Survival

Resident Evil 2 (1998)

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It’s rare to find a sequel that is a complete and total improvement from the original. More often than not, I find that sequels often are weaker than their predecessors. It makes sense because for an original work to be successful enough to create demand for a sequel it has to have something special about it. But sequels often just ride on the success of their predecessors. That’s not the case with Resident Evil 2. Resident Evil 2 iterated on every aspect of the original, polishing and refining the bones of the iconic survival horror title as well as adding its own unique ideas. I encourage you to read my review of the original Resident Evil to better understand my perspective on its sequel.

Resident Evil 2 is the first game ever directed by Hideki Kamiya, who is now renowned in the industry for his work on Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and Ōkami. Kamiya focused on the story, scraping and reworking the first drafts of the game. The main characters, Claire and Leon, end up in the zombie-infested Raccoon City. They get trapped in the sprawling police station, which owes its grandiose architecture and eclectic decoration to the fact that it was originally an art museum. The diverging paths of Claire and Leon are excellently interwoven to encourage the player to play both paths to see how they work together and how the events of the story unfold.

The writing and presentation of the story are definitely the biggest improvements from the first game. The voice acting, while still a little stilted, is so much better than the often comedic delivery in Resident Evil. Character models also got a glow-up, giving Claire and Leon more detail and fidelity. The writing in particular went from cheesy to actually thoughtful and character-driven.

While searching for her brother Claire quickly becomes an elder sister figure to Sherry, a young girl who is one of the lone survivors of the outbreak. Leon has a brief romantic relationship with the spy Ada Wong, who’s murky motivations leave you wondering if she is even on your side until the end. Even minor characters like the police chief are memorable. When you first meet him, you wonder how he survived, and something is very obviously off about him, but he gets more disturbing as you learn more about him. I wouldn’t say Resident Evil 2 is a masterpiece of storytelling, but the thriller plotlines and thoughtful characters are well-done, especially for a game of its age.

Resident Evil 2 is a survival-horror puzzle box. Like its predecessor, action takes a backseat to managing your resources and devising a strategy to escape the police station. With limited ammo, limited health-items, and limited saves, you have to think carefully about where to go next. While most enemies can be easily dispatched with the handgun, conserving ammo for the more challenging encounters is prudent. Both Claire and Leon have terrifying and monstrous entities that stalk them throughout the game, adding an additional element of tension as you never know when you’ll have to run for your life. You may think you can hold off on saving as you are only planning on going down the hall, but one of these bulky beasts could be waiting for you in a place you previously thought was safe.

The core gameplay remains largely the same from the game’s predecessor. Manage resources, solve some puzzles, navigate the zombie-filled halls of a creepy building, and occasionally shoot your way through tight spaces. While there are some new weapons, I think the most notable improvement is the diverging paths of Claire and Leon. Replaying the game is a whole new experience with new equipment, enemy placement, puzzles, and bosses. In some instances, you can even affect the world in the other character’s story. Playing both paths even unlocks the true ending and final boss fight. 

I loved the setting of Resident Evil 2. There are some brief urban sequences as you arrive in Raccoon City, running through the fires, wreckage, and hordes of zombies. There’s a sense of mayhem that is only calmed when you arrive in the police station. The police station being a repurposed art museum gives it a ton of character. From the floor layout, to the architecture, to the décor of paintings and busts, there’s a lot of charm. From there, the game descends further and further down into the grimy tunnels and secrets below the station.

My biggest problems with the game are a result of its age. Movement is still using tank-based controls, which can be supremely awkward to get used to. Especially because of the frequently-shifting camera angles. While I did get used to it after a while, more precise movement was challenging. It’s particularly frustrating when trying to run past zombies or turn during a boss fight. The dated graphics also lessens the horror and tension. The horrifying creatures just look like splotchy and blocky figures, and the fixed camera perspectives mean you rarely get surprised or snuck-up on. 

Overall, Resident Evil 2 is a shining achievement in sequel development. It improved on every aspect of the original: story, characters, setting, presentation, and gameplay. The inclusion of two separate characters with their own stories and remixed gameplay was brilliant and excellently executed. While there is no doubt that the game shows its age in a couple places, once you get adjusted to the control scheme it is still a joy to play. I can’t wait to continue through the series and see how it develops from here, and I am particularly excited to revisit the recent remake of this all-time classic game.

Pacific Drive (2024)

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Pacific Drive is not what I expected it to be. And unfortunately, after playing the game, I can’t help but feel like the game I expected would have been better than the game Pacific Drive actually was. It’s certainly not a bad game. Pacific Drive does many things very well, and I hope other games take inspiration from its successes. But even aside from not being what I expected, there are some other major issues that I have with the game.

