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'Resident Evil 2' PS1 Review

Game of the Month, January 1998

By Caleb ShermanPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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This is Jynx, she helps me review some games.

Nearly a year ago I said to myself, in a passing moment of genius or idiocy, that it would be a brilliant idea to sit down and play games that were released exactly 20 years ago, for a few hours, and then post online about my experiences with these games. This initially led me down a dark path, with 2017 being an overly busy year I experienced only a handful of my intended games—Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Spawn: The Eternal and Fallout—and that handful left me utterly disappointed.

At first, the new year greeted me with great promise—I delved into Final Fantasy: Tactics with no doubt of the greatness that awaited me. However, the second game of note for 1998, Resident Evil 2, left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Much like with Spawn: The Eternal (released December, 1997) this game's presence on the PlayStation 1 is immediately clear...as you dive into a zombie-infested world with horrifyingly bad tank controls. Truly the scariest part of this game must be the controls. For just a moment I will willingly excuse the tank controls, they seemed to have been a theme in the late 90s. No, instead, I worry for the camera.

'Resident Evil' is well-known as the cornerstone of zombie horror and survival horror video games. There is not a gamer on the planet unfamiliar with the 'Resident Evil' series in some way or another—even if that familiarity does come from the movies instead of the games. I shall never know how this game got where it is today with the ridiculous fixed camera system of the original trilogy.

I have heard the arguments, "The inability to look around every corner raises the tension, it makes it scarier." Well, you shouldn't rely on cheap gimmicks that make no sense to make your game scarier. Yes, fixed cameras prevent a lot of issues that were prevalent in several 3D platformers of the day—and yes, it does add to the tension of the game-but it is frustrating and terrible. You can hardly aim the gun for the stiff arms of your heroes, you can't look around corners which is the obvious thing that you would do in such a scenario. I can't picture Leon Kennedy walking around like "Welp, there are zombies everywhere, time to just charge torso first around every corner!"

We can add to this the ridiculous difficulty or ease of the game. There are two settings when you begin the game, Normal difficulty, which starts the player with extremely limited ammo and will allow two zombies to rapidly drain the player's health straight into the "Game Over" screen. On the other end of that spectrum is the Easy setting, where Leon for some reason is carrying around 100+ bullets, is wearing body armor that completely repels most zombie attacks, and the bosses seem to die under a few shotgun rounds max.

I'm sure this game had an impressive musical score composed by some master composer over at Capcom, as with all games of this era (that weren't intentionally bleak—looking at you 'Fallout'), but I could not hear that score over my brain melting from the sheer pain of driving a human tank that could not look directly in front of itself.

Oh boy, let's not forget the most tragic part of this game (excusing the controls and the cameras) the puzzles! Look, I get it, you need your survival horror game to have puzzles in it, it's the most challenging part. Figuring out puzzles, backtracking, backtracking, backtracking-BACKTRACKING! BACKTRACKING! BACKTRACKING! But—hear me out—maybe your police station shouldn't be booby-trapped to high heaven. Why did Leon apply for a job with the Raccoon Police Department? How did he even do it? You can't get through the first set of doors without a keycard, a unicorn pendant, two ruby stones, a couple of desk keys, and the upper body strength of an Olympic bodybuilder. Again, the puzzles are necessary, I get it, but maybe the puzzles could have been, "Find this combination to this safe, get this desk key, open this desk, get the keycard." This could be just as much of a scavenger hunt as completing the twelve trials of Hercules, and would have made more sense in a bloody Police Station.

Needless to say, my opinion of Resident Evil 2 went down—not up—after playing it for five hours.

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About the Creator

Caleb Sherman

Twitch.tv streamer (Amnesia Duck), retro game enthusiast (don't ask me about Ataris though), lucky husband, and author.

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