Idle Thoughts

More gun-fu Resident Evil is always a good thing, even if this is just a spin-off sequel (★★★☆☆)

Resident Evil Revelations 2 is both a retread and a budget title, but despite that it’s still pretty good. Even if it doesn’t reinvent the wheel and has quite a few flaws, I still like it.

You see, I have a soft spot for Resident Evil. Ever since RE4, the series is almost the sole purveyor of its own sub-genre : gun-fu survival horror. Shooting monsters in the face and then running up to them to give them a roundhouse kick NEVER gets old. But it’s also a tactical choice. It looks cool and saves up ammo, but it’s a health risk. Should you save up on ammo but endanger yourself and end up using your herbs instead? Healing items are rarer than ammunition, hmmm. You usually end up stockpiling ammo anyway, but then the usual bullet sponge boss eats up most of your ammo, so it’s back to kung fu moves. Then there’s the great hierarchy of ammo: handgun rounds for everyday tasks, shotgun shells for crowds, magnum rounds for really special occasions, etc. It’s all a beautiful ecosystem of ass-kicking. Playing Revelations 2 on the hardest available mode at the start delivers just that mix of opportunity and scarcity. In that sense, it’s definitely a success.

Say what you will about RE6, it upped the gun-fu quotient: dashes, slides, evades, counterattacks and the sometimes surprisingly useful ability to throw yourself at the ground and pull out your gun. Revelations 2 stays closer to the first Revelations, though: a lot of the fancy footwork is gone and monsters can only be stunned by shots to the head… and it doesn’t work all the time. Nevertheless, enemies are still both more agile and more vulnerable than the first Revelations’ fat sacks of slime: here, they run, swing their weapons uncontrollably and throw themselves at you.

The main gimmick here is that Claire and her sidekick Moira explore areas once, while Barry and Natalia explore parts of the same area months later. Both face different types of enemies and actions in one half can affect the other (sometimes opening a new route), which is pretty interesting. NPC sidekick characters are back and can’t use guns, but mercifully they’re almost invincible. Co-op is split-screen only, and I haven’t tried it. Invisible items are back from the first Revelations, because who doesn’t like scouring every single area for tiny glints to get their items? On the other hand, take note: there’s barely a whiff of QTEs in this game. Rejoice, Capcom learned its lesson!

Revelations 2 has another thing going for it: it has one of the best stories in the series. Ok that’s not saying much for a series that oscillates between crappy camp and drooling imbecility, but credit has to be given where it is due, you know? The bad guy’s plan is the usual harebrained scheme where the solution to an issue is, of course, unleashing a bunch of monsters. On the other hand, there is a payoff to that near the end, where the bad guy undergoes some character development and a change of heart (of sorts). Seriously, when does that ever happen? Revelations 2 also has the theme of parenthood going for it. Barry’s in it to save his daughter Moira, but things develop a bit beyond that. Some people also complained that Moira lets loose a constant stream of swears, some quite creative… (what’s a moist barrel of fucks?). I don’t mind it, really, it gives some nuance to Barry’s brat. On the other hand, Burton tries not to swear in front of the very young Natalia, but lets one slip by when he learns his daughter’s fate. It might not be much, but for a series that considers “Your right hand comes off?” the height of wit, that’s not too bad. For her part, Claire just shuts up, kicks butt AND fills her required returning main character quota (which she hasn’t filled in 15 years, time flies!).

Raid mode is back from the first Revelations as the main side game. While The Mercenaries’ (the other RE side game) emphasis on score and combos can get annoying, it’s athletic, hectic fun that requires lots of skill. On the other hand, Raid mode is, simply put, a grind. Play the same levels again and again and again to get mods and a higher-level version of the gun you already have. Gotta get those numbers up! It’s also very easy: the first hours of the mode offer so little resistance it’s almost pathetic. I’m sure it gets harder later on, but by then… meh. Then again, if you don’t mind the grind, you might as well grind by kicking enemies in the face rather than pressing x in a RPG menu, I guess. It’s also worth pointing out that the “menu” in Raid mode is interacted with by moving your character around in an anteroom, which is a very nice touch.

