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Resident Evil 2   In Brief: Gory action/adventure with some pleasant puzzles and a good storyline.
I've never really cared for fighting in adventure games. Why, amidst puzzles that require deductive reasoning and ingenuity should you suddenly  have to hit a dwarf a few times with a sword and hope he dies before you do? On the other hand, I rather like puzzles in action games. But while Resident Evil 2 should probably be considered an action game with some puzzles, the puzzles go enough beyond the simple find-the-hidden-passageway puzzles of something like Tombraider that I think it's fair to call RE2 an adventure game.
Now, some people might say that a game that primarily involves shooting the heads off of zombies while huge waves of blood spurt out is just not an adventure game, but this is my site, so there.
In RE2 you get to play either Claire or Leon, both of whom travel through a zombie infested city to a huge old police station where they are required to kill zombies, skinless men and even stranger creatures while trying to find a variety of keys, medallions and the like. Why a police station would be set up like something from an old haunted house movie is anyone's guess (amidst the reams of documents you find to read and film you find to develop, most of it not required for gameplay but simply for story, I don't recall seeing an explanation for this), but there you have it.
The puzzles are pretty straightforward. A little verse on a statue giving you a pretty clear hint of what you need. To avoid pixel hunting, most important items twinkle in the room, and often the game pretty much tells you what you need at a particular point. There are a couple of relatively clever puzzles though, which is more than you can say for most shoot-em-ups.
After playing as either Claire or Leon you can go back and play the game as the other person during the same time period, solving mainly the same puzzles with some variations, and experiencing a different plot with different characters. That's pretty cool, actually. I don't know if there are differences in the plot depending on whether you play Claire or Leon the first time through, but I guess I'll have to play the game again to find out. The stories are actually pretty interesting, and I thought the voice acting was pretty good, although I saw a review that said it was horrible, so go figure.
As an action game, I have trouble judging RE2, because I played it in easy mode, in which you can grab a gattling gun or a rocket launcher and just blast away until everything in the room is dead (this was starting out as Claire and playing easy in either Arrange or Original mode, I'm not sure). I tried playing at a higher level of difficulty and it seems then you just get worse weapons and have to shoot and shoot and shoot to kill anything. It's certainly not as exciting as Half-Life (the best 3D shooter in the world), but it has its fans. To encourage replay, you are given a ranking at the end of the game, which is affected by how many times you save the game and whether you use weapons with unlimited ammo and such, and apparently if you get a high enough ranking you get to play as another character, but that all sounds like too much work for me.
If you're an adventure game purist I wouldn't recommend "Resident Evil 2", but if you'd like some easy puzzles and a lot of gore this is a pretty good bet. -- Charles Herold -1999
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