Look I ain't gonna defend a 7/10 RE game, but it's not that bad.
I bet if you replayed it you'd like it more since you know what to do and where to go. Sometimes games seem like nothing but bad design decisions on first run when you don't know what the game expects you to do. This happens to me allll the time.
Maybe the initial shock would be mitigated somewhat, but i don't think "not knowing what to do" was ever a problem? The game is super linear for the most part and i was never confused as to where to go or what to do, tbh.
The two major problems for me, even not considering the changes to the original, were:
The awful way the story is told (there's basically no build up, everything is rushed, the RE6 style action beginning undermines any sense of progression in stakes being raised).
The fundamental misunderstanding of what made Remake2 FUN.
Having a labyrinth of ways you had to wade through, every time making a mental check of risk vs reward, depending on you resources, whether you wanted to spend bullets or health, or maybe take the long route to get to the same location.
This is what made the Police Station amazing, and then just when you started to get too comfortable with the layout, the dropped in Mr.X.
In this one none of that happens, they have no interesting layouts, just rooms filled up with zombies (with a damage system that is also out of wack) and so since they didn't know how to balance it out, what do they do? Fill you up to comical levels with ammo.
so now it's just a damn shooter, you just enter a room and start blasting.
Only turns out, as a shooter this game is quite poor.
Nemesis is also not nearly as interestingly used as Mr.X, because his pursuit lasts at most a couple of rooms every time, and there's no reasoning you're supposed to do to avoid him, just run straight and dodge a couple of times.
You had to handle X in several ways, keep a mental note of where he was, try not to shoot other enemies, as to not to make noise, etc.
Another thing i hated were the boss fights, whatever happened to the rule of 3? These things go on forever with the same pattern, and once again you're just blasting ammo for the most part.
Not to mention in the second to last boss fight, they had the balls to drop in fucking zombie mob along with the boss, i was feeling second hand embarrassment at that point.
RE2 didn't have masterpiece boss fights either, tbh, but at least they didn't drag on forever in an attempt to mask creativity with length.
Even on its own this game was incredibly poor, then if i go back and remember why i like the original, it fares even worse.
the things that i did like, were mostly carried over by the work done on 2, like the amazing engine/graphics, and a couple of musical tracks that were cool.
I also like the (visual) design of NEST2 better than those of NEST1, too bad that area was also annoying on the gameplay side of things (again, nothing very creative, just fill up every other room with 10 zombies and give the player infinite ammo).