Might as well mention the usual stuff before finishing up: graphics are decent but nothing special, especially when compared with Resident Evils 5 and 6. The music and sound work are very solid, however. The game also has all the extras, new game pluses, unlockable modes and special weapons you’ll need to occupy yourself for a while. I guess that when a big company does a game “on a budget”, the result can still be impressive.

*BUT WAIT* By the end of my playthrough on PS4, I suffered a bug that made me lose some items which will never, ever come back, even on a new playthrough. There’s also an issue with connectivity that prevents access to Raid mode special events to many players. Those are some pretty damn big bugs. The developers are supposedly working on a patch right now, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. ***In case anyone still cares about this, they did solve all the above bugs. So there.***

[EDIT – September 2024] I came back to Revelations 2, a whopping ten years after writing this. I left the game unfinished because of some bug that I had to read my own review to remember what it was. It’s interesting to see my save file was somewhere on Sony’s servers for a decade, not that I have any illusion that it will always be the case. But still, I don’t think I’ve ever gone back to an old save file like this. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How many gigabytes of save files are stocked somewhere and that no one will ever, ever use again?

In retrospect, I didn’t realize how precious Revelations 2 was as a gun fu Resident Evil game. It took eight years to get another proper gun fu RE with the Resident Evil 4 remake. Maybe the pace will pick up with the inevitable RE 5 remake. I love the formula. You shoot monsters in the face, then kick their stupid heads. Why can’t everything be this nice and simple?

I stand by what I said all those years ago in my review, especially about the story. A bad guy that actually lives on to regret their evil plan, when does that ever happen? Villains rarely if ever get to evolve, especially not once their scheme gets started. She wanted to attain godhood, but now she’ll settle on killing a single helpless orphan girl. We all have to compromise a bit on our life goals, right? We can all relate. Resident Evil games are full of grim details, but they’re usually so focused on action that it’s hard to care. Here the villain has it against that little girl both in the physical world AND from inside her own mind. Talk about a two-pronged assault. Even her own teddy bear is trying to guilt her to death. According to the wiki, most of the teddy bear guilt trip was added in the English localization. The translators must have felt really inspired that day because it’s such an oddly original extra detail. As I said, the theme of parenthood is also well realized… by the low-hanging fruit standard of a horror game. It goes both ways too. A child that learns to respect her father’s protective instincts through the grief of another father, that’s an interesting touch.

The Revelations games are low budget spinoffs, so accordingly they’re very heavy on the recycling. It has an Invisible Enemy mode, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of extra modes. It’s only one peg higher than racing games that mirror the tracks to give you the illusion of having twice as many. And yet, it’s probably the best part of the game alongside the speedrun mode.

It’s not good because the enemies are invisible, heck no. It’s good because those two modes give you a defined loadout, whereas the main game lets you carry your items into any chapter. Any pretense of difficulty goes out the window if you’re allowed to stockpile ammo. More importantly, each mode requires opposite approaches. They’re like a set of eight different courses that test your knowledge of the game. A final exam, if you will.

In the Countdown mode, you should play aggressively and stick with the main character, which has most of the means of dealing damage, thus saving time. As an aside, speedrunning has always been an important part of Resident Evil games. By forsaking unnecessary rooms and items and especially unnecessary enemy encounters, it often turns out that the fast approach is actually easier than the slow, methodical one. Every enemy ignored is worth the resources you would have spent fighting it. You just have to learn to identify what’s really important. Less really is more, who knew!

In Invisible Enemy mode, the invisibility is a gimmick, but it forces you to play more carefully. Here you should lead as the partner character, since they’re invincible, can find extra items and is the only that one that can reveal enemies temporarily. In Countdown mode, you spend ammo to save time. In Invisible Enemy mode, you send time to save ammo. I’ve rarely seen throwaway extra content work this well.