The zombies are almost upon us and, based on the reviews, I'm eagerly welcoming them myself.

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Glowing reviews or not though, the demo already convinced me to buy this game. It felt good to play, looked pretty and ran smoothly, plus had some icky gore to it - more than enough to get me aboard.

I have some great memories of playing Resident Evil 2 on the Playstation all the way back in 1998, even though it was my friend who had the control probably 90% of the time and I was just watching from aside, which was still really enjoyable and thrilling. The fact that I wasn't playing myself could also be one of the reasons for why I'm not too bothered by the switch from fixed camera angles to the 3rd person view.

Pre ordered as soon as I played the demo.

I never played the original, and didn't REALLY get into the franchise until 4. This made going back to 1(through the remaster) difficult though I still enjoyed it a lot. Since 4, I've been waiting for an RE game that had that same level of horror/suspense while also making use of modern controls. Every RE game since(until 7 which was amazing to say the least) were purely action games.

It seems like Capcom has realized how much they've strayed from the original vision of the franchise, which was maybe helped by the re-emergence of the horror franchise through things like Amensia and the like.

I hope they do this with Nemesis as well, and hope this means a new bright future for the franchise.

I'm surprised how much they changed Claire, her new look. I don't hate it, seems alright to me and I know she's had different interpretations over the years but this seems like the biggest departure. Now I'm wondering what Chris would look like in this version of RE 'cause he would have to look very different.

@liquiddragon: Chris totally shows up at the end of Resident Evil 7 and looks pretty different from his RE5 and 6 incarnations. I think part of it has to do with the way Capcom's RE Engine renders stuff versus their old MT Framework tech, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't also an aesthetic choice. In Resident Evil 2's case specifically, it definitely seems to emphasize how young and inexperienced Leon and Claire are by making them little baby-faced moppets.

Some of the things I've heard from people who have the game early have me very excited. There's definitely a part of me that would've loved some old-school tank-ass tank controls and static camera angles, but I'll suffice with inspired modernization.

@arbitrarywater: ah man, haven’t played re7 yet. Seems like that would’ve been a nice surprise. Maybe spoiler tag that.

Ah, sorry. My bad. But I wouldn't consider it too egregious a spoiler when Capcom themselves kept touting and delaying their post-release single-player DLC featuring Chris. for like 6 months.

Someone in the know explained to me that the RE Engine relies way more on facial capture and actual actors to render characters with greater fidelity, where MT Framework tech was driven more by artist renditions of human faces, and that this specific change (at least, on the technical side) contributed in large part to that character's new appearance.

I am excited about the game, but I am actually kind of surprised by how glowing the reviews are. It's not that I was expecting people to dislike it, only that I didn't expect reviews to be as good as they are. The demo, in my opinion, didn't do a lot for me. I think gameplay wise it's totally fine; it is a lot like RE7 really (which was my favorite 2017 game despite the handful of really great games of that year), but visually, on the Xbox One X it kind of looked blurry and the brightness/contrast in the dark wasn't very dark at all. I'm not sure if that's just the style the game is going for, or it was just the demo, but it didn't look good to me and kind of hurt the immersion. This is with a calibrated TV and the HDR settings set in the game settings, so it was definitely the game. I'm hoping that is fixed in the final game.

It’s nice to see all the effusive praise but part of me still worries I’m going to fall in line with Kotaku’s review a little more than the majority have so far. I have a lot of nostalgia for the story aspects of RE2 (I was 12 and got really into the novelizations and writing my own fan fiction for a bit...) and it sounds like that’s been tweaked pretty significantly, especially the save file interplay.

I’m also not at all interested in being scared anymore, so part of me is also worried I just couldn’t stomach this beefed up Mr X. I fully skipped Nemesis due to latent fears from his brief appearance in the original 2.

Not gonna read any reviews since I already knew I was going to buy it, but its nice to see the game getting a good reception. I want to go in as cold as possible, and people saying there's a beefier design of Mr. X is already more than I wanted to know. But that's my own fault, gonna go on total blackout for the game now.

I never really pre-order games, but I think I'm going to do that now with the Deluxe Edition. Also, if anyone is curious, VGTech has done a video on it and in the description, it says "PS4 renders at a native resolution of 1920x1080. PS4 Pro and Xbox One X render at a resolution of 2880x1620, and the PS4 Pro downsamples from this resolution when outputting at 1080p. Xbox One renders at a resolution of 1920x1080. PS4 Pro, Xbox One and Xbox One X seem to be using Checkerboard Rendering to reach their stated resolutions." As well as pointing out that the X version has reduced aliasing compared to the PS4 Pro version so the X version appears a bit softer. Xbox One and PS4 Pro hit the target 60fps pretty well while base consoles struggle, the base Xbox One more than the PS4, but neither looks particularly great in that regard.

