I've been playing the remake now for about a week, and I immediately began to enjoy it. The game looks stunning on a Pro in 4K, it controls SUPER well, the secrets are really interesting (In how much stuff you find on pieces of paper/scrawled on boards etc). I find that discovering a secret code, or a lock for example to be extremely satisfying.

The ambience and atmosphere are also unbelieveable. Having a tiny source of light in the flashlight, forcing you to creep around every single corner, and really conserve your ammo makes almost every single encounter with a zombie to feel memorable and tense. It also helps that the sound design in this game is utterly unbelievably good. The pattering of rain, the banging of zombies on a window, hearing something slowly move towards you, the disgusting snarl of a Licker, it all comes together really well.

At least I thought all this until I "Unlocked" the Tyrant. The entire game seems to have changed completely. No longer am I carefully exploring every nook and cranny, and really taking my time to enjoy the environments. I'm finding myself having to leg it from this unbeatable, unstoppable creature. Because of this, I've died several times by simply running into an unsuspecting licker, or round the corner into a zombie that kills me for example.

Look, I get it. I understand that you're supposed to feel pretty helpless in this onslaught of zombies. I truly feel like I'm fragile, especially with how infrequent ammo and health pick ups are. But it seems like this game straddles two different genres:

-Pre Tyrant: Tense, horror thriller with a lot of mood

-Post Tyrant: Kinda silly action game

It also adds insult to injury that the AI on the Tyrant is dumber than a bag of bricks. You can literally have him run round a table in circles for minutes at a time.

Did anyone else have this problem with the Tyrant's introduction?

Sounds like it's working as intended IMHO. The tyrant is not "active" except for certain areas of the game so if you don't like him he's a pretty small part of the game, at least on a first playthrough.

Honestly, this is the reason I didn't jump into the game until it was on sale. By the time I started it, though, I bought the "All In-game Rewards Unlock". This gives you an infinite rocket launcher that will stun the tyrant whenever you want. Then you can put it away and play the game the way you want to play. I know it's like a band-aid on a huge wound, but it helped me get through the Mr. X parts. Hope this helps.

It gives the game a new wrinkle for a bit but doesn’t overstay its welcome.

I'm so over the whole "you gotta run away from the unbeatable monster" that's in every friggin horror game nowadays.

I did really enjoy the game overall though.

Right before the Tyrant encounter, the player probably has gotten comfortable to the game's rhythm, so Tyrant is meant to disrupt growing comfort and add pressure. Don't worry, he's just and encounter in a few pockets of the game.

I agree that the back half of Resident Evil 2 is weaker than the first half, but honestly, the Tyrant wasn't the reason why for me. Tyrant is a fantastic time pressure and wrinkle on the player's otherwise leisurely movement through the police station.

The issue is those damn sewers.

Mr. X is fine. Once you're outside the police station, he's mainly used as a way to hurry the player into a new area. As for exploring, he turns up when you've covered most of the ground.

I understand the reason for Mr X, but i saw enough gameplay before getting the game to know i'd enjoy it more without him, so i got the mod that removes him from the game and never looked back.
I also played on assisted mode but turned aim assist off which massively improved the combat, zombies just take far too long to die for my liking, and it increases the chance of headshot crits which is very satisfying, puts it more in line with RE4-6.

He's totally fine from a game design perspective IMO, but he's totally abominable from a me design perspective. I waited until the game was half off specifically because I knew I would be setting the game down as soon as he appeared. Despite having already watching Abby play through the game I had a hell of a time playing this remake and it brought up a lot of warm, fuzzy little kid memories I deeply appreciate.

But the only reason I had time for Lisa in the RE1 remake was I had summers all to myself and was obsessed with Resident Evil enough that I was writing fan fiction on the IGN message boards. I couldn't care much less about the franchise now, and the only thing less appealing to me than playing a horror game where an unstoppable monster stalks you around a house full of other monsters that are hard to kill while constantly being stressed about inventory management is putting my hand on a lit, open stove.

Suffice to say, despite my aforementioned RE love as a child, I completely skipped RE3 for the same reasons and always will be able to say "I've never played Resident Evil 3".

I picked it up when it first came out and put it down just before he showed up. He plays more off my anxiety than anything else, and I can do without it.