What I expected was an ominous road trip across the Pacific coast. I thought I’d be looking for bastions of safety to spend the night away from some sort of eerie threat as I made my way across the country. And that is the general idea of Pacific Drive. But instead of being a straightforward road trip with a start and destination, the game takes on a looping format. You plan a route from the safety of the garage, collect resources while avoiding sci-fi dangers, and then drive into a wormhole to return back to the garage where you can upgrade your car and tools. While the vibes here are immaculate and exactly what I expected, I found the roguelite looping structure to have a few aspects that I wasn’t a fan of. 

While Pacific Drive didn’t turn out to be exactly what I wanted, I can’t deny that the game does a ton of things right. First and foremost, I love a good safehouse and Pacific Drive has one of the best in gaming. After a stress-inducing journey I loved rolling into the shop to do some repairs on my car. There’s an ever-present checklist of tasks to accomplish: filling up the gas tank, charging the battery, healing up, restocking survival tools, organizing loot, swapping out beat-up car components, and spending resources to upgrade. It may be a little repetitive after a while but I feel like the calm and safe environment itself is the reward for a successful trip into the wild.

The car itself is an extension of the player’s character. It starts out as a piece of junk that can barely make it down the road without falling apart. But as you play you will unlock upgrades to the panels, doors, engine, bumpers, trunk storage, as well as being able to slap on some special additions. Going from a car that’s panels that are duct-taped together to a radiation-shielded vehicle with wind turbines on the side, extra batteries in the back, and a radar on roof is a satisfying progression. Driving in this game is wonderfully terrible. This isn’t a racing game, and you have to take care of your surroundings as it is easy to lose traction and slip down a hill and crash into trees and rocks. All the time you spend with your car, upgrading it, learning its ins-and-outs, mastering the driving, detailing it, and repairing it makes the car an excellent tool that you really feel attached to.

What Pacific Drive really excels at is the vibe and atmosphere. It’s a wonderfully isolated experience. You don’t meet any other humans outside of limited radio interaction. You simply drive around the lonely landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and avoid dangerous anomalies. The anomalies themselves aren’t really sentient beings or scary monsters, just unnaturally occurring science-fiction phenomenon. It’s a tense but oddly relaxing experience. It distills the feeling of a solo road trip as you listen to the radio, navigate back roads, and try to make it to your next safe stop without running off the road and getting some dings on your car. 

I appreciate that Pacific Drive was committed to environmental threats rather than enemies. You aren’t running from monsters, just avoiding puddles of radiation, explosive mannequins, and electrical towers. The hilly and densely forested landscape can make it a tricky problem to go off-roading to avoid these obstacles, but I enjoyed the environmental threats. Moreover, I think Pacific Drive does a great job at maintaining tension throughout the experience. The game never loses its teeth, even as you upgrade your car’s defenses. You always have to play cautiously and keep a watchful eye on your fuel, battery, and other resources to make sure you can make it back home.

I found that Pacific Drive had distinct issues in its beginning, middle, and end. The start of the game is arguably when the game is at its best. You are dropped into a terrifying world and have to figure out how to survive. Your car is a rinky-dink piece of junk that constantly needs its parts swapped and it struggles to go up a mild hill. You have to navigate through a variety of hazards and sci-fi phenomena to gather materials. Upgrades come fast and the learning process is fun, but I do think the game has some problems when teaching the player about its systems.

The game introduces you to 3 characters over radio who spend much of the early portions of the game technobabbling in your ear. Much of it is nonsense, some of it is story related, and a little of it tries to teach you how to play. But it’s hard to spend your brain’s bandwidth listening and discerning what is important while also anxiously navigating the world’s environment. The game is very punishing early on, and certain resources are exceedingly scarce. I was annoyed when the game encouraged me to fully repair all the car’s crappy components with the fairly expensive repair putty item. I also had no idea about the game’s “storm” system which encloses the map in extremely dangerous radiation if you take too long in any given area. It’s a good way to give some urgency to the player, but I don’t remember it being taught to me, maybe I missed it in the waterfall of technobabble. Regardless, I was enormously frustrated when my first encounter with the storm was an anomalous “fast storm” which closed faster than usual and caused me to die. 

Once you’ve gotten comfortable in the world of Pacific Drive, you’ve entered the middle of the game. Despite how frustrating the beginning can be, the constant tension and process of learning and upgrading can be rewarding. The middle of the game is unfortunately far more repetitive. The game devolves into a monotonous cycle of collecting materials, returning to base, repairing and upgrading, and then doing it again. I get that this is the standard survival gameplay loop, but I feel that it’s particularly unrewarding in Pacific Drive. My favorite survival game is Subnautica, which has a mixture of upgrades, exploration, and story to keep the game interesting as you repeatedly dive for resources. Pacific Drive doesn’t really excel at any of those aspects.