@nodima: Weirdly enough I was never a fan of Resident Evil games, just never got into that genre, but this started to pique my interest. Then the Mr. X stuff I saw in reviews was something that really turned me away. From the scary selection the only series that really spoke to me was Dead Space because it was an extremely well made game that took oldschool survival horror conventions and made them enjoyable to play, and my deep love for gritty sci-fi which the game had in spades. I do remember, I think Dead Space 2 had this and maybe even Dead Space 1, the regenerator boss encounters - an enemy that would chase you down and would constantly regenerate as you shot his limbs off and so forth. Those were some of my least favorite sections of the game because they just weren't built around doing things in a rush and it was stressful for me in a not-so-fun way.

The entire idea of an enemy you can't defeat that occasionally will show up to throw a wrench in your plans causing the player to run around until they leave seems more like a nuisance than anything.

@humanity: Part of me worries I'd wind up finding it a nuisance as well. I know time has been a little kind to Nemesis, but twenty years ago plenty of RE fans were upset that he changed the pace of play in such a substantial way. Obviously, others were jazzed to the moon over the constant threat he presented and the creative custom ammo system that game introduced to counteract him. For me, the first Resident Evil had me imagining zombies crawling into my bathroom stall throughout elementary school, while the second had me fascinated with this increasingly esoteric story about a multinational biological warfare corporation and one small town police force's attempts to take them down...except for Mr. X, who I'd see in the shadows late at night and constantly be shaken awake by. So, like I said, I skipped Nemesis and waited patiently for Code Veronica and RE4.

(I was a very imaginative kid.)

Obviously I'm older now. I watched Heridetary and, honestly, found it to be more of a comedy than a horror film. Who knows if I'd truly be scared by Mr. X anymore. But something about my childhood memories of him coupled with the idea that they aren't using him in the same way as they did the first time around has the 12 year old in me shaking in my boots. And the 30 year old I am wondering whether I have the patience to deal with him anymore. It's been a long time since I've been this torn on a video game thanks to a mixture of nostalgia for my past with disinterest in the genre as a whole in my present.

I suppose I should download that demo and give it a go!

I'm excited as hell. I fucking love the design of Mr. X. His hat somehow makes him scarier to me

I was going to write something about maybe being a little disappointed at how ’short’ the campaigns seem to be on their own, but when I’m going to play through the game at least twice, I suppose it’s not that bad.

Plus if the whole game really is that good, I at least won’t leave it to rot in my backlog.

I havent read the reviews but I did play the demo and had a good time. I kind of blew it my first time round (on XBO) trying to kill zombies like it was RE4 but then I tried again on PS4 and got through it pretty quick.

I have a similar experience to the OP where I was playing the game with my brother and his friend (who I assume already completed the game since he knew his way around) and we got through it in one sitting and it was a blast.

Anyway, i'm looking forward to it, im glad the reviews are good but I cant say I care that much about them these days.

IGN changed their review because they missed half the game.

what happened?

If you're familiar with the way the original game worked, you played through once as Leon and once as Claire and things would change depending on who you played first, this same thing is in the remake but the IGN reviewer played Leon A and then Claire A rather than doing the actual other half of the game. He should've played Claire B instead of Claire A after playing Leon A. So he just played the first half of the game twice with different characters.

@rk92: oh wow.

But I gotta be honest, I didn't know that feature returned for this! I think I read somewhere that each campaign was integrated together into one? I'm happy it retains the same format as the original

Yoshiaki Hirabayashi's quote from last summer...

