“Controls are now crisp and fluid like diarrhea I had one time.”
The original Resident Evil 2 came out in 1998. That’s one year before The Matrix was a thing. Let THAT sink in. 21 years ago. The new Resident Evil 2 Remake is developed by Capcom R&D Division 1 and published by Capcom. The first game defined a genre of horror games and the sequel cemented it. But some really old games don’t always hold up as well as they did back then, and a full, ground-up remake is necessary. So, how is this one?
GRAPHICS: 2/2
It has stunning updated visuals and state of the art usage of textures. These include but are not limited to:
A wet look on surfaces like tiles due to rain.
Flooding beautiful locks of hair sprouting from our protagonist’s head.
Lickers and their perfectly rendered lil’ buttholes.
Phenomenal facial animations and character models replace the old 90’s pixelated ones.
Instead of a camera that obscures and can’t be navigated, you can now enjoy the same over the shoulder camera you know and love today. With that, you really take in the atmosphere. Now this is how you remake a game! Everything has been re-imagined from the ground up!
STORY: 2/2
If you like stories about:
Zombies,
Big shadow corporations
Labs hidden away in sewers
Biological weapons
The usual sci-fi warning to us mere mortals as to what CAN go wrong the more we meddle with technology…
…then look no further! G-virus! Choose between 2 characters that experience the zombie outbreak via their distinctive perspectives and situations. Replay them to piece together more of what really happened in Raccoon City with 4 possible variations of the events!
AUDIO: 1/2
The music and sounds definitely enhance the horror and gameplay/ atmosphere. Some tunes come on just to warn when certain enemy variants come into play. The voice acting and dialogue has improved so much since the 1998 release! Despite Mr. X having a straight up banger song play when he pursued you. The game did feel like it could have used more in the soundtrack department, but all the sound effects, each squishy tissue on the zombies was perfect!
GAMEPLAY: 1/2
So long tank controls and shoddy camera! Hello controls that are now [SEE ARTICLE SUBHEADLINE]. Explore the police station, solve puzzles, and be strategic with ammo and healing items as this game is survival horror. I do however wish there were more updates like a dodge or roll to evade foes. One boss battle in particular bothered me that he could throw things through walls and I had no means of avoiding it. Props to Capcom for making a character like Mr X, he could have easily broken the game, but didn’t, he was an awesome balance to the game.
FUN: 2/2
Although a challenge and a bit of a learning curve, this game is fun! On my first playthrough, I was already ready to take on the final boss with just my knife alone! If I can survive the zombie apocalypse, so can you!
I am still playing this game even though I don’t think it’s all that great. Somehow, the gameplay just sucks you in and make you want to play even though it’s practically nonstop torture. I understand that multiplayer with friends might be a better time, but jokes on you, I don’t have any friends. -chet
I think the entire point of the State of Decay games are to be a simulation of the total clusterfuck of surviving a zombie outbreak looks like. Endless issues.
State of Decay 2 is a survival-based zombie game with a focus on micromanagement. It is an Xbox One (and PC) exclusive, available for free with the Xbox Game Pass, and developed by Undead Labs. What sets this game apart from other zombie games is the focus on the minutiae one would have to do to have a thriving community after the zombie outbreak. It’s not your typical “punching trees” survival games. Instead the game focuses on special resources you need to find by scouring abandoned buildings for food, meds, building materials, and other necessary survival stuff. Although not really a system seller, the game is a very competent and well-designed game. It’ll either have you shut it off after an hour out of frustration or having you going through the gameplay loop for 3-5 hours straight.
GRAPHICS: 1/2
HDR and Xbox One X Enhancements are available for this first party title. But the game’s overall graphics quality really isn’t affected by which console you run it on other than performance. It is competently made with just a set of “good” assets. There’s nothing you can really pick apart from this title other than the fact that nothing spectacular stands out. The textures are very high quality, but the rest of the FX could still be better. Shadows look good enough, anti-aliasing is just okay, models could use some work. With the random generation, there’s only so much quality you can squeeze out of people who will be cooked up in seconds with a bunch of sliders. There is also an obvious lack of variety, as many houses in the game are just the same building copied and pasted a bunch of times. Which, isn’t too bad but if you go on a marathon it may irk you.
STORY: 2/2
The greatest thing that this sequel did was ditching the plot altogether. In the YOSE version of the game for XB1, you had 3 modes, the campaign, an endless mode, and an expansion pack. Playing the campaign was exhausting because the conditions of the game’s challenge really got in the way of you being prepared to actually partake in the missions. You get a clear goal ahead of you, but the woes of your survivor group took precedence. The endless mode streamlined the experience so you can focus on making your community great again. That’s a lot in and of itself. So, I was actually pleased to find that State of Decay 2 embraced the endless mode. All you get in the way of a plot is an introductory tutorial featuring one of 4 different pairs of people you can choose at the start. But once that’s done with, if you start another community, you can randomly generate NPCs as many times as you want before launching the game.
