I beat the Ada chapter of Resident Evil 4, which serves as a kind of "sidequel" that shows the events of the main game from Ada's perspective. One of the interesting wrinkles to it is that the final boss is not really the last challenge - from Leon's perspective, we free Ada and then she turns up to toss us a rocket launcher to finish off Saddler once and for all. In this, we need to play through her rapid fight across the scaffolds of the big rig while Leon's fighting. With a sharp time limit (though I think I finished with a minute to spare) I was focused less on killing enemies than getting past them.
Anyway, Separate Ways is all well and good, but obviously a lot shorter of a campaign than Leon's main one.
Having beaten it, I decided to put RE4 to a rest and boot up the Resident Evil 2 remake. Right off the bat, there are some interesting differences: The Zombies are spongier than the early-game Ganados in 4. While I did get a combat knife after the first little excursion into the halls of the RCPD, I'm curious to see how much we can get away with using melee here - every time I get even close to a zombie that isn't incapacitated with a bullet, they grab me, and pre-knife, at least, that's guaranteed to take off a chunk of my health. We'll see if I get the chance to cut short such grabs with the knife like I do in RE4.
Still, the overall impression I'm getting is that avoiding foes is more often the right call than killing them.
As horrific as the Plaga parasites are, maybe I just got desensitized to them. The zombies are pretty standard horror movie zombies, but there's a somewhat more apocalyptic feeling here, you know, like a zombie movie, which is what they're going for.
I'm only like half an hour into the game - I was rescued by presumably doomed Lt. Branagh, who seems very pale and is clutching what I assume is a zombie bite wound. Now, Leon's gotten bitten plenty here, but presumably the lore of the game's zombie virus is that it's not, like, a guaranteed conversion if you don't then die. (I know part of the story of the upcoming RE9 is going to have an older Leon suffering from "Raccoon City Syndrome" as one of the few survivors. Man has had some nasty things attacking his body).
I actually initially meant to play Claire's campaign first, but they were listed with Leon first, and I'd just played a fair amount as Ada, so I was willing to go back to our favorite boy scout with boy-band hair. The two meet up early on, but are separated when their obvious route back out of the city is cut off by an exploding tanker truck.
I am bracing for a much simpler set of gameplay systems - RE4 was released when games were definitely heading in that "more is more" attitude toward game mechanics, but it looks like crafting, melee attacks, and any real sense of in-game economy are going to be out. In place, it seems that the RCPD is built more like a big puzzle-box (somewhat akin, I assume, to the Spencer Mansion). Even a big location from 4 like Castle Salazar is still a somewhat linear experience taking you through it, while I get the sense that a good chunk of this game is going to be figuring out the central medallion puzzle in the RCPD lobby.
That's kind of fun, honestly.
Still, I had one of those moments where I had jumped into a new game so shortly after finishing an old one that I realized I needed to take a break and digest what had come before.
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