$9.99Resident Evil 2 (1998) Two campaigns, one doomed city
Survive a zombie outbreak as two strangers whose separate stories cross, change each other and end in more than one way.
Is Resident Evil 2 (1998) worth it?
Resident Evil 2 (1998) is worth it if…
- you want the original survival horror formula: scarce ammo, fixed cameras and typewriter saves
- you like old-school tank controls and puzzles that ask for keys, emblems and chess pieces
- you want two campaigns that change each other and a reason to replay
- you enjoy a grim, cinematic story about a city that is beyond saving
- you played the remake and want to see where it all started
Screenshots
Two campaigns that talk to each other
Leon S. Kennedy reports for his first day of duty and stumbles onto carnage. Claire Redfield is desperately searching for her missing brother. You can play either, and that choice matters: finish one campaign and the second one starts as the "B" scenario, where the other character walks much of the same city but finds different items, different routes and different dangers. Leave the police station's generator wired a certain way in one run, and it changes what waits in the other. Even which character you start with reshapes how the story plays out. It is a structure few games have matched since, and it makes a second playthrough genuinely different rather than a rerun.
Scarcity is the horror
Ammo is short, saves are finite, and every bullet is a decision. You save at typewriters, and only if you carry an ink ribbon, so there is no save-scumming your way out of trouble. Zombies can lose an arm or a leg and keep coming, crawling after you, which makes shooting them dead a real commitment of ammunition you may need later. The tension builds the way the genre does best: a corridor you cleared on the way in is not safe on the way back, and the fixed cameras mean you often hear a threat before you see it. The game never unfairly kills you, but it makes every room a small calculation.
A dead city, staged like a film
Raccoon City is the star. Fixed camera angles frame each room like a shot, cutscenes carry the story, and the plot moves from the police station into the sewers and an underground lab, with creature designs that hold up as some of the series' best. The story is the reason to keep going: Leon and Claire, Ada, Sherry and Annette all feel connected, and you spend real time with the cast instead of meeting them in passing.
Questions before you play?
Can you play it solo?
Yes, it is a singleplayer game throughout. The two campaigns are played one at a time, and the story connections between them are what make replaying worthwhile. There is also an Extreme Battle mode where you fight through hordes of zombies in a challenge that changes every time, plus the 4th Survivor and Tofu modes, unlocked from the start in this edition.
Do you need to play the first game first?
No. The story stands on its own, and the game explains what happened in Raccoon City. Playing the first game gives you some extra context, but nothing you need to follow along.
How long is it, and how hard?
A first blind run of one campaign takes roughly seven or eight hours, and there is a second scenario after that. The opening can feel much harder than it is: once you find proper ammunition and clear out the early zombies, the difficulty settles. The tank controls and fixed cameras take a little time to adjust to if you have never played a game from this era.
Does it hold up visually?
It is a 1998 game, and it looks like one: low-poly characters in pre-rendered rooms, though this edition runs with 3D accelerated graphics that were photo-realistic for their time. The fixed camera angles still do the horror better than many modern games, and there are modern display options like windowed mode, aspect ratio correction, integer scaling and gamma correction to make it look right on a current monitor.
