Resident Evil still creaking along
Latest mutation should be the end of a series that is a sad echo of its former glory
After almost 20 years, the Resident Evil series has kept itself alive through mutation, joining blockbuster spectacles, mobile miniatures, multiplayer experiments, light-gun games and lavish remakes. Each new instalment has featured narrative convolutions, reversals and non sequiturs that make it impossible to believe there’s anything left to reveal.
Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is a sequel to a 2013 spinoff that’s been split into four episodes, each culminating in a cliffhanger reveal meant to keep players lumbering forward for another few hours.
From the outset, Revelations 2 creaks with age. The series has gone through so many permutations, its heroes are now children of side characters. Longtime zombie killer Claire Redfield welcomes Moira Burton to a new job with a paramilitary corporation that fights bioterror with mutagenic plagues and undead super soldiers. During a welcome party for new recruits, Claire and Moira are kidnapped by another paramilitary group. They come to an abandoned penal colony and are spoken to by a woman who calls herself the Overseer. Each of the four episodes follows Moira and Claire as they try to escape from the island and unmask the Overseer. Shadowing them is Moira’s father Barry Burton, the camp barnacle held over from the original, who’s partnered with Natalia, an adolescent survivor of the island’s genetic experimentation, in an attempt to save his perpetually departing daughter.
For all its plot complications, the game overflows with familiar backdrops — old factories, abandoned prisons, a mine quarry, a misty forest.
Yet, buried in all the dead weight of the series’ past, Revelations 2 still has a sense of life. While the lead-footed gunplay has never felt more laborious, it’s surrounded with co-operative partner dynamics substantial enough to merit a zombiefree game of their own.
The story sections of the game come to an improbably wonderful conclusion in the fourth episode. As one gets closer to the game’s conclusion, the more the characters’ mechanical differences add to a disquieting narrative momentum, making it seem like you may be controlling the game’s hero and villain simultaneously.
Revelations 2 feels like perhaps the best end point to a series that has become a farce of itself. It’s both a sad echo of former glory and a perfect summation of it.