Resident Evil 6 did a lot of things differently from its predecessor. Namely, it was an unapologetic action game with so many explosions that Michael Bay would blush. While that certainly wasn’t the game’s only issue, you can clearly see that Capcom took this bit of criticism very seriously as they crafted Resident Evil: Revelations 2.
In Revelations 2, the player will find a familiar premise in exploring derelict, lonely (well, aside from a partner character), abandoned facilities residing on a mysterious island. Revelations 2 is more about thorough exploration of environments and more careful combat with more powerful enemies.
Revelations 2 brings back co-op and while it might ruin the tension to an extent, I can at least appreciate some of the changes made to the feature. The two playable characters available at any part of the campaign have very different roles. For example, with the first set of characters, series veteran character Claire Redfield represent a more conventional skill set the player has in Resident Evil, with shooting and knifing. The second character of the duo, Moira, instead carries a flashlight that, aside from helping visibility, can be used to stun enemies when focused or can make hidden items obtainable. While all this might sound great on paper, it just isn’t executed that well. In most cases I didn’t find the enemies that intimidating and often opted to stand my ground. It didn’t help that there were only about four enemy types and all of them felt very, very generic horror game fodder filling in very familiar roles. Even the environment was similarly uninspired.
Even the co-op gameplay wasn’t even properly executed which is mindboggling since Resident Evil 5 and 6 did it right. Revelations 2 doesn’t include online co-op. You’ll need a human being willing to come over to play, which I feel doesn’t very well match the episodic structure of the game. Have fun convincing someone to come back again for the next three episodes (and bonus two episodes assuming you bought the season pass which provides the best deal) within a reasonable timeframe.
If you don’t play co-op, well, then combat is probably going to be a little annoying. I found that it’s actually better to play the support character most of the time. The AI controlling the support character will never mark the hidden items and almost never stuns enemies. I at least found that in most cases when I stunned the enemies as the support character, the AI controlled gun totting character would often seize the opportunity to knock the enemy down allowing for me to finish them off with a context sensitive button prompt. However, when larger scale encounters or fights with one of the more demanding enemies arise, you’ll want to switch over and that’s when things get frustrating as the support character provides zero assistance and just wails in agony as they only succeed in getting in the way.
I only played the first episode of Revelations but what I took away was that it was a cumbersome but mostly inoffensive (well, aside from the pandering references to previous games…) survival horror game that’s so middle of the road and uninspired that you’ll forget it shortly after playing it. Resident Evil 6 might have been a controversial step in a direction not everyone liked but at least the events that took place in the game reached a level of such absurdity that it could become hilarious and entertaining. The only thing that stood out to me in Revelations 2 was that a game from a flagship franchise belonging to mega publisher Capcom couldn’t go to the expense of including online co-op.
Vash was a community contributor to ICXM, writing 1 article in 2015 covering Xbox news. ICXM operated as an independent Xbox and Windows gaming outlet through the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming, drawing from a rotating bench of editorial volunteers. They post on X as @vashkey.