Xbox 360
There's nothing worse than a pointless sequel. So what do you make to follow up a revolutionary game like Resident Evil? Well, Simon Pegg summed it up best in Spaced : "A subtle blend of lateral thinking and extreme violence".
Rather than just re-hash things Capcom took the meat of the original and gave it a kick-start into complete mayhem. Following the Hollywood horror model, Resident Evil 2 was to it's progenitor what Aliens was to Alien. Replacing the slow build-up and sparce ammo with bucketloads of undead coming at you from the offset, and more importantly increasing the amount of bullets you could lay your hands on.
Following on from incident at the eerie haunted mansion, the game moves the action to the nearby Racoon City; introducing us to Leon Kennedy, an emo-haired rookie cop confronted with zombies on his first day on the job. He meets up with Claire Redfield, a level-headed stranger in town looking for her missing brother (Chris from Res 1). Some zombie vehicular manslaughter later and both are trapped alone and surrounded by shambling hordes of undead in the car-wreck strewn city-streets. Letting the player choose either of the pair, and play out their seperate but interlinked stories.
Both of our daring duo end up taking refuge in the zombie strewn Police Station, with Leon struggling to put out the blaze from a downed chopper on the roof while Claire digs up some info in the S.T.A.R.S. offices. In the mean time they bump into a small girl called Sherry Birkin, a demented Police Chief and Ada Wong, a mysterious woman who has a secret agenda of her own.
While Leon and Ada root around looking for an escape route down the sewers, Claire gets lumbered with kid-finding duty, leading her to witness the mad Chief Iron die horribly at the hands of a strange mutation. As if that weren't enough, Umbrella have also parachuted in a hugely muscled meat-puppet called Nemesis, intent on wasting EVERYTHING in sight. Even after getting shot to bits it just keeps coming, stronger than before.
After legging it to the sewers Claire happens across Sherry's mother, Annette. As it transpires The Birkin family are the biogeneticists responsible for creating the G-Virus, a nice little follow up to the zombie making T-virus of the first game. Daddy Birkin also decided to have a little spot of self-medication after being shot up by Umbrella Agents trying to cover up the mess, sprouting a giant eyeball and huge claws and going a bit postal. He's after Sherry to make her into a eyeball beastie as well! More than that, once he's shot he keeps coming, stronger than bef... do you see a pattern emerging?
The fevered escape leads our motley crew through the sewers and into a chemical plant, complete with a SECRET UMBRELLA LAB; hounded at every turn by the ever-more-mutated William Birkin, his loony wife, the Nemesis and of course scores of Zombies and other assorted weird things. In a completely expected turn of events, Annette turns on Ada and in the ensuing catfight, gets thrown off a bridge. Shortly after, Ada gets mashed most horribly by Nemesis and 'dies' in Leon's arms. Annette shows up again to help create an anti-virus for Sherry before being gutted by her meatloaf husband.
Having gotten the cast back down to a managable two heroes and a useless brat, they go through the standard drawn out rigmarole which is necessary in the Resi universe to do the simplest of things. Climaxing in a race against the clock as the self-destruct sequence counts down and the Nemesis, now angry as hell, bears down on them, until a shadowy figure (who looks supiciously like Ada) tosses down a rocket launcher to finish him off.
With the galant heroes finally safe on the train and getting away, Pappa Birkin shows up again, now deformed into a lump of angry blancmange. He worms his way through the train just reaching the cockpit before Leon, Claire and Sherry leap clear and the obligatory Umbrella Corp self destruct kicks in and burns him into ashes.
Cue smiles all round...
The End.
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More from the Ultimate Resi Guide:
Resident Evil - Team S.T.A.R.S, find a little house on a little hill...
Resident Evil 2 - Unlucky Cop and Foolish Female stroll unwittingly into Raccoon City, town of the undead.
Resident Evil Zero - Taking place before Resi 1 (just incase you were following things so far), we see how S.T.A.R.S team B got to be so dead.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - Lady S.T.A.R.S. from game one must escape a city...
Resident Evil: Code Veronica - Foolish Female (from number two), seeks Unlucky Cop (from number one).
Resident Evil 4 - Unlucky Cop goes on holiday to Spain. Hates Foreigners. (Part two here)
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Crazy word picture from wordle.net