Resident Evil 2 (2019) (PC) (Capcom)
0With the dogged persistence of a starving zombie who hasn't eaten brains for days, I still maintain that Resident Evil 6 was the most *fun* - which doesn't mean "good", by the way - that the venerable survival horror series has ever been. After the rollercoaster of cheesy action movie set pieces, globe-trotting scenery changes and generous roster of playable characters seen in RE6, the dependable "back to basics" approach of Capcom's more recent installments in the never-ending Umbrella saga comes off as much less ambitious and more than a little mundane.
The multi-platform spin-off Resident Evil Revelations might be the most obvious case in point for the developer's new-found traditionalism, but it's not the only relevant example here. While it's true that RE7 brought the series into the third dimension with an immerse PSVR mode, the actual game was (perhaps for technical reasons) a curiously small-scale, corridor-crawling affair that wouldn't have been out of place in the PS1 era - and I don't mean that in a good way.
Now, Capcom's genre conservatism has reached a whole new (albeit entirely predictable) level with the release of Resident Evil 2, a remake of a 20 year old game which was indeed built from the ground up for Sony's original PlayStation console. The result is a faithfully recreated - if also sensibly modernized - version of survival horror ca 1998.
As someone who never played any RE game in the pre-GameCube era, I very much appreciated the 2002 re-release of Resident Evil 1 for its methodical gameplay, purposeful exploration and moody atmosphere. And apart from having ditched the original's fixed perspective in favor of a RE4-style over-the-shoulder camera, Resident Evil 2 for the PC/PS4/Xbox One is more or less the same kind of respectable upgrade that the 2002 RE1 consisted of. This is great news for fans of the much-loved second entry in the series, but for me the novelty of this kind of retread has largely worn off in the long 15 years since the first remake was released. Also, I played Evil Within 2 fairly recently and it had a lot of the same elements, except with a more unpredictable, delirious world design.
That being said, the new RE2 is a robust third-person survival horror game with a well-balanced mix of tense gunplay, cute little puzzles and monster closet thrills. The visuals are solid (if once again somewhat hampered by the game's focus on just a few thematically consistent locations) and the sound design in particular is excellent. But it's hard to see where Capcom goes from here; at least if a strict adherence to well-established genre tropes is something they intend to stick with for the next game as well.