appreciate the effort the staff put to make the sequel bigger and better in every aspect.

Another thing you will notice quickly is the bigger focus on action. Explosions, cool moves, and action sequences are more common than in the first part, but that doesn't mean the horror elements are forgotten. There are many occasions when you are walking in an empty room and suddenly an enemy jumps from a window and attacks you, just like the first encounter with the Cerberus in the previous game, and to be honest, they managed to scare me more than once, which made my experience more special and tense than I was expecting.

The creepy factor is also expanded with the new enemies, such as the Licker and the Ivy, which have terrifying designs and movements that are more erratic and violent than anything you find in the first game, so finding them in a room will activate your fight or flight response instantly, especially when you haven't saved in a long time.

However, the police station that serves as the main setting isn't as eerie as the Spencer Mansion, and I found it a little less interesting to traverse. But that doesn't mean it's boring, as it has lots of elements that make it unlike any police station you can think of. The statue at the center, the huge library, the puzzles that involve gems and plugs in the shape of chess pieces, and the characters you meet in both routes are just a percentage of the weird and surrealist aspects that makes Resident Evil such an entertaining and original world to explore, it's just that the Spencer Mansion is so iconic that it's hard to surpass it.

On a related note, both routes have way more differences than Jill and Chris in RE1. While most of the experience is the same, Leon and Claire have exclusive rooms, story beats, and characters. For example, Claire never meets Ada, and Leon never meets Chief Irons, so you need to play both scenarios to get the whole experience and unlock the final boss, which is an obvious update to the previous game. The only downside is that there are only two endings instead of six and the little variations that depended on talking to characters or exploring specific rooms at a certain point are gone, but I would say it was a fair trade-off.

In conclusion, Resident Evil 2 is the best example of a perfect sequel that improves in every aspect of the previous entry while keeping the essence, and if you liked RE1 you'll definitely love this one.

A great and brillant sequel that elevated everything present on the original title while delivering an ambitious and interconnected plot (that affects the gameplay and the events of the plot) thanks to its A/B scenario structure for both protagonists (that even the 2019 remake FAILED miserably to replicate).

Only complaint: too easy, giving you lots of ammos by the end of the game and the enemies not that tough to bring down (BUT, on the PC and Dreamcast versions there's the Hard or Nightmare difficulty, that makes the game tough as nails)

Played through the main story on the dreamcast and really liked the A side but the B side felt repetitive. Also got very sick of having to run through the mansion to a save box just to get a key or something.

3.5/5 for me, I'd give it a 4 if keys and similar items didn't take up inventory space. Backtracking is not good game design, in my opinion.

Got a little sick of it so I'm putting it down for Panzer Dragoon before going back and playing the extra content.

Finished both Claire A and Leon B! I had no idea the game was so different when you did the B/2nd Scenario, it was practically a different game. Playing this now as an adult for the first time it's really cool to see how fast-paced it can actually be when you get good at dodging enemies; when I was a kid this thing was nothing but anxiety and rooms full of fumbling evasions. Leon B seemed significantly harder than Claire A, which was a welcome change as I thought Claire's campaign was probably one of the easiest examples of an RE game I had played. Still, it was super fun to sprint through precincts and sewers and labs either as Leon or Claire, or as a little kid or a secret spy. Any situation you find yourself in in RE2, the game is equipped to present you with something fun or challenging, Remember to humbly consider how different a time the 90s were for action and drama plots in video games and the worst thing this game's dialogue and cut scenes will inflict you with is just a case of rolling-eyes.

Can't wait for the remake.