I think Dead Space 2 did it better because it was a case of getting past it rather than putting you on constant edge all the time.

The game is great when you first enter the police station and start exploring, and just as you start to feel comfortable with it, the tyrant shows up. The tyrant section is the most exhilarating gaming experience I've had in years.

I suppose some people have a natural anxiety about stuff like this, just like with games with timers or maze levels and such, I do too to some extent. As soon as you see a countdown on screen you know that you're no longer in control, and some people just immediately turn the game off, even if the timer were extremely generous. An unstoppable monster sounds terrifying. But the game is designed to be beatable, the game wouldn't have gotten such high praise if the tyrant were some impossible run-killer. If there are nooks that you haven't fully explored, you probably don't need to do that in order to beat the game (and you can do that on your second playthrough).

My problem with the game is that the tyrant feels like end-game content. Once you dispatch of him, you still have like half the game left, and nothing in the second part is as exciting as the tyrant. Once a game has raised the stakes, it can't so easily lower them again. It feels like a chore to play to the end because your firepower increases, but the enemies don't get any more dangerous, and the puzzles become easier and more linear too. But of course if the game ended at the police station people would say that it's far too short to justify its price.

It is wild to me that people are complaining that a horror game is too tense and stressful. Just... play a different game.

I think you might be misremembering your time with Lisa, @nodima? On a typical REmake playthrough, you only encounter her like twice in the whole game: once in a cabin (where you just have to get past her and leave the cabin after picking up an object), and again later on in the "crypt" with her mother's body, for a minor boss battle/puzzle. She doesn't really follow you around the mansion. Otherwise, worrying about Crimson Heads and the Hunters which spawn after returning to the mansion is more "persistent" than anything Lisa does.

Just as an aside: I think people forget that Mr. X/the Tyrant was totally in the original 1998 version of Resident Evil 2, but I guess quite a lot people missed him because he only appears on a "B" playthrough (i.e. a continued save after beating the game with one character already and switching to the other), whereas now he's front and centre in the remake. His 1998 form was somewhat more linear than he is in RE2 Remake, though, mainly popping up at specific points.

Ironically, this situation is kind of flipped for RE3; Nemesis in the RE3 Remake went the other way, being arguably more linear than he was in the 1999 version of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, where he followed the player somewhat dynamically, more like RE2 Remake.

I hate all forms of this mechanic or anything else that exists to rush me along somewhere.

I thought that Mr. X was the absolute best part of RE2make and was rather bummed when he died early in the claire playthrough (2nd for me). He injected so much dynamism and tension into the game imo.

@the_nubster: I've followed the discourse around this game for a while and I don't think most people are complaining about the Tyrant so much as admitting that it's a bridge too far for them. Like I said above, there was a time in my life when I was fairly obsessed with the Resident Evil series (through 4/Zero/REmake) but I have never been a fan of the horror genre in either films or movies. Part of that is just how much of a cultural moment that box art and opening 20 minutes was back in 1996, but an equally important feature of Resident Evil's appeal for me is that it's not actually all that scary.

In the first two games, most of the scares come from the games controlling like hell (sidenote: in a good way! Tank controls are scary! Bring them back!) and things like dogs jumping through windows and preying on phobias like snakes and sharks (the REmake shark is still the worst thing any video game has ever done to me) occasionally making wimps like me toss the controller across the room, but mostly it's weird jewel-based puzzles, interesting-to-a-point lore dumps and a lot of winkingly excruciating dialogue. Resident Evil was the closest you can get to playing through a chintzy grindhouse picture at its best, and Resident Evil 2-2 revives that tradition enthusiastically in its first half. Like the Halloween series, it's nominally a horror franchise but I'd argue it's most iconic attributes are villains that make you cackle out loud when you first set eyes on them and ponderously obtuse architectural philosophies.

But the Tyrant, for me, is just a bridge too far. Sure you can stun it and sure, you can prove that its AI is easily taken advantage of, but I don't have the horror bonafides for any of that. Same with the angler fish in Outer Wilds, which is decidedly not a horror game, mostly. Put a big thing I can't put in the ground into any video game and I'm toast. One of the scariest games I've ever played is Grand Theft Auto V because of its sharks, or at least the threat of sharks. Whenever the submarine got involved, I was sweating. And I was safe in there.

