Game #1107: Resident Evil Revelations 2

  It's time for a Claire Sandwich.

  There's only one way to close down Octoberween, and that's with Resident Evil Revelations 2. While many people considered Revelations 1 a return to form I was... less than enthusiastic about it thanks to some questionable design choices. But hey! It's round 2, baby, now on stronger hardware and with the return of Claire Redfield.

 First of all, this game takes after then-modern Resident Evil games, like 5 and 6, so it's built around co-op, except worse. Each of the four chapters are divided in two sub-chapters, one featuring Claire and Moira, Barry's daughter, and the other one featuring Barry and Natalia, a girl he finds when searching for his daughter, Moira. Whichever the case, one player will be stuck as the load, either Moira or Natalie. For you see, only Claire and Barry can wield guns and do the cool stuff. The player stuck as Moira can attack with a crowbar, which at least is something, and must use a flashlight to shine over shiny spots to find ammo for Claire. The player stuck as Natalia can 'sense' monsters in order to guide the Barry in order to stealthily take down enemies, find their weakspot, or downright highlight annoying invisible enemies. Either way, one player will have fun, the other one will try to do so vicariously through the other player.

 But if you're playing in Single Player, Barry's chapters are a chore. You'll have to quickly swap between Natalia and Barry in order to find invisible enemies, which if you can't kill fast enough will instantly kill you, and you can't trust the CPU to do it. And it sucks, 'cause I really like Claire, I like her new, older design, yet Barry is clearly the main character considering he gets the longer sub-chapters, heck, Claire's final chapter is only 14 minutes long. Finishing the game unlocks 2 bonus chapters, one featuring a gun-tooting Moira, in which you get to interim stages to hunt for food, and each retry costs food rations because reasons, and if you run out of rations your savefile gets deleted. It's a weird idea for a chapter that is less than a hour long. The other bonus chapter is a stealth mission featuring Natalia and 'dark Natalia', it was a stealth mission and I hate stealth so I didn't actually care to finish it. It was boring. Beating the game also unlocks incredibly dumb fanservice costumes for Claire and Moira, such as a 'sexy cowgirl' costume for Claire, which was idiotic.

 Character-swapping shenanigans aside, the main campaign was fairly decent, as it plays just like the other third-person REvil games. Throughout every chapter, if you explore around, you can come around parts that you can then use to customize your guns, such as increasing fire rate or damage. It had some fairly decent segments too and the ammo is always verging on just having enough to deal with everything coming your way, but not any more than that. You also earn BP that you can use between chapters to upgrade passive abilities, such as bonus damage with the knife, having AI partners actually shoot with their guns if you are using Natalia or Claire, using healing items faster, etc.

 Now then, if that was it, Resident Evil Revelations 2 would've been a passable but ultimately forgettable entry into the series, like Revelations 1 but slightly better. But this game has yet another element to it, Raid Mode. Raid Mode is this game's take on Mercenary Mode, it has tons of stages and tons of characters. Not only do you get Barry, Claire, Moira and a ton of tertiary and secondary characters from this game, but you can also unlock Hunk, Wesker, Chris(Revelations 1 model), Jill(Revelations 1 model) and... Leon too! And not only do you get a ton of characters, there are also a ton of stages, featuring 9 gauntlets with six stages each, and each gauntlet has 3 different difficulty variation to it. And then there are a ton of weapons you can find, a ton of parts to customize them with, and you can also unlock passive abilities to equip your character with and upgrade these abilities as well.

 And not only is there a lot of stuff to do, it's also really fun, as each micro-stage is made up of assets from other games in the series, so you'll come across a ton of familiar locales, as you try to take down every enemy, while gathering new weapons and weapon parts. And you'll also have to contend with enemies that have special secondary abilities, such as being set ablaze so that they explode when defeated, or come equipped with force fields! Resident Evil Mercenaries 3D, which was a full-fledged release, pales in comparison to this mode. Revelations 2's main campaign pales in comparison to this mini-game extra. They could've easily sold this mode on its own and it'd been worth every penny.

 I thought that Revelations 2 was a somewhat dull entry into the series... but man, Raid Mode turned this game into a must-have for people that enjoyed Resident Evil when it became a third-person shooter. It really distills the game's gameplay into its purest form, making for a fantastic, although not scary in the least, arcade shooter, which is something I loved, and that alone makes it, quite probably, one of my favorite releases in the series, despite its forgettable main campaign. Also, bring Claire back in a proper starring role, Capcom!

 9.0