Resident Evil 2

Resident Evil 2 arrived on GameCube as a carefully reworked port of the 1998 original, which brought the horrors of Raccoon City to an infested city full of zombies and mutants born from the Umbrella corporation's experiments. The player takes on the role of either rookie police officer Leon Kennedy or civilian Claire Redfield, who try to survive a night in which the entire city turns into a slaughterhouse, while also uncovering the connections between the police station, the sewers, and a secret laboratory beneath the city. Along the way they also meet supporting characters such as the girl Sherry or the mysterious agent Ada Wong, whose fates unfold depending on the chosen scenario.

The gameplay rests on the series' classic mechanics: limited ammunition, puzzles based on combining items and keys, saving only at a typewriter, and unforgiving tank controls that force the player to plan every encounter. The pair of characters offer separate A and B scenarios that intertwine and change the fate of supporting characters depending on the player's choices, giving the game an unusual degree of replayability for its time and a motivation to complete it more than once. On GameCube the game benefited from sharper graphics, crisper textures, and faster loading compared to the PlayStation version, although at its core it was a faithful port without major new features or bonus content.

The atmosphere is rounded out by sparse, dark music and the moaning of zombies echoing from somewhere down the corridor, which made the game famous as one of the peaks of the survival horror genre in the nineties. At the time of its GameCube release, reviewers praised it above all as a quality, accessible way to play the classic on a modern console, though they compared the lack of new content unfavorably with the richer remake of the first game that had come to GameCube a year earlier. To this day, Resident Evil 2 is considered one of the most influential titles of the genre and an inspiration for countless later horror games, and even with the years behind it, it still functions as a tense, well-thought-out survival horror that isn't afraid to leave the player groping in the oppressive silence of the corridors.

Why play it: For survival horror fans, this is a tense, well-thought-out classic experience with the dark atmosphere of oppressive corridors, though the GameCube version adds no new content compared to the richer remake of the first game from the year before.