And again, I think it's a totally fine design choice. It's lifted from the B scenarios of the original game (from what I recall, truly persistent in Claire's case and just a recurring boss in Leon's) and is a cute nod to the fact that Capcom has cherry picked what is and isn't canon from the original's four scenarios as they find convenient over the years...but just like RE3, I didn't ever play Claire's B campaign for a reason, and that reason was an unstoppable monster getting dropped into my corny inventory management game.

I sort of consider the modern RE2 situation to be the same. I played half of the game, I loved what I got out of it, and then they turned it into another sort of game I've never signed up to play in my life and I walked away from it. The quality of the game married to the knowledge of self I have can't leave me upset about any of that but it did mean I knew I had a hard out and waited to pay half the price to play half the game as a result.

@young_scott: Nah, I know she was limited to certain encounters, but she was still a big lumbering idiot that could kill me faster than I could ever hope to kill her and, uh, yikes to that, friend.

Haha, fair enough!! Yeah, while she's pretty easy to avoid, she's effectively completely invincible (even with cheats!), so I understand the fear and concern. :P

I just love her position in the lore. The whole Trevor family story is so tragic, and according to Wesker's Report 2, Lisa's basically the basis for what becomes the G-Virus.

Nubster kinda already said what I was thinking, so I'll just take this opportunity to remind people that this is still a thing:

Rest easy, X.

My experience kind of went "Oh wow this is intense and insane" to "Okay stop following me I don't have time to think" to "Oh, I just made this more difficult on myself, didn't I?"

I never disliked the Tyrant, and he did make the game very stressful, especially upon his first appearance. I did get mildly frustrated at one point when I felt like I couldn't just explore anymore, but honestly, as @ghost_cat said the best advice I can give is just to do whatever objectives you have when he appears. The sections aren't THAT long if you don't kind of accidentally stretch them out by trying to explore while he's chasing. It's easier to just complete the necessary objectives until the segment is over, and then you can go back to exploring without the stress.

@sombre: Yeah in RE2 Remake, it is pretty mild. I still loved it even though Tyrant was not fun. Its the reason I haven't touched the RE3 Remake and also why RE7 and RE8 don't sound great either. I'm 100% with you OP

I had mixed feelings about the tyrant in my first playthrough (as Claire) but really lost patience with the whole mechanic when I played through as Leon. It just got annoying, and felt like it broke the atmosphere of the game for me; made it much more of a 'game' that I had to think about purely in terms of mechanics and resources, which undermined a lot of the other things the game was doing so well.

No more please, Capcom.

I love RE2 Remake but I do kinda agree. I wish Mr. X was saved for the B scenario like the original game. At least he's only there for a fraction of the game.

Someone must've tried to use Mr. X as a way to clear the police station of zombies.

@colinstros55: It might just be me, but RE3 feels like it has Less segments where the enemy actually stalks you. Most of the time Nemesis shows up for scripted events that aren't scary, or boss fights.

RE7 has some really stressful areas but most of the time you can explore on your own pace.

God I looooved what they did with Tyrant. Every “thud” of his footsteps got me so terrified/excited. I get why some people hate the shift in mood though.

Now if you wanna talk RE3 that version of the tyrant is ass on ass on ass. As in bad. It’s bad.

@theonewhoplays: Hmm well I do currently have RE7 from PS Plus a while back. Haven't played it yet, but maybe I'll give it a go based on your recommendation.

Yeah, I kind of wished that they had the alternative story mode that og RE2 had. This way you only get to see him after you first beat the game with any of the playable characters.

@shindig: I don't know whatever happened to devs wanting players to spend more time at their games. I wouldn't actually have cared if the game was bad because he would be helping me to rush the game but RE2 is so good that I wanted to play it at my own pace and the best part was the police station. I had to beat it 3 times to let it all sink in.

as someone who is a HUGE coward when it comes to scary games; Mr. X was the #1 thing stopping me from getting that RE2 remake. That game looked SO cool, but the fact that there was a big, spooky, Invincible enemy constantly stalking you TERRIFIED me, and I didn't play the game for like a year. I eventually steeled myself and buckled down and played the game, and I'm really glad I did, but the Tyrant was absolutely an obstacle for me.

And I understand he is Very important to that game! and Super rad in his own right! It's just personal taste on this one for me. I loved watching OTHER people encounter him!