As you cower in safe rooms, you worry about footsteps and creaks in the distance: are those zombies, or is that him? Everything about my approach to RE2 changed, and areas I'd already explored were thrown into a new light. You don't want to fire your weapons at zombies not to preserve ammo, but to avoid revealing your location to Mr. Stomp, stomp, stomp down the hallway, emotionless and unstoppable.Īs you risk crossing back from one side of the RPD to the other for story or side objectives, the game changes. X has all of the most stoic and terrifying horror stalker icons: he's Jason, he's the Terminator, he's Maniac Cop. When Maugerite calls you a 'fucking shitcock', you stifle a chuckle even if you're bricking it. Jack and Maugerite were threatening, but as they hollered and called after you, it'd sometimes undercut the chase. In those narrow corridors, that means brown trousers time.Īll of this is further enhanced by the nature of Mr. If you want to clear out the station, you'll have to brave its corridors with Mr. Locked rooms tease you for those early hours, but by the time you earn the method to open them the Tyrant is loose. On harder difficulties it's also a test of how gutsy you are. X appears you know the building well, and thus that knowledge is tested: to avoid and escape you'll be forced to take alternate routes quickly and decisively. You always have a map, of course, but nothing is quite so effective as memory of where the safe rooms and shortcuts are. You first have hours to explore and learn the layout of the building. That enhances your stress levels for better and worse, but in RE2 the introduction of the Tyrant feels like an excellent late twist on the RPD area. When Jack stalks you through the corridors of the earliest parts of the Baker house in RE7, the house is new to you.
Crucially, he doesn't show up until you've been in the police department for some time - that's key to all of this working. X only showed up in the second B story of the original game, the remake integrates him into your first playthrough. Much of RE2 Remake takes place there, and while Mr. X himself, but through the brilliant design of the Raccoon City Police Department building. He's intelligent enough to feel a real threat, but easy enough to manipulate, avoid and lose that you don't feel frustrated.įor the most part, that balance is achieved not through Mr. It's all about that balance, and in this the Capcom team has nailed it. X toes the line perfectly between remaining a constant threat and becoming enough of a nightmare that he might be negatively disruptive to the game experience. Such is the genius of the implementation of the stalker in RE2 remake - Mr. X is intelligent enough to make such a strategy either risky or impossible. Zombies are slow enough and stupid enough to be avoided, but Mr. I take my time in every room, turning it upside down, checking every cobwebbed corner and pile of trash for resources. The way I play survival horror games is methodical, meticulous. I am perhaps the best sort of person to be freaked out by a character like Mr. It's a combination of elements the thudding footsteps as he approaches, the searing music that increases in volume and intensity as he nears, and of course the not-quite-man himself: huge, blank-faced, absolutely robotic.
There's a wonderful sense of tension to your encounters with Mr. But the remake version of the Tyrant mutant that stalks the halls of Raccoon City PD may very well be the best execution of this concept in the series. X, Nemesis, and most recently Jack and Maugerite in RE7.
#Mr x resident evil 2 series#
The best example of it working out is of course Alien Isolation, but Resident Evil has stalkers baked into the series identity almost as much as Alien thanks to Mr. X.Įnemies that stalk you aren't an easy thing to get right. I love Resident Evil 2 in both of its forms, but one element of the remake grabbed me (literally grabbed me) more than I expected: super-stalker Mr.
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