"One of the great things about the original was this sort of two character system where you could get a different perspective on events. Either as Leon the rookie cop, or Claire as a student—the ‘zapping’ system as it was known where there was A parts and B parts to each character. We still want to replicate that feeling of seeing two sides to the same story through both character’s perspective in their own way. So for that reason we have a Leon campaign and a Claire campaign, they’re separate and you can choose which one you want to play first. We did simplify it a bit and make it more elegant by eliminating the A/B distinction and sort of meshing together what happens to the character’s A and B scenarios into one story. I think players today, they want these sort of deep/intense experiences with the story, and by stretching it across 4 scenarios the story gets spread a little thin and create a sense of repetition by going through the game multiple times to see everything. So for that reason we went with two campaigns that still show all the events of each character’s story rather than have it all split up."

https://www.relyonhorror.com/latest-news/re2-remake-two-scenarios-and-no-zapping-system-but-deeper-story/

And for further explanation/clarification of the differences between this and the original's alternate scenarios...

https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/486253-resident-evil-2-remake-a-b-scenarios-zapping-1st-run-2nd-run-differences#/slide/1

I'm wondering which character everyone picked for their first run. From the coverage that I've seen, it seems that most people went with Leon. Going off of the stuff from the original, however, I chose Claire. Her guardian dynamic with Sherry was much more interesting than Leon's weird sexual-tension-filled interactions with Ada.

As for the game itself, I'm still very early on (haven't made it past the demo bits). Playing it in the hardcore mode though I'm totally getting that old-school survival-horror feel from the early games, but with modern gameplay sensibilities. I think this is the game that a lot die-hard Resident Evil fans were waiting for.

Played for 3-4 hours so far and I had a pretty good time 'till big T. A more evolved Nemesis is sort of a fun idea, but the fact that he follows you everywhere and seemingly knows exactly where you are at all times, even if you'd hide for a while, I'm maybe not too hot on. It didn't really help that I've also caught a flu, so I got frustrated very quickly while trying to deal with him and eventually decided to stop playing for today.

Yeah Mr.X (Trenchcoat Tyrant) was always a nuisance, and looks even more so now as rooms are no longer closed off affairs.

@opiumniy: They want to add to that client where Lineage 2 classic? That would be cool, I would play in МК11 , and participated in the sieges to Skelth

Finally got a chance to play some tonight. It's so awesome, I'm really impressed by all of it. From the graphics to the horror survival feeling of it. Running low on ammo and having zombies getting back up and not stopping is such a thrilling feeling. Haven't felt like this with a RE game since RE4.

Is the game scary? I don't consider the RE series to be scary from the ones I've played (RE2, REmake, RE4, RE5) so I was wondering if it was. I don't need it to be, just curious.

@liquiddragon: Halls can get a little claustrophobic in the dark with only a flashlight. Otherwise, I would say the only real scares are things that grab/hit you from behind, and even then, it only startled me when I was super tense about the current shit situation I got myself in.

I was absolutely loving the game and then Mr X appeared and frustrated the hell out of me. The game suddenly changed from being slow and tense to a mad dash to desperately avoid him and complete puzzles. He can follow you pretty much anywhere, bar a few exceptions, which for me ruins the pacing.

Personally I thought Mr. X was the only scary thing in the game. I enjoyed it but much like later RE games once you get used to how the game plays and how the zombies/creatures act things become a lot less tense.

@opiumniy: for example I'm the fan of both games and it's pleasant fo me there will both remake and the classic server in one place

I got here like 45 minutes ago and honestly I just had to take a break because it's too much. Not only is it annoying, it's stressful as shit. I really love the balance between new and nostalgia the game is hitting, but if there are many more sequences like this, it's going to sour me on the experience. And this is just me under the assumption that eventually I'll do SOMETHING that makes him go away for a bit.

If you reserved this at Best Buy and got a steel book, you may want to take a look at those sold on ebay because collectors are really dumb.

RE7 and this remake are the only two games in the franchise I've played, with the former probably being my favorite horror game of all time. This "new" one is excellent, but I really wish I had a dedicated melee button. It's really frustrating to run out of ammo and not even be able to punch a zombie in the face or stomp on its head when it's down. Other than that though, it's really cool. Interested to see how I feel about this Mr. X stuff when it begins.

The thing I really like about these two games are the light adventure game aspects that are just obscure enough to require some thought, but not crazy enough to be indecipherable. I like finding a miscellaneous item and knowing that I can use it to open something in another room. It's a satisfying loop that makes backtracking through areas rewarding.

@nateandrews: I couldn't handle RE7 (too stressful) but if you loved it, I imagine you'll be just fine with Mr. X.

Speaking of, thankfully, the only moment of his that I found genuinely stressful to the point of stopping the game was his first appearance. Mostly because there is a LOT to do at that and the game kind of just changes its entire play style suddenly with no indication of how to make him stop (I blew WAY too much ammo without knowing any better, and then I spent all this time just trying to hide and not getting stuff done -- ALSO not knowing any better). But, in actuality, I think that I'll like it MORE now that I know it's coming, on subsequent playthroughs.

