Resident Evil 2: Dead Shot/Arcade Goes On Test At Round1USA

Back in July, the surprise story of the Summer broken by us was the quiet appearance of a Resident Evil 2 arcade lightgun shooter from Bandai Namco and Capcom on location test in the UK. Thanks to the game’s big name, it was quickly picked up by various other gaming news outlets, with the test soon ending after that. At the Tokyo Game Show in September it was then officially unveiled as Resident Evil 2/Biohazard RE:2 Arcade, with tests for the US in the Winter and Japan in Spring 2026 announced.

Though the game is not going to appear at IAAPA 2025 this month due to it still being midway through development, Bandai Namco have wasted no time in starting that Stateside test, as Resident Evil 2: Dead Shot has now appeared for a limited time in the US at a Round1 location. Let’s take a look:

NOTE: The game discussed in this post is on location test, which is the arcade industry equivalent of a beta test. The final product may differ significantly from the final production release – if the game passes the test and reaches production. We’ve also been asked to not share the specific location in this case, so we’ll respect that request.

Resident Evil 2: Dead Shot/Arcade Goes On Test At Round1USA

The upcoming Resident Evil 2 arcade game’s first US appearance was originally spotted by site reader, Stern Pinball programmer and light-gun game nut Multibrawlr, who posted his pictures and impressions of the game after playing it for the first time late last week. Since then we’ve additionally had some media of the cabinet come through from Manamaster (who also informed us of Bike Dash Delivery‘s US tests… wonder what happened to that game), which can all be seen below.

The below photo gallery has a great look at how the cabinet currently stands, including its guns (which have blowback). Also interesting to note is that despite simply using the “Arcade” subtitle on its aforementioned Tokyo Game Show reveal, here it is retaining “Dead Shot”:

Then we also have some new video of the game from Manamaster too. We did already get plenty of footage of this from the original UK test, between the first to be ever captured for us by site friend Toby and subsequent sources, but further videos on top of that can't hurt:

For those impressions from Multibrawlr mentioned earlier, he unfortunately notes that the game's difficulty is pretty harsh; enemies can regularly knock your health bar down from full strength to 20 or 10% in one hit. This is a slight shame (though not unprecedented, as other titles like Raw Thrills' shooters do the same), since graphically it looks fantastic, and otherwise has good gameplay mechanics. With some luck though, that could be changed by the time of its mooted late 2026 release - it's possible they may get some feedback at the tests in Japan next year, where companies tend to much more actively monitor feedback.

As mentioned above, this is one game that we know for certain will not be appearing at IAAPA 2025 this month (nor Japan's Amusement Expo later this week either), especially since it is still under active development; as can be seen in the above video, three levels are yet to be implemented. This is why we like to emphasize that games on location test can always change considerably, though not all of them make the specific point of there being additional future content like this.

In the meantime, stay tuned to the blog and YouTube channel throughout the coming days, as we will have plenty of coverage of Bandai Namco's IAAPA 2025 and Japan's Amusement Expo 2025 presence, where they will have several new games at both events - just not this one. Thanks once again to Multibrawlr and Manamaster for sharing their media and thoughts on the game, as well as Ted for organizing things with the latter. What do you think of Resident Evil 2: Dead Shot's US test?

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