Resident Evil 2 Demo Thoughts

So recently Capcom released a demo for the upcoming Resident Evil 2 game, which is due to be released in January this year.

I’ve been quite excited about this Resident Evil game, I’m not the biggest Resident Evil video game fan and while I have played a bunch of the titles over the years, they’ve not been ones that I have collected or even finished that often. Most of this is because the horror genre for me has always been a difficult one to play. Games in this genre are always slower paced than other genres, they give you limited resources to do what you need to do and you always have to walk slowly through areas for fear that something will kill you. As a person with not always that much time for gaming lately, slower paced games such as these can frustrate me quite a bit as I am limited on the time I have.

In the demo you will play as Leon, who is a police officer. He has just arrived at a local police station which has been overrun with zombies. There’s blood everywhere, there’s no electricity in certain sections, the building is damaged and basically it’s one dangerous place to be.

In this demo there is an actual limit for the amount of time you have to explore. Once you download the demo and then start to play it, you will find that actually you only have 30 minutes to experience the game. After that, you are done. You can’t exit out and restart it either. It’s a one time preview. This works quite well for Capcom because players will play through this and if they love their 30 minute experience, at the end they are prompted to pre-order the game and can buy it on the spot.

I did not choose to purchase it on the spot as I played it on the PS4 and a price of $99.95 on the PS Store seemed a little high for me. There will be better deals when the game is released, in fact I can already see that on Amazon AU the game is on sale to pre-order for $69 on Xbox One and PS4. So if you’re reading this, save money, check all the retailers and shop around.

The game itself for the time I played it was pretty good. My main draw to this game over the last year has been the look of things within the game. I really like the art-style and the way the levels have been animated and drawn. The trailers and the screenshots I’ve seen released in the past have made Resident Evil 2 look quite good. Playing the game this weekend gave me a good idea of what I could expect when it came to the graphics in the game. They are all quite nice overall. Textures are sharp, environments are dark and all that you need for a horror look is present.

The 30 minute time limit actually makes things very tough. The gamer in me wants to beat this demo within the 30 minutes I have available, but the style of game that this is, is a slow paced one and by the time my 30 minutes were up, I was nowhere near done. I wasted the first 10 minutes in the first room of the demo trying to figure out the code to the statue that was at the back, when really all I needed to do was go to the garage door on my right which was unlocked. After that I ran around trying not to die to the many zombies in the corridors and trying, but failing to rescue another police officer in time.

I did actually attempt a second playthrough of the game by downloading the demo again, but this time on PC instead through Steam. Where it’s currently free.

Just some comments about my PC vs my PS4 experience. I would say that on PC the game looks a little better than I thought it did when I first played through it yesterday on the PS4. I thought the lip syncing in particular when characters spoke was better handled on PC. Also on PC things were much smoother during the game as I played the demo in 144hz with the highest textures my PC could handle. If I was to choose between the two right now, I would probably lean more towards the PC version of the game. Sitting closer to the screen, with my headset on and being fully immersed in the horror environment is where I think I might prefer my Resident Evil 2 experience to be. But both versions of the game are decent and there’s nothing at all wrong with the PS4 version, it’s just as good.

These Resident Evil games are always a lot of fun and this game does feel a little scary at times. The mixture of having such limited resources to fend off enemies, but also the limitations of exploring a police station filled with narrow corridors makes quite a tense gameplay experience.

As it’s also a remake, much of this game plays like games I used to play when I was much younger. There’s no easy way to find where you need to go, there’s little hint of what to do at times and things are not made so easy for the player to just run through it all. Some doors need keys to open them and those keys can be hard to find. You can be running around for a long time before you find a single key and I’ve missed this type of frustrating gameplay in modern games.

You can try out the demo for yourself on PC, PS4 or Xbox One.