Having said all that, despite really enjoying it overall, I'm at the end of Leon A and man, fuck this shit it is irritating as hell. Spoilers are for the endish of the game (I suspect I know where it's going after the part I have highlighted below).

The plant section was annoying enough, especially when I had to run from Mr. X amid all of the plant zombie shitheads, but the part I'm REALLY not liking AT ALL is the final battle with Birkin. It's not so much challenging as it is just a constant struggle against the way Leon handles. I love the controls in the game for the most part in 95% of the situations; I think they enhance the tension perfectly. But in this boss fight, I just feel like I can't maneuver at all and this ding dong, especially in his "final form", is just flying ALL over the damn room and teeing off on me, and by that point I'm already low enough on health.

Anyway, maybe I'm just terrible at it. But I don't like it, regardless.

This was really great. Not better than RE7 but that's one of my favorite games of all time. I was hoping they would skip a RE3 remake and go to RE4 but this was so good I don't mind anymore.

The only real complaint I have is it didn't seem like Leon accomplished anything in his story.

@opiumniy: If they do that, it would be lit. I've just thought that it would be cool to have more games on 4Game

I honestly forgot that Mr X/Tyrant/Nemesis/BadMechanicsThatIHate started here and it really does a lot to drive me away hearing that they made it more involved.

@sethmode: Finished Leon A this morning. I ended up not really liking the Mr. X stuff at all, only because he has a constant lock on where I am. The concept isn't bad, I just think other games like Alien Isolation have done it better. Once Mr. X entered the scene I felt like I had to speedrun the rest of the level, which isn't how I preferred to play.

That final form boss fight was immediately frustrating so I bumped it down to Assisted mode on my first death. Just did not have the patience for what that fight was doing. Other than that, I enjoyed the game quite a bit and I've already started the Claire side of things. Thinking about just running through on Assisted and then going back to Standard for the 2nd run stuff, whatever that is.

@nateandrews: I was prepared to bump it down to Assisted this morning when I picked it back up, after banging my head against that fight so many times last night before quitting. I don't remember what the crew ended up calling the phenomena where you are at your breaking point with a part of a game, come back to it, and immediately and easily complete that point, but that is EXACTLY what happened to me when I played it this morning. I mowed right through the ending with little to no issue haha. I still think it's pretty poorly designed, but it didn't mess up an otherwise great game for me, and I'm also jumping right into Claire's B run.

Spoilers for the very VERY end of playthrough A:

Man, having an elevator full of zombies pop up right at the very end and just being able to unload a missile launcher shot at them was a very cathartic way to end playthrough A.

Question for you: what grade did you get? Do you get a penalty or anything for bumping down to Assisted mid game? Not that I particularly care about my grade outside of already thinking about trying to get an S to get the infinite ammo weapon rewards that you get.

Finished Leon playthrough. I was also ready to go with Assisted when I died 5-6 times in the final boss, but eventually I just got lucky enough. Really didn't like the fight at all, had easier time with the one before it.

I guess I liked it for the most part? It was kind of a love-hate relationship, like Brad said in the QL. I didn't love it enough to immediately start a 2nd playthrough with Claire, going to wait for next weekend or longer. Might also just pick the easiest difficulty to experience the rest of the story, which really isn't that amazing, but anyway.

@sethmode: I ended with a B grade, not sure how it determines that. It tallies your saves and completion time so maybe that influences it.

Unless I'm mis-remembering (it has been 20 years or so, after all), the B game in this one doesn't get near the attention to detail as the original. For example: seems kind of lame that Claire's B involves the same first boss fight as Leon's A, when the idea is supposed to be that the two of them are working in tandem. Again, maybe I just don't remember the original properly.

Quite enjoyed my first playthrough. Only one part did I feel that the game's controls were hindering me... a particular boss on a small platform. Ended up at the final boss with far too much ammo and health items so breezed through that. Time to beat B playthrough and do it again on hard!

Eh there are definitely some serious inconsistencies in the conceit of "this is side by side" in the original A/B campaign as well. There are multiple puzzle you solve in the exact same way with both characters and get different results. The worst example imo is the painting you burn the middle out of.

If this is what you like about RE, I highly highly recommend downloading the remake of Resident Evil 1. It's been remastered for current gen and still looks phenomenal. Pretty scary too. It's my favorite game in the series

@frostyryan: I definitely will. I really wanna play through the whole series, warts and all.