Resident Evil 2 Platinum

Capcom?s Resident Evil 2 Platinum is a faithful port from the Sony PlayStation, but the game carries over a ton of console weirdness that may weaken its appeal when placed beside similar PC titles.

Capcom?s Resident Evil 2 Platinum is a faithful port from the Sony PlayStation, but the game carries over a ton of console weirdness that may weaken its appeal when placed beside similar PC titles.

As the story begins, zombies spawned by Umbrella Inc., an evil biochemical company, are overrunning the hapless burg of Raccoon City. Chris Redfield, the hero of the first Resident Evil, has gone missing along with the rest of his police comrades. Arriving in Raccoon City in the nick of time, Chris?s sister Claire and a rookie cop named Leon must get to the bottom of this crisis and put a stop to Umbrella?s sinister plot.

You can play the game as either Claire or Leon, with each character taking a slightly different path through the game. Or you can undertake a mini-adventure (locked in the PSX version) against randomly placed enemies in the Extreme Battle mode, in which you can also play as Chris Redfield or Ada Wong.

For those of you unfamiliar with this series, it?s best described as an action-adventure hybrid. The game?s third-person action is somewhat reminiscent of Tomb Raider, though the backdrops are all 2D, so your movements are limited much as they are in Grim Fandango and Blade Runner. There are 10 locations in all, including the streets of Raccoon City, the multi-story police station, and the Umbrella labs.

The character models and zombies all look great with a decent 3D card installed. Voodoo2 and RIVA TNT cards make the game look especially nice. Software rendering will work in a pinch, but even a PII 450 chugged through some scenes without 3D hardware help. However, the 2D backgrounds range from bland to ugly regardless of your setup.

Throughout the game, you?ll fight your way past a host of zombies and other scary creatures using a variety of weapons ranging from a simple 9 mm to a rocket launcher. Mowing down wave after wave of lumbering zombies can be quite a rush?especially with the Gatling chaingun.

You?ll run into numerous locked doors and an array of other relatively tame puzzles that are just tough enough to slow you down without becoming frustrating.

Unfortunately, as in the port of the original Resident Evil, you?ll also have to get past the game?s many design oddities. For starters, you can only save the game when you come across a typewriter?and then only when you have a typewriter ribbon in your inventory. Many of the puzzles require extensive backtracking. You can carry only six to eight items at a time and must frequently return to the designated storage boxes on each map. You can?t even exchange items in your inventory for those you find in your travels, and you can?t drop items unless you?re at a storage box.

Other issues include the annoying delays whenever you open a door or climb a flight of stairs. And the game intermittently stopped accepting keyboard input when I used that as my primary controller on two different systems. I eventually switched to a gamepad.

So while the zombie-killing action and the mildly challenging puzzles can be quite a blast, the game?s many needless gameplay limitations keep it from being in the same class as a Heretic II or Tomb Raider III.

Comments [0]

post a comment

Post a Comment