I'm finally playing this modern horror classic thanks to its Switch 2 port
I never got around to Resi 2!
I have a confession to make – despite counting myself as a big Resident Evil fan, I'm quite far from having played every game in the series. In fact, although I played a few of the Xbox 360-era games back in the day, the big renaissance for me was Village, which arrived back in 2021. I hopped aboard the Resi train and absolutely loved the mixture of action and horror that it offered up in modern times.
That means that I'd already missed the series' first big modern remake – Resident Evil 2 from 2019. I never played the original, and despite having the newer version on a couple of platforms, I never quite found the moment to dip into it and start Leon Kennedy's story off from the beginning.
Now, though, Switch 2 versions of the Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 remakes have arrived, with Capcom dropping all three at once to give fans of the series a veritable smorgasbord of choice if they want to revisit some of its finest moments. As it turns out, that's just the prompt I needed – I've finally made time to play the oldest of those three games on my Switch 2, with portability being the key factor.
It's been a pretty brilliant time, too, getting to see how the series really evolved into its modern-day run-and-gun genre. Leon and Claire's time in Raccoon City is tense from the get-go, not least because they're getting stalked by Mr X from a relatively early stage, and that dynamic really is just as electric on your Switch 2 as it's been on various other platforms over the years.
Crucially, Capcom has once again done a very solid job with its porting work, scaling down these RE Engine games to still look crisp and modern on the handheld platform, but noticeably blurrier than most other platforms you could care to name. That means there's an argument to be made that this is one of the less impressive ways you could play them, but I'd counter that by pointing out that plenty of people will only have a single console, and that makes these ports extremely welcome.
It's worth pointing out that the games all aim for 60fps, which is really quite remarkable when you consider some of the ambitious scenes they display. That said, while they often hit that mark, all three of these remakes can dip into the mid-50s when things get more hectic.
It's also well worth underlining that this means you can play Resident Evil 2 all the way through to Resident Evil 8 on this one platform. Given it's only been a little over a year since the Switch 2 first went on sale, that's remarkably impressive work from Capcom, which really hasn't hung around at all on this front.
So, if you, too, have been thinking about playing Resident Evil 2 (or 3 or 4) in its remade form, then now looks like the perfect time if you have a Switch 2. If you're anything like me, you'll find they're brilliant little portable scare-factories.
