Some Nemesis moments are better than others and I think he works best when dropped into a more open-ended scenario. For example, the first major area of Racoon City has players darting through streets piled with broken down vehicles and rummaging through busted shops. About half-way through this, Nemesis appears and creates a new type of zombie by horrifically wrapping tendrils around a victim. From here, Jill has to deal with the new monster and Nemesis’ massive fists. This is where the most interesting interactions with the tyrant can occur as Nemesis can fiercely pursue the player through various areas. Almost assuredly, Jill is forced to fight which can lead to various weapon upgrade parts.

Making the decision to face Nemesis and dealing enough damage for the cartoonish crate to drop out of his coat feels awesome. Anytime I saw Nemesis (I played on standard difficulty) I would roll a frag grenade at his feet and most of the time just one of those would be enough to score me a new part. By the time I moved on to the next area, I was sporting a pistol with three new parts and a shotgun with one new part. I was rewarded for spending more time in those areas and I wish that more sections of the game were designed as well as this one.

From there, Jill catches a ride on the subway with a few UBCS (Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service) members including the headstrong Carlos Oliveira, the grisled Cpt. Mikhail Victor and B Squad member Sgt. Nikolai Zinoviev who can immediately be pegged as a betrayer and villain of the story. Interactions like this show just how incredible the game’s animation and acting can be. Facial movements can be subtle, giving more weight to the meager script. The narrative doesn’t offer much overall but it makes for an exciting action ride that does a fine job explaining this moment in the Resident Evil timeline. In fact, all of the character models look fantastic and the RE Engine continues to impress with stellar lighting and object rendering. I don’t remember running into many performance issues, although I set my graphics to performance mode to ensure I got a good framerate. I have also been enjoying playing this and the previous remake with keyboard and mouse far more than I thought I would. Having that extra bit of precision really helps place shots but unfortunately accuracy is less important in this and RE2 than it was in RE4 and RE5.