Resident Evil 2

The Good
For me, this is another BIG slap on the face. I was in general holding grudge against Resident Evil series no matter I'm a fan of horror-survival genre and have most of top ones in my collection. This one I wanted to add just to fulfill the horror-survival game collection more than for a fact I believed it to be a good game. Well, I gotta tell you something, it has hit me hard, and this slap I won't forget that easily.

The reason I considered this game so 'crappy' before is 'cos I never liked zombies in general, how they act and even how they look like, you might say. Thus other horror-survival with monsters, or simple badguys I considered only decent ones. It appeared that Resident Evil 2 gave me such a story and elaboration on the things that it seems more real that the townfolk of Raccoon City could've become zombies than any other monsters had their realism embroided in the other horror-survival games.

This game is rather short, as all horror-survival games are, you might say, but that's what makes them so good I suppose. They don't bother you too much with how to solve this puzzle and how to pass this boss. They require certain level of cleverness from you, yet they don't bedazzle you with their stupidity of design and lack of imagination. And utterly they win every prize when it comes to their stories.

Now, what I though when I started this game is that I will play Leon and Claire as in one story after another, however, instead of that, you get to play simultaneous stories of them both. Exactly what Half-Life and Alone in the Dark IV had, only they had that much more perfected with no gaps and lacks in design. I'll elaborate that lack of RE2 stories in the next section.

Some people (if not most) have complained about voice-acting. I dunno why, I find it rather nice and well chosen voices for each of the characters. And speech goes smoothly and with a flow like a normal conversations. As for the cinematics, the character detail is rather below the standard, especially for the year the game came out, but all the rest looks dashing, from the police car chase to the surroundings, buildings and other vehicles. Music is aboveall one of the finest to find in the horror-survival game. Not the best, but one of the finest never-the-less.

Probably one of the best thing is that you have (I dunno if that was later release, but on my PC con-version of this game I had japanese and european game selection) japanese port to select which when on easy gives you unlimited ammo for a machine gun with which you start the game, gattling gun and a rocket launcher. That's kinda neat, but the rest of the weapons you must find as you progress along. Creatures are very well designed and the whole atmosphere looks eerie and real, yet not as horrifying as for example that one of Silent Hill.

And hey, actions scenes rock!

The Bad
Well, I dunno how come they could make such a flaw with conversion, and only partially. Ya see, movie scenes when you play as Leon do not match with the sound, hence you hear the sound of like 5 seconds ahead happening. When you play as Claire, the videos are fine, though. As for the video quality itself, like I mentioned, it is superb except that of the characters. Seems they didn't want to bother to increase number of polygons for some reason. But that's probably 'cos they wanted to concentrate on the game itself and make longer cinematics. The whole game is really great, and it's strange how it happens on such a small place, almost 80% of the game is literally placed inside the police station, no matter which character you choose to play with.

Mentioning this, the stories of Claire and Leon do not go swell together. When you play as Leon you do certain puzzles, and when you play as Claire, you do the exactly same puzzles yet you find other characters and things like Leon left them. It is not well balanced that way wise, in fact, it is very bad combined together. Now, in Half-Life it's perfect, yet all three characters there don't much cross over each other's territory. However, in The New Nightmare, both characters have their own story and play simultaneous on exactly same place, yet everything is so perfectly merged together that you can literally say every time "hey, I remember doing this when I was playing another character, how kewl". If only they paid attention to that in Resident Evil 2, it would've been much better to follow.

The Bottom Line
Okay, okay, I see now why you all guys consider this game to be a resurrection of a horror-survival genre. And I see now that what I liked so much in other games are enhanced things which this game provided already. However, I never played long enough AITD trilogy to see if they already had what this one had, 'cos otherwise, farewell originality. Bottomline, if you don't like bad stories, and if you like only well designed and interesting horror-survival games, then look no further, this one will give you what you want. Even though it won't take you more than 3-4 hours per character if you're experienced enough with these kind of games.