Okay fuck it lets play Resident Evil 2 - but the remake this time. I’ve had it sitting on my shelf since I bought the PS4 pro a couple of years ago and, seriously, I’m not immune to being swept up in Resident Evil fever - let’s see how this Leon Kennedy business starts. I’ve got RE9: Requiem on that shelf now too, so since we played Resident Evil 4, I might as well round out the Leon saga, despite being out of order.

I’m about 5 or 6 hours into this game - through the entire police department and out through parking garage with the help of Ada Wong! The police station segment I really enjoyed right up until Mr. X shows up. I’ve got a confession… I hate Mr. X! I think he sucks and it grinds the pace of the game to a halt. When he first shows up in the police station - after you fall down a crumbling ladder in front of a burning helicopter - he comes out of nowhere! His entrance is pretty cool with him throwing that helicopter away like it was nothing but up until this point we don’t really know this guy is stalking us, we just know that he enjoys smashing the skulls of nosey reporters. That’s all well and good but there isn’t really a way to escape this guy. The only thing you can do is find a random room he cannot enter and wait… and wait… and wait some more. I kind of understand what they were trying to do, up until this point in the game we’ve had three enemies; the regular zombie, the licker and the mutated doberman.

The regular zombies take so many shots to kill that it becomes worth the risk to try to run around them. There isn’t a dodge or any kind of side-step that it feels like a risk to do with the zombies but a necessity with Mr. X. I wish there was something more to do with him like hiding in lockers or boxes or crawling into spaces. This feels like it was lifted straight from the original game, now with a fresh coat of paint and if thats the case, I should have played the original because then I could see exactly what the original intent was.

But even with this complaint I’ve really enjoyed the puzzles and atmosphere so far. When I first walked into that police station I said “What the hell is this, why is a police station going to have weird medallions and crazy keys” and then boom you get hit with the fact that the police station used to be a weird creepy art museum. That’s brilliant. I’m constantly thinking “was this in the original” so I think I’m going to have to put on my big boy pants and try it out. I really want to know if Ada’s section is in the original game because her weird infrared hacking mechanic is my least favorite part about this game so far. Its a slow, methodical thing that needs to be done and surprise when being stalked by Mr. X there’s nothing that can be done. So in the entirety of the game up until now I’ve died once (from that first Mr. X appearance) and now with Ada you can add on another 3.

Tonight we made it out of the sewers via a funicular. What a scandalous tram ride that was - I can’t believe Ada kissed Leon! They’ll make a much more attractive couple in RE4 but its still cute for now. I’m excited to be out of the sewers and into the very cool futuristic Umbrella facility, NEST - I love this kind of level design. I’m excited to see this play out. I feel like we’re in the final stretch but then we get to do it again as Claire! I’m interested if that’s going to be a rehashing of what we’ve already done or if she has entirely new areas to explore.

Mar 23, 2026 / 11:22 pm

Leon has made it out of the lab! Fighting William Burkin for the third time was a little tiresome but at least this time we were able to kill it. Now that that’s over we’ve started on Claire’s route!

I’m enjoying the way they’ve remixed the adventure so it doesn’t feel exactly the same going through again, there is enough variation to keep it interesting at the beginning and then, pretty close to the beginning, the differences comes bounding around the corner - Mr. X is here from the get-go. Which I get, but my complaints about him are the same and with Claire its worse!

I find myself rushing, I’m assuming its half because its SO familiar and the other half is because Claire has 6 guns and no bullets when she really needs no guns and 6 bullets… or however that’s supposed to go.

I’m past the police station, through the parking garage and back into the laboratory and it’s been quite the struggle. I don’t understand why Claire gets so many guns but never has any bullets! I spent about an hour with red health backtracking through the police station from the lab because I couldn’t find a green herb. I went through the whole map again running away from zombies and blob monsters trying to find anything to give me an edge, but it never came. I apparently misused the available resources! So I pressed on and got Sherry and headed to the NEST. It’s a cool game so far but Claire has been fairly frustrating.

We’ve reached credits on Claire’s route in RE2R! This game was MUCH harder the second time through. Claire really had to struggle to conserve health… something I wish I knew earlier. Health and ammo were so prevalent as Leon I assumed that the game would just keep doing that but they didn’t and I think that’s okay. It lead to a lot more tension in the action sequences. But my score suffered because of it.

I think the thing this game did great was throw a lot of tough enemies at you at the moments where it knew you had full health and an okay amount of ammo, and then when you were out or low or on death’s door let you succeed. You may come out with one bullet and red health but you’d come out of it.

I think Claire got too many weapons and none of them were good. I hate “quickshot army” even though I’m a cowboy at heart. For zombies that are constantly swinging their head around it’s a tough weapon to get a headshot with and I don’t think any of my hits ever blew a head off. I think my most used weapon with Claire was the damned grenade launcher! I could make acid rounds all day with how much gunpowder is lying around. I never got the hang of the electro-tazer thing, I feel like there is a proper way to use that but I would just let it short out and fry the bastards.

I liked Sherry’s section and the inclusion of that terrible police chief’s area. There is a note in his office, a log about taxidermy, that talks about him preserving a 22 year old white female pig and Catrena choked and yelled “fuck that’s a woman” and sure enough as you move through the stage you find his lab with a young woman on the table. This whole area was so fresh and then once you get out of the orphanage and into the sewers its basically the same thing as the first route for the rest of the game. Less blob monsters in the sewers but I did get poisoned way more than Leon. I spent my time trying to run away from them because I lacked the resources to kill them. I wish they remixed the sewers and lab a bit more for Claire. In the end I enjoyed it and we’re now one step closer to playing RE9.