First Impressions: Resident Evil: Revelations 2 - Episode 1: Penal Colony (NS)

I started Resident Evil: Revelations 2 on Nintendo Switch for a couple of reasons, the first and foremost being because I bought it during one of the previous sales when it was 25%+ off, secondly because I love the Resident Evil series, and lastly because it was October and that seemed a good enough reason to play a survival horror-related video game.  Survival horror in that at least the first half of the first Resident Evil: Revelations was a survival horror and the second half was more like an action-horror, but at least it wasn't an action game with a sprinkling of horror, the way that Resident Evil 5 was, but I have already gone down that corpse hole.  All I knew going into this game was that it featured Claire Redfield, who I do not think I had seen since Resident Evil: Code Veronica X and Barry Burton who was also MIA since the original Resident Evil, and that the game was told in an episodic style.  So I booted up the game and dove back into the post-Umbrella Corp world of Resident Evil.

After the intro cinematic, which did a pretty good job of setting up the world, where it fit within the context of the other Resident Evil games (kind of, but I have still had to look at timelines), I began my journey with Claire Redfield in the format of a 3rd person shooter that the series has been a fan of since Resident Evil 4.  With weapons and ammunition appropriately scarce, I knew that we were back to good ol' survival horror.  Kind of.  Since the series has taken on more of an optional co-op method of play, Claire is joined by Barry Burton's semi-estranged daughter Moira, who is also kidnapped and taken to a dilapidated prison complex along with Claire.  Now, Claire and Moira, although they are both controllable by the player, they both serve different purposes, with Claire being able to wield guns and knives, while Moira uses a flashlight and a crowbar.  Once both characters were available, I actually found that I preferred controlling Moira to Claire for a couple of reasons.

While taking control of the flashlight, Moira is able to (somehow) stun enemies that aggressively come at the two women.  The flashlight can also be used to highlight otherwise hidden objects such as gun ammunition, the old reliable green herbs, and random jewels that can be used to purchase in-game skills/attributes, which I know seems odd and does not make a lick of sense.  So while controlling Moira, I felt that uncovering ammunition was more important than taking control of a character with a gun, especially while exploring, but even then, the AI would not seem to attack enemies while Moira was in the process of stunning them, since my whole goal was to preserve ammunition as much as possible.  Thankfully, the computer-controlled AI seems to have improved since my fiasco from Resident Evil 5 that was Chris Redfield's back absorbing 85.47% of the bullets fired off by Sheva, and AI Claire would actually be pretty conservative with her shots.  However, as was the case in RE5, the AI still loved to liberally use green herbs to heal me, even if I felt that I could hold off a bit longer.

Even though the Resident Evil franchise use to be all about their puzzles, there were not too many in this first part of the game, which makes sense story-wise, because why would you have puzzles in a prison?  Most of the puzzles as such were about locating an object needed to gain access to an area that gave you a key in order to access that control panel behind the locked door in the control room that activated whirring iron maidens that allowed you to finally exit the hell hole you found yourself in.  You know, those kinds of puzzles.

Then there was Dad Bod Barry Burton's chapter as he goes to rescue his daughter Moira.  The character play-style was nearly identical to that of Claire and Moira, with Barry being the one to use weapons and the still unexplained appearance of the Eight-Year-Old (I don't actually know her age yet) running around in a nightgown Natalia being the one who can locate hidden objects and when needed, bash downed enemies with a brick.  Combat with Barry and Natalia is a bit different however as it is revealed that Natalia can sense the locations of enemies, and later is discovered the weak points of specific mid-tier creatures.

In an actual co-op game, I could see the person controlling Natalia telling the person controlling Barry the location of the weak point while avoiding enemies, rather than wasting ammunition on otherwise spongy monsters, but having Natalia be a person's main would definitely be up my alley.  As a single-player experience, I would have thought that switching between characters would inevitably leave the other character open to attack, especially in close quarters, but so far and from my own experience, there might be a split second when you switch characters that allows you to react.  This has allowed me to use Natalia to quickly spot the weak point, switch back to Barry and target that weak point, allowing me to use 4-5 rounds of ammunition rather than multiple clips.  And kudos to the Natalia AI for doing a pretty decent job of avoiding enemies while I control Barry to take out the creatures.

One last thing that I found to be stupidly hilarious, in part because it was even included in the final game in the first place, and second because it was included when you sign up for a Capcom account and agree to link your game to their website, was the inclusion of a Cowgirl costume for Claire and whatever an Urban Ninja outfit is supposed to be for Moira.  Now, the only way that this could possibly make a lick of sense in the final game, is if in the main story, Claire and Moira, when they are kidnapped, are put into these outfits as a way of humiliating them by way of showing them that, "Hey, we removed your clothing and put you in these ridiculous outfits.  We could have done whatever we wanted to you, but we did this.  So keep that in mind."  But this is not that type of game, and my theoretical reasoning for this existing is a very dumb idea.  There are alternate costumes for Barry and Natalia as well, but thankfully we do not have the option to see an eight-year-old in a pair of daisy-dukes, although had that been an option for Barry, I might have gone that direction; Barry's outfit is that of a Russian-esque commander and Natalia is wearing an outfit based on her pink teddy bear who wears a blue coat and hat.  There are other costumes for the characters to wear, but these were the "Thanks for linking up your Capcom account awards."  So whosever idea this was at Capcom, knock it off.  Now.

So after playing the first chapter for just over two hours, my current playstyle is to have either Moira or Natalia as my main character in order to explore and then switch over to Claire/Barry when things start getting harry, or in Moira's case, if there are more than two enemies that are moving too fast to be able to stun quickly.  The feeling I am getting so far from this game is that it will progress similar to the first Resident Evil: Revelations, that the first third of the game will be more of a survival-horror with the rest being more firmly action-horror.  I could see this transition happen at the end of Chapter two, or at the beginning of Chapter 3, kind of like a James Bond action intro, but I am still not 100% sure, since 50% of the playable characters are unable to use firearms, that is unless Barry and Claire meet up and just start mowing everything down.  But that will have to wait for the next chapter for me to find out.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Two Worlds So Far Apart


P.S.  And for those of y'all who are interested in how I actually performed during Chapter 1, here is my scorecard, at least for Barry/Natalia's chapter because I apparently did not grab a screencap after finishing Claire/Moira's chapter.  I will do so for Chapter 2 though.

Wait, there are flea-looking collectible things you can shoot too