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Heaven Dust 2 is the cutest version of Resident Evil 2 you can play

775 View2023-12-16

Heaven Dust 2

8.3

CartoonDungeon CrawlerSci-fiAction RPGZombiesActionRPGHorror

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SHOULD I PLAY HEAVEN DUST 2?

This one’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re interested in Resident Evil 2 but have been put off by the sheer amount of terror and gore. In fact, just imagine the chibi version of Resident Evil 2 and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of Heaven Dust 2, which is about a guy who wakes up in a zombie-infested research facility and has to solve a bunch of bizarre puzzles to escape, all while avoiding being munched on by the walking dead.

PLAY IT FOR YOURSELF

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TIME PLAYED

I played an hour of the Heaven Dust 2 demo, which was the time it took for me to complete it. The ending came as a bit of a surprise, and I was disappointed—I definitely wanted to play more. The demo included the first few sections of the research facility, and I found a security uniform, a pistol, a waist satchel that increased my inventory space, and a knife, as well as a bunch of keys and ingredients to use for making ammo and healing items. There were even green and red herbs, in case the Resident Evil inspiration wasn’t clear enough.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT HEAVEN DUST 2?

• Great look. Heaven Dust 2 is a cute reimagining of the overgrown police stations and research facilities you probably already know from the Resident Evil series. The whole thing looks like something out of the Sega Saturn era, and while it’s definitely less menacing and scary than Capcom’s horror games, it’s still dark and cramped enough to be juuuuust a bit spooky from time to time.

• Some really cool puzzles. I didn’t run into anything truly devious in Heaven Dust 2, but a couple puzzles were nice and satisfying to solve. Without giving anything away, on one occasion I had to consult an outside reference to work out an access code, while another puzzle had me carefully watching a garden water feature for clues.

• Clever combat system. The zoomed out isometric perspective cut down on the tension, but Heaven Dust 2 still managed to keep combat at a nice intensity level by making me deliberately raise my weapon to aim at approaching enemies. I could either fire when my reticule first locked onto a zombie, or wait for a moment to zero in on a weak spot, like a head. I walked much more slowly with my pistol raised, and so waiting to take that more precise shot was sometimes anxiety inducing, especially when a pack of zombies was getting close to arm’s length from my character.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT HEAVEN DUST 2?

• Very derivative. The new perspective isn’t quite enough to cover for how cautiously Heaven Dust 2 sticks to the Resident Evil 2 script. Combining red and green herbs, crafting weapon rounds, and finding keys for hilariously impractical puzzle doors are all lifted directly from the Resident Evil series, which to me crossed the boundary from loving homage into copycat territory in several cases.

• Buggy menus. It took some fiddling with resolution settings to get my inventory menu to display correctly—by default, the two halves of that screen were rendered overlapping each other, which made it effectively impossible to use. Another time I loaded the game and no text boxes would pop up at all, although this resolved itself when I exited and reloaded the game.

• Keep flipping that light switch. You’ll know what I mean. That puzzle annoyed me.

PLATFORM TESTED

PC.

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO PLAY ON THE CLOUD?

Heaven Dust 2’s touch controls need some work. The mobile version that loads via the cloud uses a confusing touch interface that’s awkwardly matched up with the PC prompts displayed on screen—instead of replacing the right click and left click prompts, for example, there are right click and left click “buttons” included in the touch UI, bizarrely placed on opposite sides of the screen. Another issue I ran into was with the movement controls, which are bound to a virtual thumbstick that only registered when I pressed it all the way to the edge. In other words, everything except the extreme rim of the on-screen icon is functionally a dead zone. This felt really bad just walking around with, so I don’t even want to imagine how awkward and unresponsive it feels in the heat of combat.