What time is it? Time to pop open the champagne, put on festive hats and have fun. Who said “cake”? Cake will be very appropriate, as we begin to inspect the third episode of Resident Evil Revelations 2, which is also the penultimate one. And what an episode! There are no words, nothing but positive emotions.
To begin with, I’m taking most of my words about the first episode back. By the third part (the equator of the plot), the authors have corrected almost all their mistakes. I don’t know whether it was originally planned, or the episodic nature helped, but the third episode came out exactly the way I wanted to see all the Revelations 2 entirely.
Firstly, it is much longer than all that was before. Playing it took me more than an hour and a half, and almost exceeded two hours. The authors are no longer stuffing the game with dull enemies and no longer drag us along on the same premises, they force us to think, make the wrong choices and re-play.
Secondly, just the fact that the entire third episode is not about shooting but about the intellectual player, makes it much better than its predecessors. A minimum of shoot-outs and bustle from the monsters, a maximum of unusual puzzles and lengthy riddles. There is nothing, that you would have failed to deal with, but at least there is also nothing stupor-inducing, like in the first episode. The third episode will focus almost completely on traps and implementation of non-trivial tasks. Some will resemble cute platformer games, others – torture chambers of The Saw.
Thirdly, it no longer feels as if the authors are skimping on locations. The routes of Claire and Barry overlap little and are held in different places where we have different environments, jobs enemies. No more feeling that you’re crawling yet again the route you’d passed ten times before. Now everything is different, and the variety of situations, says that authors laboured over the third episode much longer than the rest of the game.
The only disappointment is that the network co-operative is still no go, and seemingly never will be. Alas, only local co-op on consoles, and the same on PC, where control via split-screen is the most disgusting decision that developers might have come up with. But I think I’m almost used to this slightly strange “co-operative without co-operative.” Yes, I still lack the sense of a friendly shoulder, but I can live with it, I can take it, I can forgive the authors of this strange, incomprehensible decision that looks like either the result of a huge laziness, or as another symptom of a generally low-budget project.
Overall, even if the budget is the guilty party, well, then this mistake rests entirely on the shoulders of the superiors at Capcom. They could have developed Revelations as a separate expensive franchise, not as an appendage of a series created exclusively for older fans, so that they don’t run away. In the third episode of Revelations 2 we can feel in what direction its authors are driving: more of a chamber plot, more of classic Resident Evil, and a minimum of new trends from the main, numbered series. And even the writers didn’t look like they wanted to include the Ouroboros virus from Resident Evil 5, but had to stick it in to move the main plot along. In general, they manage the movement still. They make mistakes, they leave a lot of things unsaid, but they still continue to intrigue the players and bind together elements that no-one would not dare bind. The downside is that they have started badly, but at least the middle of the story has been corrected and is trying to do everything right.
Making an interim conclusion, I want to say that the third episode of Revelations 2 has exactly one flaw: you have to go through the first two to enjoy it – the short, sad, clichéd and consisting of copying and loans. The third episode is different, it plays out differently, and it gives the player that which the game should have given from the beginning. Now we are waiting for the denouement and the understanding, finally, if the game is good as a whole, or if the third episode was just an accident.
Kirill Ilukhin. Born in 1985 in a land with snowy summers and flooding winters. Games addict from the age of 13, actively voicing opinions about them since 17.
