"A great port of an even greater game"

Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64 is a port of the Playstation version. The game is excellent, gameplay, graphics and sound wise. If you are unfamiliar with Resident Evil, It is a Survival horror game, which means that you must escape enemies much more powerful than you in both size and numbers using limited ammunition. This game is scary as well, cheap thrills in the game will make you jump every once and awhile, so be warned!

Gameplay

Great! This game is so much fun. It's you against hordes of the undead, from things like Zombies and undead dogs to lickers and the evil tyrant. The game has a difficulty setting, meaning you can make the game range from easy to hard. This game will make you jump. The camera angles set things up so that something can jump out from the wall/ceiling/floor and scare the daylights out of you. The game has really cool weapons like a Magnum and grenade launcher, even a sub machine gun! Plus It's like you get 2 adventures in one game. Playing as one character alters some of the other characters game. You can either play as Claire or Leon, and each character gets different weapons and story line. Speaking of which...

Story

Pretty good. The story isn't exactly award winning. Claire Redfield comes to search for her brother Chris in Raccoon city, and Leon Kennedy is on the job as a cop. They get trapped and must find any remaining survivors and then escape. The story gets a little more interesting as you go along, but I don't want to spoil anything.

Graphics

Pre-rendered backgrounds and quality character design. The graphics are great for N64. The enemies move very realistically, and the detail is pretty good as well, you can shoot separate parts off of zombies! There are also cut scenes that look great, if not a little fuzzy on N64's cartridges. On this version you can change the violence level, even the color of the blood. Overall very well done.

Sound

Scary! The music is moody and very well done. You'll hate it when the music suddenly gets silent because that's when you know something's going to happen! The sound effects are good as well, you can tell if something's around the corner because you can hear howls, feet scraping, or moans of enemies.

Replay

Surprisingly, this game has a lot of replay! The N64 version has and invincible code which makes it even more fun to run through the game, blasting your way through with unlimited ammo codes. You unlock things when you beat the game based on ranking levels. There's even 2 additional mini games ( although they aren't very mini ). New costumes for the characters and awesome codes and extras. Great replay value.

Buy/Rent

An instant classic, buy right now. It's such a great game, trust me you won't regret it. N64 doesn't have many great 3rd party titles, but this is an exception.

Overall

9/10, excellent game. However, there isn't really a need to buy this version if you have any other version of RE2. Buy this game if you don't have it already though!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/17/02, Updated 03/17/02