Resident Evil: Revelations 2

Why is it that all of the Resident Evil games since five have partners? I mean, yeah 4 had Ashley, but that hardly counts. She wasn't playable and she tended to be more of hassle than anything else. But now, ever since 5, Capcom seem to have a hard-on for coop play. I can’t imagine why. I mean, asides from the slightly clunky inventory system, Sheva had to be the worst part of that game, thanks in no small part to her AI, if only because she needed ammo and shit unlike future itterations. I mean, if there was one thing that 6 did well, for all of the flack it got for not being an actual survival horror game, your AI team-mates didn't rely on in-game ammo and health. Hell, even Resident Evil: Revelations, the one game that finally realized what, exactly, people go to play resident evil games for. Although, to be fair, at least in that game, one or two of the characters felt like something other than a hanger-on. I even liked that one french guy who hung out with Jill (at least I think it was Jill who he was with).

All of this being said, I think it kind of interesting that Revelations 2 tries its best to mix in survival horror with co-op. But I suppose I should probably to get on to the plot. This time around, we follow two seperate pairs of co-op parters, following storylines, one happening before the other. the first being Jill Valentine, I think, (to be honest, by now, keeping track of all of the various RE characters and factions probably requites a flow chart and much more time than should be spent on such matters), and Moira, the daughter of Barry Burton (yes, the "Jill Sandwich" guy, they even hang a lampshade on it so heavy that anyone who doesn't get the joke will be left feeling underwhelmed),as they each traverse the maze of traps and Evil Within rejects, all the while being taunted by the female version of the Director from Manhunt. The second follows Barry Burton and creepy girl du jour (her actual name is Natasha, but for the sake of my schlocky sense of humor, from here on out, I shall refer to her as various creepy children from whatever piece of fiction strikes me at the time), after the two disappear with at least, and I'm willing to bet cold hard cash that she ends up dead. This time around, it is only Jill (I think) and Barry who are allowed to use to guns. Barry Burton's daughter and our LIttle Sister wanna-be are relegated to using a flashlight and crowbar and infrared vision monster detection powers and a ready supply of bricks lying for the latter. It also helps that you can switch characters at will, allowing you blind a particular silent Hill resident one moment and shoot the crap out of another.

Now while I'd understand why we wouldn't allow Emily the Strange to use a weapon (let's face it, the Japanese aren't so crass as to feature child soldier allusions), but why the hell can't Barry's little girl? Supposedly it has something to do with guns being a trigger for her, but I'm pretty sure life and death situations should demand that you take up arms, as it were. I suppose it doesn’t do well to dwell on such matters. I might as well be wondering why the president’s daughter could only throw lamps at baddies at best. The resulting dynamic is that it does feel a little bit more like a proper survival horror game, at least the Jill sections do. While stealth is something of an option in both stories, it’s much more viable in the Barry/Carrie side of things, what with the help of a certain villager of the damned. There are also little things that make Jill/Moira feel a lot like the resident evils of old and the Barry/Mandy of Grim Adventures fame. The only weapons Jill has access to are a pistol and double barrel shotgun, making it feel all the more like you’re desperately scrounging for whatever ammo you can get your hands on. Barry, on the other hand, is armed to the teeth like every Resident Evil protagonist ever and even has his own flashlight, and the option to kill off the various “The Suffering” rejects Solid Snake style. In other words, we get a nice variance of gameplay styles, one harrowing and nerve-wracking and the other stealthy and/or full of badassery.

As you may have guessed by now, I haven’t exactly completed this game. The reason for this is, of course, that the damned game has been spliced into four episodes, a format that I don’t really think compliments any game style much less a Resident Evil game. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a place for episodic content in this world… just… not in video games. It’s especially misleading because I thought I was picking the game up for a steal when instead Capcom was stealing from me. All of this being said, I, for one, will indeed be waiting for this game to drop a little in price and then pick up the complete version, because I’ll be damnned if I pay fifteen dollars or what have you

So I decided that I'm going to be a little more dedicated to this blog this year, and I figure the best way to go about this is to start out with something that I wrote approximately six months ago. So without further ado, I give to you my review of no one's favorite Xbox game (no, not even for ironic reasons):

            These days, there’s a lot of emphasis on Indie games. Indie games allow for small groups of people to put their heart and soul into whatever they’re doing and create unique, beautiful experiences. Games like Limbo, Bastion and Dear Esther have proven to be the cream of the metaphorical crop. That being said—as anyone who’s ever listened to Jim Sterling’s most recent stuff will tell—being indie doesn’t automatically make you a clever hipster who fights convention. For every genre-defining Braid, there are half-a-dozen Day One: Garry’s Incidents, Earth: Year 2066, and bullshit flappy bird knockoff. Just as not all indie films are genuinely good, so are all indie games. I bring this up because I’ve recently been playing “Dead Lights,” a game which rips off several other games, with only shitty writing and shittier voice acting to show for it. Frankly, a more appropriate title would’ve been “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.”

