Resident Evil: Revelations 2 was released in four parts over the last month. This is a retrospective review of the game in its entirety. You’ll find a closer look at the game’s action and premise in Anthony John Agnello’s review of the first episode.
Capcom is an artisan with an impossibly fragile specialty: the palimpsest. Decades ago, its key creators worked hard at crafting wholly original visions. Look close, though, and you’ll find that almost all of its greatest successes have been made of recycled parts, with garish colors splashed all over the past. Mega Man 2, Street Fighter 2, Bionic Commando on the NES—all of them are texts wiped clean of their rough first drafts and drawn on again, the new work revealing the hidden depth and potential in the original.
Resident Evil wasn’t an original idea when it popped up in 1996, either. It was drawn from Sweet Home, a weird NES horror game that never made it out of Japan. Of all Capcom’s palimpsests, Resident Evil is the strangest. Story continuity runs through every single entry, even as it wipes down small changes in style to rewrite a new version of the exact same game again and again and again. In its first episode, Resident Evil: Revelations 2 demonstrated real promise thanks to the dynamic between its characters. But that promise was threatened by a lack of personality in its setting, a factor that has been the secret MVP of the series’ best entries. With all four of the game’s episodes out, how does it fare as a whole?
Divorced from its predecessors, Revelations 2 is a capable, escalating thriller. Moira and Claire continue to pass through dull, faceless sewers and charnel houses in their bid to escape an island of mutants. Barry and his psychic ward Natalia continue to follow in their footsteps six months after the fact. While the shooting and puzzle solving never change dramatically from what comes in that first episode, it also never outlives its welcome. Neither does the satisfaction of controlling either duo with their complementary skills—one character being the monster-mutilating muscle and the other an indispensable pacifist supporter. Even the token boss fights waiting at the end, with big virus-ridden, bullet-sponging freaks, are mild fun.