Resident Evil Revelations 2 Gameplay Video Reveals A Lot More Of The Same

A 10 minute video has recently surfaced of the upcoming Resident Evil Revelations 2, the third-person, horror-survival game from Capcom that's due for release on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in early 2015. If you're familiar with Resident Evil since the fourth game... well, then expect more of the same.

The video comes courtesy of Connected Digital World and offers a nice look at the gameplay and control mechanics of the upcoming Capcom title. The video was originally captured during this year's Tokyo Game Show, but was only recently published for the world to see. Quite naturally, the gameplay footage comes from the PlayStation version of the game (as if the Japanese would ever use an Xbox console to demo a multiplatform game at the Tokyo Game Show? Ha!)

I have to say that there are some good things and bad things present in the video. I really like how there's some immediate danger there that doesn't hold the player's hand; you can die by making the wrong moves and I like this. Too often we've seen fake horror-survival games from the AAA sector where they make so that you're always forcibly nudged in the right direction to avoid death. That's bull crap.

Back in the day, gamers would constantly die in horror-survival games like the first three Alone in the Dark games or the earlier Resident Evil or Dino Crisis games – it was pretty easy to waste resources and get stuck because you royally screwed up. We get hints of this in Resident Evil Revelations 2, which is a good thing. It means the game is bringing challenge back and challenge is what makes gamers stronger. And you want to be a strong gamer, right? Right.

Enemies not dying in a few shots was good to see; I also like that some of those bad boys would get back up after a short period of time. We need to see more of this... bad guys who get blasted down but get back up. We need Wheaties-zombies not Corn Flake-zombies.

Another good thing worth pointing out is that the monsters – in a few of the segments – forced the player to run or attempt to catch their breath with a bit of respite. Too bad the person playing sucked donkey toes and didn't know how to use the game's dodge mechanic. There's a perfect word for people who play like the way they're playing in the video above, but there's no sense having a bunch of snowflakes e-mailing CB's managers over it.

Suffice it to say, at around the 9:30 mark anyone with an I.Q., in the triple digits likely would have used the dodge mechanic during that time.

As for the bad parts: what was up with the tank controls from 1998? The lack of being able to climb on things, hide under things or just interact with the environment like most other survival-horror games these days is just kind of bizarre.

Also, Moira seems to be a huge step back from the partners in Resident Evil 5 and 6. She's closer to Ashley than she is Sheeva. Cue the red blaring light with a tag under it that reads “Useless Alert”.

Last thing and then I'm done with this rant: what is up with the cross-generational gameplay? Do publishers know that most core gamers aren't going to be swayed over with five-year-old gameplay mechanics with some visual spit-shine and polish for today's home consoles? It feels like publishers sometimes churn out these factory-stamped games hoping to cause another video game crash. To that I can only say: keep it up and it'll happen sooner rather than later.