Knives have durability, and using them excessively causes them to break. No longer the unbreakable Excalibur, knives are now more limited. Likewise, melee weapons have changed a little. However, they are one-use boards, so you'll obviously need to consider which areas should be made safer. In the demo, you can also find boards that you can use to seal windows, which limits the number of zombies who can spawn into previously safe areas. Knowing when a zombie has to stay dead versus when you can settle for "down is good enough" is an important distinct, somewhat similar to the Crimson Heads from the first Resident Evil remake. While the demo is too linear to get a real feel for it, it's clear this will be super important in the final game. The only way to be sure is to utterly obliterate the head or to spend precious ammo to convert a zombie from maybe dead to assuredly dead. Some zombies go down and seem dead but will get back up later. Even then, blowing apart a zombie's head isn't necessarily enough to stop them. Quick-fire headshots don't work as effectively. More importantly, the only way to get a real headshot is to pause for a moment and allow Leon to properly aim. You obviously want to go for headshots, but that isn't always easy when you have multiple zombies lurching at you. Taking down a zombie is a surprisingly thoughtful process. The game focuses on the decaying and nearly unkillable aspect of zombies. It quickly becomes tense when there are multiple zombies lurching toward you, and every bullet wasted feels like a setback. They can take surprising amounts of damage, and anyone that isn't obliterating their heads has a chance of losing an arm or leg. The zombies who appear in the game are gross, shambling, and disgustingly durable things. By this point, anyone who has ever touched a controller is probably inured to zombies, but Resident Evil 2 seems aware of that.
One of the most impressive things about the Resident Evil 2 demo is that it makes zombies scary again.
You have better movement, manual aiming, and a lot of general gameplay improvements, but it doesn't feel like an entirely different experience.
In the demo, the game feels like a properly fleshed-out PlayStation 1 game, and it works well. This isn't just an HD port, but it seems to have been made with the intent of the original game. Many remakes seem focused on creating a whole new game, but Resident Evil 2 seems to be focused on modernizing the original without losing the original game. Some puzzles are logical, such as finding a safe combination, and others are delightfully absurd, such as having to use journal entries and pictures to find medallions to unlock a hidden exit. The demo only covers a small percentage of the game and contains a lot of puzzles that can't actually be solved. The police station is a convoluted and complex maze of barriers, destroyed rooms, strange puzzles, and danger aplenty. The demo follows Leon during his early exploration of the overrun police station, and all of the classic Resident Evil tropes are present. Amazingly, from our time with the 30-minute demo, Resident Evil 2 Remake may just live up to those expectations. Resident Evil 2 was held in as high, if not higher, regard than its predecessor, so when a remake was announced, the expectations were sky high. It combined the same basic framework with a number of improvements, new features, and surprises that made it a delight to play as either a newcomer or a veteran.
The original Resident Evil remake for the GameCube is arguably the gold standard for how to update an older game.