After getting the basics at your garage and in your car, the upgrade system in Pacific Drive is a little underwhelming. I never felt particularly thrilled when I could finally upgrade my panels to gain some radiation resistance, or my doors to be insulated from a little electrical damage. These never felt like big momentous bonuses that would allow me to do things I didn’t do before. Just that it would give me a little protection when I made a mistake. I would have loved if upgrades fed more into exploration, but unfortunately the game’s roguelite format squanders a lot of opportunity there.

It would be phenomenal if there were areas that were in permanent thunderstorms that required components insulated from electrical damage. Or areas that were heavily radiated that needed lead shielding. And if those areas had huge rewards and lore drops it would be a great incentive to want to visit these areas. The game does have a single example of this, an area that is permanently shrouded in darkness that also rapidly saps electricity. I enjoyed planning for this area as it presented a unique challenge and made me think about what upgrades and tools I needed to bring. So much of the game is randomized and it results in many runs feeling same-y, I wish there were more zones that had unique layouts, anomalies, and conditions to plan for.

The late game of Pacific Drive is fairly short, which is probably a good thing because by the time I got there I was feeling burnt out on the gameplay loop. The final area is pretty tiny and there’s only one or two story missions there. I didn’t get a single late game upgrade because they weren’t necessary and by the time you get to the final zone, the game is basically over. Again, I’m actually kind of glad that this is the case because it’s a major pain to traverse all the way to the deep zone and I was already ready to be done with the game. My real issue with the late game is that the story has no climactic payoff. I wasn’t super invested in the story in the first place, but there are a few excellent and emotional moments building up to the finale. Things start to make more sense; you understand the characters more and get attached to them. But the actual ending just kind of… happens. It doesn’t really resolve most of the game’s major plot points and it ultimately just feels disappointing. 

If I had my way, Pacific Drive wouldn’t be a roguelite at all. I still would like to play a version of this game where you don’t warp back to the same garage but instead drive across the Pacific Northwest on a long journey and try to find sanctuary in gas stations, rest stops, and cabins along the way. Regardless, I had other issues with Pacific Drive other than its genre. Some better teaching in the early game, better rewards and exploration in the mid game, and a better conclusion would have done a lot to make Pacific Drive more enjoyable for me. I will say that Pacific Drive does so much right. The atmosphere, the garage, the environmental hazards, the car’s handling, and the lonely vibes are aspects that I hope other games can learn from. It is for these reasons that I give Pacific Drive a 7/10. It’s not the game I expected, but I appreciated its unique approach to the survival game genre.

Subnautica (2018)

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As a genre, survival games can be repetitive and uninspired. Many of them follow the same generic formula of gathering resources, building a base, and making sure you have enough food to survive. Most of these games have no end goal, they just kind of peter out after a while. Despite not being a fan of the genre, Subnautica caught my attention because it was different. The setting, story, and ultimate goal make it a survival game that stands out among its peers. With a higher emphasis on exploration and discovery as opposed to resource collection, Subnautica felt right up my alley.

As the giant spacefaring vessel Aurora plummets towards an unnamed ocean planet, life pods are jettisoned into the open waters with the few survivors of the crash. You begin your journey in one of these life pods. Equipped with some basic survival necessities like a couple days’ worth of food and water, you realize that you are going to need to take a dive into the alien waters to have any chance at survival.

As you dip your toes into the shallow waters around your life pod, you can start collecting resources. Catching fish to be turned into sustainment, and gathering minerals and other natural resources to start crafting new items. In the beginning hours of Subnautica, you cannot stray far from the water’s surface. With limited oxygen you need to frequently swim back to the surface to breathe. To travel farther and dive deeper you are going to need to craft some new equipment.

Like any survival game, Subnautica has a rather nebulous tech tree. While there is no defined path of equipment and upgrades that needs to be strictly followed, you will find it hard to progress until you craft the necessary upgrades. For example, to dive deeper you are going to want to get faster swimming fins and an oxygen tank. In the deeper waters you will find resources to craft vehicles that let you dive even deeper. And from there you can discover upgrades that can let you dive even deeper still. There is a defined gameplay loop of collecting resources to build new technology which in turn lets you go deeper to collect new resources that lets you build newer technology.

This is all pretty standard for a survival game so far, but Subnautica deviates from its peers in a few ways. The first being that the world is not procedurally generated. The world is predefined, and there is nothing to guide you but your own navigation skills. There is no map that shows you all the biomes, you have to use your compass and some landmarks to remember where you are. Beacons can be placed that make navigation simpler, and the giant crashed ship Aurora serves as an obvious visual anchor of where you are at all times. I liked the decision to leave exploration and discovery to the player’s own ingenuity instead of there being a map that you need to unveil. It cements the fact that you are on an alien planet, with nothing but your own resourcefulness to guide you.