If you put all of your eggs into one basket and build up one character, you’ll find yourself struggling when you give that character some rest and switch to somebody else.
The game tells its own story with the environment and interactions mostly. You can meet up with different groups that all have their individual quirks. Same goes for the survivors, as most of them will have any one of many different personalities. These personality traits actually affect your community, as someone who’s hotheaded may frustrate others, or if one character snores it bothers everyone and is even a risk of attracting zombies. Seriously, one of the personality is snoring. Either way, as much as you want to work hard to provide help to your team, don’t get too attached. Permadeath is the other major factor of this game. If you put all of your eggs into one basket and build up one character, you’ll find yourself struggling when you give that character some rest and switch to somebody else. That’s right, your player character gets tired if they do too much work and lose stamina, so you have to make sure everyone gets their exercise.
AUDIO: 2/2
This game doesn’t have much in the way of an OST. But that’s not too important in a game like this. There’s a lot of stuff going on and the game has a good grip on spatial awareness. You could be digging through some trash in a house. Then you hear the grunt of a zombie coming from somewhere else in the house. Also, one of the primary mechanics of searching is how quickly you do it and whether or not you make noise. Make a loud noise like a gunshot and you’ll attract local zombies. Searching through containers for the resources you need is slow. You can speed that up by holding another button while searching. But, doing so also risks making a loud noise by being careless and again endangers you of some surrounding zombies. A lot of craftsmanship went into making sure the sound FX are accurate and effective.
GAMEPLAY: 1/2
Buggy in some places, but overall not too bad. The combat is considerably visceral, so if you like getting up close and personal. Killing zombies and by beating their skull in with a lead pipe is particularly enthralling. The gameplay loop is to simply survive. You find a base and accrue followers. THen, you have to take care of your base by getting materials to help with the upkeep. You need to manage every inch of your base, making sure people have food and water, they’re happy, they aren’t arguing, etc. Then you gotta head out of the base and go collect whatever resources you needed to get. After you have enough stuff, you bring it back to the base. This is difficult because the game is very time-consuming.
Like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, only extremely violent.
Whenever you’re in the middle of doing a supply run, you’ll get a call from one of the neighboring survivors asking for help. But then you’ll also hear from your base that they found out the ammo you got were duds. Or stuff just plain expires because you don’t have proper storage. The whole game is a struggle through and though. It keeps you going by dangling a carrot on a stick, but whether or not you enjoy doing it depends on your tolerance for other games that do this. Like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, only extremely violent. Eventually, once you do enough stuff as one character and promote them to a leader of the pack, that’ll unlock a sort of main quest line.
FUN: 1/2
Fun is going to be a hit or miss with this game. I personally found myself giving up, going back to the game, swearing off it, then going back on it again and so on. This is very subjective. I don’t like a lot of games of this type but it’s a novelty experience for sure. Its no console seller, but it is a pretty damn simulation of small towns fighting off zombies.
State of Decay 2 has sucked me into long playtimes, from 2-5hr sessions, yet when I stop playing, I really don’t feel like I accomplished all that much. I got everyone to stop being so damn miserable. But now everyone is sick and I don’t have enough meds to treat them all. This game just has a lot of buzzkills.
Oh wait nevermind, I started playing the game for 15 minutes after writing this review. I got the meds but all 3 of the settlers that were talking to me just abandoned us. But now my community has a high morale rating all of a sudden. What… what?
Its a War against Zombies! (or Zombie Fatigue, who knows.)
Alright, so something weird is shaking up in the gaming industry. It’s weird “in a creepy not sure whats going on here” way. At a time where most people are having discussions surrounding this mythical thing called “Zombie Fatigue“, what’s the least likely thing that should happen? Well the obvious answer is the announcement of a new zombie game. That wouldn’t make any sense right? Well thats just the tip of the confusion spear.
Here’s where it gets real strange. Most movie tie in games, no scratch that, all movie tie in games are usually released around the release of the movie. It kind of works to the marketing and business side of things even if the game is complete garbage. So imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to the the cinematic gameplay trailer for World War Z. Yes, you read that right. The absolutely amazing 2013 film World War Z is getting a tie in video game at some point after or in 2018.
I would love to justify this game existence by saying “Paramount confirmed the sequel, World War Z 2, is in production” but, that really isn’t enough. That movie doesn’t even have a release window yet. So, where did this announcement come from? Honestly, I don’t actually care or care to know. It looks like its going to be amazing, its coming to PS4, and I’m going to play it proudly. No explanation needed guys, take your time cause that seems to be working so far. Check out the trailer below and let me know what you think?
