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One of the best survival horror titles

Resident Evil 2 was released originally on PS1 back in 1998. It was my first Resident Evil game I ever played—and I enjoyed it. It introduced two playable characters that goes through the horrors of the Raccoon City after a virus had spread through the city, turning everyone into zombies. 2019 the game saw a remake that was very well received. Now Resident Evil 2 remake saw release on Mac, iPhone and iPad. I played this through on my iMac (2021) with M1 chip.

Plot

Resident Evil 2 tells separate stories of Claire and a police officer Leon. It’s Leon’s first day as a rookie cop at the R.P.D. (Raccoon Police Department). Claire, in the other hand, comes to the Raccoon City to look for her missing brother, who is also a police officer. Soon after their arrival, they find out that the city is overrun by zombies. They get separated and decide to meet at the police station. The police station isn’t safe as it should be because it’s full of zombies and other monsters.

I played this through with Claire’s story as I like it the most. The story is overall the same to Leon’s, but there are different places each character goes and other differences. So playing the game through with both characters feels fresh.

Gameplay, controls, audio and visuals

The gameplay is third person over-the-shoulder survival horror. The main thing is to just keep yourself alive, do puzzles and find keys to get to the next area and collect ammunition. I think the gameplay is just enough. It doesn’t have too much of anything convoluted other than your first time playing this might feel difficult if you’ll get easily lost in video games. But thankfully there is always a map that’ll show what doors are locked and what key is needed, and so on.

There is also a stalker enemy, Mr. X, that’ll makes things more difficult as it always feels the stalker enemy is right where you’ll need to go, but thankfully the enemy isn’t with you the whole playthrough, at least in Claire’s story.

The gameplay also includes fiddling with the inventory and its space is very limited. That’s why I recommend you to try and find all the pouches in the first part of the game so you don’t have to run to the item box all the time.

Controls are the same as in the original console version. (I played this through by using my PS5 DualSense controller). The main things the characters can do is walk, run, shoot enemies, collect items, use sub-weapons such as grenades… and that’s pretty much it. What I would’ve liked was a dodge move (like in Resident Evil 3 remake), because it only feels more natural that you try to evade enemies.

All the audio in the game was terrifying. The moans the zombies had and all the odd noises they kept. The loud stomping sound that the stalker enemy Mr. X kept that echoed through the police station. Not to mention the voice acting that was on point and felt realistic.

Visually Resident Evil 2 looks good. I recently played Resident Evil 7 on Mac (the same iMac M1) and it looked pretty rough, but hey, the game is 7 years old. Nevertheless, Resident Evil 2 had the same issues with gradient shadows; they looked bad. Also hair on the characters can look little bit off at some parts. Otherwise I think this game holds up very nice visually.

There are lots of settings for graphics. I first tried to run this on highest resolution that was 4480×2520 but the game simply wouldn’t run. So, I opted to full HD resolution 1920×1080 and went through some of the settings to get the best graphics I could without crashing the whole game. It shows that the system has 3.53GB amount of graphical memory and I didn’t want to fill it completely as I remember of playing Resident Evil 4 remake on this iMac it did hard crash my computer twice. So I tried to avoid that happening now—and the game ran nicely with 60fps also on.

Goodbye Raccoon City

Resident Evil 2 is one of my favourite games; it’s near and dear to my heart. I played Claire’s story through in about 4 hours, but it was rather easy for me as I mostly knew where to go and what to do. There isn’t much negative I can say about this game, if I must nitpick I would say the graphics might looks sometimes low quality. So don’t expect any current-gen graphics. Every other way I think this Mac port was very successful.

Resident Evil 2 is available on Mac (reviewed on using iMac M1), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows, iPad and iPhone.

SCORE:

4/5

“Resident Evil 2 tells separate stories of Claire and a police officer Leon”

RELEASE DATE: December 10, 2024
GENRE: Survival horror / Action
DEVELOPER: Capcom
PUBLISHER: Capcom
PLATFORMS: Mac (reviewed)
PS5
PS4
Xbox Series X|S
Xbox One
Nintendo Switch
Windows
iPad
iPhone

 

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