The most important aspect that makes Subnautica stand out is its story. Most survival games are just about surviving, upgrading your gear, and building a base. You just play until you get bored. Subnautica has all those things, but you always have the ultimate goal of leaving the planet. You begin getting messages on your life pod’s radio from other life pods. This brilliantly nudges the player forwards to discover new biomes and technologies. You may be apprehensive at first to stray far from the safe shallow water near your life pod, but you will want to know what happened to the other survivors.

Eventually, your curiosity will be what drives you to delve into the deep, dark, and terrifying ocean. You need to know what happened to the Aurora, and the alien structures that you find will certainly pique your interest. I found that the story of Subnautica was a decent sci-fi tale. It does a phenomenal job at always leaving breadcrumbs for you to discover and make you want to learn more about the world and its secrets. Truthfully, I would’ve quit Subnautica fairly early on if it didn’t appeal to my sense of exploration and discovery.

Aside from the story, the other strong aspect of Subnautica is how genuinely terrifying it is. It’s not like a conventional horror game with grotesque monsters. You must contend with the flora and fauna of the world, some of which are hostile, and some of which are gargantuan. But these creatures don’t exist just to chase you down and kill you like something out of Resident Evil, they have habitats that they happily exist in regardless of your interference. There is no point in battling these beasts, you simple avoid them or use tools to inhibit them long enough for you to get away.

The brand of terror in Subnautica is one that exists almost entirely within the player’s mind. Primal fears like the fear of the dark, fear of the ocean, and fear of the unknown are constantly triggered. You cannot see 360 degrees around you, so there is a constant fear that some predator is lurking just behind you. Traversing into dark waters is always terrifying, you never know what is lurking there. There’s a magic to how unsettling and petrifying Subnautica can be despite not being a horror game at all.

Subautica has its fair share of issues, many of which are common for the survival game genre. Since the game has a tech tree and obvious upgrade paths, it can occasionally be frustrating to get stuck with absolutely no idea of how to acquire the next upgrade or what it even is. You need blueprints to build most new pieces of equipment, and finding these blueprints can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

For example, one of the most obvious objectives the player has is to board the Aurora and scavenge it. But you need a laser cutter to open many of the sealed doors. It took me ages to find the necessary blueprints to build the laser cutter. They are often found in wreckages scattered on the ocean floor, but it is all too easy to glance over the blueprint while scavenging or miss the wreckage all together. This happened to me numerous times throughout the game, and it was immensely frustrating to aimlessly scour the entire ocean for wreckages that may or may not contain the blueprint I needed.

The worst example I can think of was when I had all but completed the game, I still had not unlocked the giant submarine vehicle. I never came across the necessary blueprints. This was doubly aggravating because I needed to build the submarine to finish the final piece of my spaceship. I spent hours exploring every inch of the world for that blueprint, for no reason other than to build a submarine that I didn’t even really need. I already completed the story; I was mere moments away from blasting off the planet forever.

 Additionally, Subnautica also has the classic issue of tedious resource collection that many survival games have. Towards the end of the game in particular the escape rocket requires a ton of resources. All of which the player has likely already collected plenty of times. I guess it serves as a final victory lap as you acquire the copious amounts of titanium and copper necessary to blast off, but by that time in the game I felt like I had already proven my mastery of the ocean.

The most objective flaw of Subnautica is the overwhelming number of technical issues. Although many of the game’s flaws have been getting patched through the years, its hard to ignore how buggy it was on launch and how it still is poorly optimized. The two big issues in particular are the framerate and the draw distance. While the framerate has improved over the years, there are still hiccups. But the more frustrating issue is the draw distance. In a game where exploration is the main mechanic, I should be able to see what is 50 meters in front of me.

This is what leads to the player missing many important wreckages or other landmarks. They swim around a biome, thinking they’ve fully explored it, but some pieces just hadn’t rendered. In many areas of the game, it makes sense that visibility is low. In dark zones or dusty terrain it makes sense to have obscured vision, but in the open ocean I should be able to see more than a few dozen meters in front of me.

Overall, Subnautica is the best survival game that I’ve played. It’s unique setting, sci-fi story, and actual tangible progression makes it more appealing to me than most other survival games. The perhaps unintentional terror and fear that it strikes into the player is something that cannot be forgotten. Nothing gives you chills more than when entering a new biome and you get warned that there are multiple hostile leviathan creature lurking about. All that being said, it still has many of the tedious aspects that plague survival games. It is for these reasons I give Subnautica a 7.5/10. The ocean may seem inhospitable, but I’m sure most people will quickly grow fond of the watery planet that you call home in Subnautica.