Resident Evil 4 vs Revelations 2: Which Is Better?

Resident Evil 4, and the interesting part is how much of it Revelations 2 sketched first. Leon parries a chainsaw with a knife that wears down and breaks, and engaging gameplay mechanics and smooth combat is the first item in the remake's stored player praise. Revelations 2 got there in pieces: the ResetEra thread that pairs these two games credits it with the stealth kills, the counter prompts and the simplified crafting the remake later refined, and Kazunori Kadoi designed the older game before co-directing the newer one.

What Revelations 2 does not have is the polish. Its own stored complaints name technical issues and repetitive gameplay, and switching between Claire and Moira mid fight is a puzzle input far more often than a combat one.

Resident Evil 4. The village, the castle and the island are three distinct places with their own rules, and our catalogue logs exploration, puzzle-solving, resource management and inventory management across all of them. Revelations 2 has one island and reuses it. The recurring criticism in the ResetEra thread on this pairing is generic level design, and Digital Foundry said the same in 2015: disappointed at how simplistic the level design is, still a beefed up 3DS title.

Revelations 2 holds one advantage. Its penal colony is built for two bodies at once, so a locked door is a job for Moira's crowbar and a dark corner is a job for her flashlight, and the level design asks for that constantly. That is a different kind of space rather than a bigger one, and on scale alone the remake is not close.

A draw, and the closest call on this page. Strong character development and storyline tweaks sits in the remake's stored praise, and some narrative changes diverge too much from the original sits in its complaints. Both are fair: a rescue story told better than it was in 2005, and a familiar one to anyone who played it then.

Revelations 2 answers with the pairing every thread about it returns to. Barry Burton reaches the island six months after his daughter Moira went missing on it, and the girl he finds there instead, Natalia, can sense the things coming at them before he can. Half the game runs on that. Interesting character dynamics between Claire and Barry is its first stored praise; inconsistent character and story development is one of its complaints. One story is told well. The other is worth telling.

Resident Evil 4, and this is the least close category here. Incredible graphics and atmospheric design leads the remake's stored player praise. Graphics and technical issues were the parts of Revelations 2 critics criticized most at launch, and Digital Foundry's face-off found the PlayStation 4 version running measurably worse than the Xbox One release, with a large forest scene regularly falling under 30fps on PS4 where the same sections averaged 50 to 60fps on Xbox One.

Eight years and a full engine generation separate them. The honest caveat is that neither is clean, since graphical or performance issues on various setups sits in the remake's complaint list too. But Revelations 2 was a mid budget episodic release built to a weekly schedule. It looked like one in 2015 and it still does.

Revelations 2, on price rather than on hours, and the at a glance table above needs one caveat before that makes sense. Our catalogue holds a Metacritic score for Revelations 2 and none for the remake, which is a gap in our data and not a verdict: Resident Evil 4 scored 93 on PlayStation 5. On length the remake wins outright, roughly 20 hours for the main story against 9.

What decides the category is the entry fee. Episode One of Revelations 2, Penal Colony, is free on the PlayStation Store with Raid Mode attached, which is why our availability data files the game as free. The remake is full price, plus a paid Separate Ways campaign and the weapon upgrade microtransactions Capcom added two weeks after launch.

Revelations 2, without an argument, because the remake does not compete. Resident Evil 4 is single player and nothing else, and our catalogue logs exactly one game mode for it. Revelations 2 logs four: single player, multiplayer, co-operative and split screen, with two players locally.

Both campaigns are built around a pair, Claire with Moira and Barry with Natalia, and the second character is a real second player rather than a follower. That is the thing the ResetEra thread praises most warmly about it. Raid Mode takes co-op online as well. Played alone, the same design becomes one of its stored complaints, that AI companions can be frustrating. Bring a person and the game changes shape entirely.

Revelations 2, and Raid Mode is the entire reason. It carries roughly 200 missions and 15 playable characters drawn from across the series, with weapon and skill customization layered on top, and it runs solo, online or in split screen. Engaging Raid Mode with RPG elements is its second stored praise, and the ResetEra thread on this pairing rates it above the comparable extra modes in the bigger Resident Evil games.

The remake is not short of reasons to return. High replay value due to various modes and challenges sits in its stored praise, and Mercenaries arrived free two weeks after launch. But Mercenaries is one mode. Raid Mode is a second game with a progression system behind it.