We just can’t get beyond Raccoon City, can we? From Biorand’s screwball silliness to Requiem’s post-apocalyptic return tour, it’s all gotten a bit familiar. A bit… safe.
But no longer: Now is the age of sickos, and thanks to Resident Evil 2 Remake’s slightly barmy Chinese modding scene, the most popular game in the series has become a rich ground for one-upsmanship and sharing of challenge mods. Resurgence Of The Dead Shadows is one of the newer big releases, one of the most actively updated, and it WILL kill you and laugh about your demise.
So why would you want to play a Kaizo-style Resident Evil 2? Because it’s a fun challenge and frequently very funny. Right off the bat, this mod dials up the shenanigans to 11. I couldn’t stop laughing on my first run through the prologue area at the gas station. My first discovery is that I needed some C4 to blast open the door, and my second surprise is that the bomb’s beside the Raccoon City road-sign… and Mr X.
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So, I grab that, run like hell, plant the bomb and oh no—Mr X brought the family.
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But if that does sound like fun (in a perverse sorta way), setting up this mod is similar to Berserker for RE4R, but with a couple extra steps, as Capcom’s update adding ray tracing to RE2R broke a lot of mod support:
- Install the non-raytracing version of RE2 Remake on Steam (This is important!)
- To do this, right-click on it in Steam and select Properties/Game Versions/DX11_Non-RT
- Grab Fluffy Mod Manager, download it and unpack it anywhere you like
- Run Fluffy Mod Manager once to get updated
- Run it again, go into Downloads and download RE Framework
- Download Resurgence Of The Dead Shadows and place it in Mod ManagerGamesRE2RMods
- Launch RE2 Remake from within the launcher and begin.
- You’ll know it worked if the gas station is boarded up and everything goes to hell from there.
Despite the silly, death-defying (or more likely causing) opening, this mod is designed to be consistently beatable even on the highest difficulty. Very hard, but doable. Yes, there’s extra enemies everywhere, but you’ll frequently find full boxes of 60 bullets, and Leon starts with a rapid-fire pistol that will be fully upgraded within the first hour. Easy mode even cuts you some slack, with a pile of bonus items and a fully loaded minigun just inside the police station. It’s a power trip if you want it to be, but masochists get in free.
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Being a Kaizo-style mod, there’s no real rhyme or reason to the placement of new elements beyond ‘it’s funny’. For the most part, the new additions are fairly smart, with slowly opening gates forcing you into endurance fights and some creative re-routing on puzzles and key items giving the adventure a very different flow. It’s also really stupid in places, with a pair of suggestively posed (but fully clothed) zombies getting posthumously freaky with it in the lobby of the police station.
Expect the unexpected, including bonus Mr X fights as a requirement to progress, repurposed bosses, lickers rudely sneaking into safe rooms and dead end trap triggers unleashing swarms of zombie dogs upon you. You’ll need a jester’s temperament to endure this one on anything above Easy mode, and the patience to retry tricky fights, but there’s few funnier, weirder ways to spice up a familiar survival horror classic.
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