I truly find it hard to recommend this to anyone – whenever you are a survival horror or action fan, if you’re a Resident Evil series fan or RE: Revelations 1 fan… Even if you are a hardcore Barry Burton fan, like I am, I just cannot recommend this game.
It feels like Capcom completely misinterpreted why people liked Revelations in the first place. So, if you liked the main parts of that game, that worked “metroidvania-ish”, like classic survival horror, and hated linear action sequences – I have bad news for you, because guess which parts Revelations 2 consists of? The game is balanced out to be less annoying and action-heavy than those chapters from Revelations 1, and there are new mechanics to play with, but still – not exactly what people wanted. Also, those new mechanics make the game feel more like a reimagining of ObsCure 2, rather than Resident Evil. Which isn’t *bad*, just, you know, not Resident Evil.
Overall, the game is just jumping from “serviceable” to “not good”, never really hitting the spot of “good”, but never falling into “bad” either. First two episodes provide some interesting gameplay and locations, but are rather light on the story, while last two episodes try to tell more of the story, but start failing in locations and gameplay with very boring looking places taking a lot of game time and emphasis on “puzzles” (read “slightly to very bs for Clair” and “busywork” for Barry) in the third episode and just rushed feel of the last episode. Extra episodes are not that great either, with Struggle having a lot of very boring action and one interesting mechanic of “use food for restarts after death”, while Little Miss is just a clunky stealth-only episode. Both provide interesting elements to the story, but aren’t very fun to play.
Raid mode, another thing people loved about Revelations 1, now feels more like a F2P tie-in to the series with super grindy gameplay, microtransactions and more emphasis on arena-like short stages, rather than the 4th Survivor/Operation: Mad Jackal-type gameplay the first Revelations Raid levels sometimes evoked. Also, while it is interesting to see levels from Revelations 1 and RE6 reused in Raid mode along with some player characters and enemies, it feels more like a cheap solution rather then a nice idea which makes the “F2P game” feel even stronger.
While playing I felt, like the developers didn’t really know what they wanted to do with this. A lot of it feels like a reuse of Code Veronica ideas, game sometimes uses very RE1-like imagery, but then does something very distracting – like putting a mansion-like location and then using very RE2-3 sounding music on top, that evokes a completely different thing. The only thing the game does actually good is the characters – Claire and Barry feel like you’d expect them to be. There are cool references to the main character relations (Jill writing to Barry after RE5, Claire talking to Piers about Chris) and previous games. So, the, so to speak, “main lore” of RE series is done right.
Thing is – you can read and watch this best thing, without playing the game. And playing the game is not very worth the time. If you somehow get it for cheap of free, and are a RE fan, and have some time to play – sure, why not give it a go. But if you feel like you’re getting to the point of “maybe I should drop this… but what if there’s something good after?” – if you got past episode 2, then no, nothing good after.