            So here’s how I envision the creator of DeadLights going into his, or her—because suckiness knows no gender--“opus”: “well I just spent $100 on a copy of Microsoft game studios, but I have the imagination of a lobotomized monkey. How do I make my money back? Well, let’s see what’s popular on Xbox Live: Walking Dead, Limbo, and Shadow Complex. I know! I’ll combine the shooting and generic white dude—because god-forbid I create anything original for my first gaming outing—from Shadow Complex, the dark and dreary atmosphere, puzzle-platforming, and arbitrary inability to swim from Limbo, minus the German-Expressionist inspired surrealism, and setting from Walking dead, minus the racial/age/gender diversity. Oh and voice acting, because even though my writing is worse than the combined efforts of Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, it’ll be way more legit if I have voice actors. I’m sure my friends down at the local community college would love a spare five bucks plus pizza. Professional voice actors are overrated, anyway. Alright now for the plot: To the online Plot Generator!”

            As you may have guessed, after having played through the majority of the game, I’m not exactly impressed. That being said: let me get this out of the way: yes, the aesthetics are pretty damned decent. And yes, the controls work just fine. That being said, those aesthetics and controls don’t exactly gel with the rest of the story.

            Here’s the thing about 2D plat-forming: it doesn’t exactly work with the whole “Zombie apocalypse” setting. 2D plat-forming is at it’s best when it’s slightly cartoony, either due to the limitations of the technology or plain old aesthetic choice. Limbo is dark as hell, yeah, but the whole thing has this very German expressionist feel, which already bordered the weird. Dead Lights on the other hand  is supposed to take place in the real world, and last time I checked, there’s no way in hell one underground hobo can create an entire labyrinth of traps that reset themselves. This isn’t fucking Indiana Jones here. I thought one of the aspects of the Zombie apocalypse were at least some vague pretentions to gritty realism. At the very least the puzzles in Limbo had a sort of disturbing edge to them. Any moment could involve using the corpses of fellow children to swim across a river or using the very spider that had been hunting you as just another box to climb over. The closest we get to that in Dead Light is tricking zombies into traps, and they’re not even your undead comrades.

            As for the story, well let’s play a little drinking game: I’m going to describe the plot and every cheesy videogame/zombie apocalypse cliché you come across, take a drink. If you’re not drunk one paragraph in, you clearly need play more videogames and/or watch more zombie movies. So the world has succumbed to the zombie—in this version called “shadows,” which only makes sense because everything is nice and contrasty—apocalypse has happened. You play as Randy, a survivor out to save his friends and family— and incidentally the latter group might as well have “bad shit happened to us” taped to their backs if only based on those arbitrary little trips down nostalgia lane we experience every other scene. Along the way, you’ll encounter a sewer level which is a good third of the game, run by the blandest crazy old man I’ve ever seen, as well as, naturally, a group of rogue humans who have decided that the zombie apocalypse is the perfect opportunity to act like complete psychos despite the need for man-kind to stick together, and a military which has gone bat-crap crazy “containing” the virus. Oh and you save two people in total, one of whom dies in the middle of piloting a helicopter, and the other is a young woman who almost gets raped but Randy saves her—in cut-scene no less, because god-forbid anything interesting happen gameplay wise.

            Don’t get me wrong. The aforementioned setup—as clichéd as it is—would be decent in the hands of some decent voice actors and decent writers. Even if it hasn’t been proven time and again that the zombie apocalypse can be an effective setting for everything from deep reflections on how far people are willing to go to survive (see 28 Days Later  and Walking Dead) to social satire (see Dawn of the Dead and the first two Dead Rising games), to paraphrase Movie Bob, “you can make a good story about anything.” That being said, it isn’t the set-up that kills this story, but, like most bad stories, the execution. As mentioned before the voice-acting is… mediocre at best. Randy is constantly making bland statements pointing out the obvious like he has some sort of disability that makes it necessary to say things in order to process them. If you’re going to pull that sort of crap, at least do it in a way that tells us a bit about the character as a whole (see the chronicles of Riddick games)—Batman in the Arkham games only got away with it because he’s Batman and you’d hardly expect him to be waxing philosophic while taking down thugs or solving environmental puzzles. The Rat—the aforementioned inventive sewer hobo—has to have the most boring voice for a guy whose supposed to be so eccentric and insane that his own son ran away from him. And then there’s the girl you rescue near the end. Seeing as how you rescue her, you’re forced to escort her. That’s right, the last half-hour of this puppy’s an escort mission, because the game hasn’t bothered taking any risks up to that point, so why should it bother giving us a climactic ending? If that wasn’t bad enough, she manages the impossible task of making the Ashley RE4 seem like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite by comparison. I swear, if I hear “Randy! Shadows!” Or “Randy! Soldiers!” one more time, I’m gonna gouge someone’s eyes out, preferably the developer’s.

            Despite the last thousand words or so, though, the game isn’t that bad. The plat-forming works and the aiming system works well with the setting. That being said, if you are going to buy a downloadable game, there are an endless supply of better ones to spend your hard-earned cash on, such as “Shadow Complex,” “Limbo” or one of the episodes of “Walking Dead.” Hell, Goat or Surgeon Simulator would be better uses of money than "Dead Light," or as I've come to refer to it, “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.” At least some genuine imagination went into those last two.