I'm very late to the party - RE2 released in like 1998, when I was in 6th grade - but comparing it with the RE4 remake I just played through, boy is this a different kind of game.
It's interesting: RE4 famously oriented the game more toward action, and there are certainly arguments to be made that it's more of an action game than a survival horror game. You strip out the macabre aesthetic and gory body horror and you could argue that it's not all that dissimilar to an action game. Resources like ammo and healing items might be kind of scarce, but in most cases I was finding myself near running out and not actually running out.
In 4, you might be kind of expected to fight off and kill all the monsters.
Now, in fairness, I think this tended to be the case in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but in that game, it was super-rare you fought more than, like, three enemies at a time. In RE4, you will often be facing off against a dozen Ganados.
Now, we come to RE2 (remake).
In this, two zombies is a big problem. And if you try to kill them all, you're going to run on ammo. Instead, I've found that a good option is often to just shoot them in the head or knee and run past. On occasion, I've gotten lucky, and that single bullet to the dome takes out the zombie's head, which I think means they're permanently dead (bodies don't despawn, which is something that is probably easier to do when there's a pretty small and finite number of enemies in the game).
Given that there are still a lot of rooms left in the RCPD that I have yet to explore, and also that I haven't met Mr. X yet, I'm assuming I'm not done there (though I do wonder if Claire and Leon get to explore separate parts of the building). But I solved the first big meta-puzzle, getting all three of the medallions for the Goddess statue. I've encountered two Lickers, and aside from a move where I was able to stick a flashbang in its mouth to escape, I've basically tried not to engage as best I can.
Lieutenant Marvin Branagh is still alive, barely, but I have a feeling Leon's going to have to take him out when he turns into a zombie.
I will say, as horrifying as the Ganados' heads exploding with a big weird parasite thing, I think I'm finding the zombies more disturbing as monsters, because it's so clear that they were people. Strange, that, given how desensitized that we as a culture have become with zombies after the huge trend of zombie movies in the late aughts/early teens. But I always found zombie movies disturbing because you can only really find them "fun" if you turn off your empathy a bit.
Generally, I thus feel more scared here than I did in RE4, which is interesting.
I also think, structurally, the way the game encourages backtracking through rooms you've been through many times before is a fun bit of game design - opening doors and creating more routes through the wings of the building gives you a feeling of mastery over the environment. While enemies don't respawn, new ones sometimes pop up. I was going to dip into the Darkroom, where there's a typewriter to save, and turned a corner to find a zombified police officer standing, facing away from me. While this was one of those lucky one-hit headshots that caused the zombie's head to explode, it was still jarring, as that room had been a little safe haven while going around the west wing.
Unlike in 4, key items are stored in the inventory (you also have far less inventory space, though every item is the same size - I don't know when they introduced the inventory-tetris, maybe 4?) but they get a little red checkmark (at least in this remake) when you've opened every door that requires them. It still requires you to manually throw away these key items, which feels... painful. (RE4 remake let you sell key items once you'd used them up, which still felt weird, but because you couldn't sell them until you had gotten all use out of them, it was a way that the game kind of rewarded you for progressing past them).
It's interesting to see Leon in this game after playing 4. He's a nice, young rookie, and not yet the special-forces badass that he is at the start of 4. It lends to the sense of horror. He and Claire have had a couple of interactions, separated by locked doors and such. I'll be eager to see her version of the game and how it differs.
It is interesting to me comparing this with Silent Hill 2's remake. In SH2, you're also thrown into puzzle-box situations, usually with one major overarching puzzle that contains mini-puzzles. This feels more like that than like RE4 Remake. But while I will have to see what the rest of this game looks and feels like, it seems much more focused on the one location, whereas SH2 is a bit more linear - once you clear a "dungeon," you're not going to be able to go back to it.
Even if I never really played any survival horror as a kid (you could argue Bioshock was at least partially of that genre, though I didn't play that until I was out of college) there is a vibe and structure to this that does feel familiar. Again, I've compared it with Sierra adventure games like Space Quest and King's Quest, and I wouldn't be shocked if there are some early-90s adventure games with a similarly ghoulish aesthetic.
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