Resident Evil 2 Remake's Demo Was Completed By Only 25% Of Players

So, how did your experience with the Resident Evil 2 demo go? If your half-hour in that Raccoon City police station didn’t go quite to plan, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Barely a quarter of players managed to complete their mission.

As we know, Resident Evil 2 is a game that just hasn’t received the treatment it’s deserved over the years. At the time of its launch, sure, it was well-received by players and critics alike. It wasn’t easy to be released in 1998, the year of such top-drawer items as Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Pokémon Red and Blue, but it was certainly worthy of doing so.

In the two decades since, though, we’ve not heard much from the game. You know what Capcom’s like, after all, re-releasing and porting all over the darn place. It wasn’t until 2015 that they made that glorious "We Do It!" announcement that Resident Evil 2 was finally being remade.

Fast forward a couple more years, and the title is set for a worldwide release this Friday, January 25. Naturally, Capcom have been fuelling the hype train as much as possible in the run-up to release (how about that $900 Japanese collector’s edition?), but what we really wanted was a demo.

Capcom obliged with the 1-Shot Demo, which arrived on the Xbox One, PS4 and Steam stores on January 11. As you might expect, it’s quite the intense experience, throwing you into an early sequence in the game with a strict 30-minute time limit. True to its name, you are indeed given a single shot at playing through, after which you’ll be locked out of the demo.

Resident Evil 2 One Shot Success Rate — Via: VG247

What you can expect in this brief experience, then, is classic Resident Evil gameplay, with modern quality of life adjustments thrown in (the movement, over-the-shoulder aiming and inventory management of later instalments). There are mysterious locked doors, obscure puzzles to solve, inventory-wrangling to deal with, ravenous zombies to empty endless darn pistol shots into (unless you grabbed the shotgun)… you know how this stuff works.

Needless to say, the 1-Shot Demo has proven pretty darn popular, passing the two million player milestone at the end of last week. At the time of writing, ResidentEvil.net now registers 2,376,812, and this is only players who have registered their details with the site in the first place. There are sure to be many more who haven’t.

To ‘complete’ the demo, you just have to unlock that door with the fancy key and talk to your new buddy on the force one more time. Surprisingly, lots of players have failed to do so. The site currently displays a completion rate of just 26%.

Now, we can’t take this entirely at face value. As CinemaBlend reports, players have been manipulating things to get around the time limit, which could affect the numbers. Then there are those who were just enjoying seeing everything in HD for the first time, slowly taking it all in and looking for secrets.

The good news is, there’ll be plenty of time for that when the game launches on January 25.