Resident Evil 2 Boss Weaknesses | How to beat every boss in the game with low ammo

Running out of ammo while fighting a boss in Resident Evil 2 remake is a genuine possibility. The game doesn’t hold your hand, and it’s entirely possible to find yourself in a situation where you can’t just use brute force to beat an enemy. Luckily, the developers put boss weaknesses in Resident Evil 2 that you can exploit to defeat your toughest foes with much less ammo than if you face them head-on.

Below we’ve listed each boss weakness in Resident Evil 2. Some of these are tricky to pull off, and some have prerequisites that are required for them to work. Executed right, though, you’ll be able to beat each boss in the game with little to no ammo.

Warning: Major spoilers below.

Resident Evil 2 Birkin First Form weakness | Underground Facility fight

When you face William Birkin for the first time in the underground facility, he’s by far the most potent enemy you’ve met thus far in the game. Fortunately, his weakness is very simple to exploit. Once you cause a bit of damage, the massive eyeball in his right arm will open up. By hitting Birkin here, you’ll do more harm than you would just shooting him in the head or body.

There are handgun rounds scattered in the corners of the area you fight Birkin in, which will help replenish your ammo stocks if you’re out of bullets. If you aim carefully and make each shot count, you should be able to take him out with around 30-50 handgun bullets. Also, keep in mind that if you saved in the Secret Room before this fight, you can return to the RPD in the 2nd run scenarios if need be.

Birkin’s first form can also be cheesed. If you can get into the right rhythm and keep glued to his right side, you can get Birkin stuck in a loop where you’ll continually stagger him. This allows you to keep going to town on him and as soon as he recovers he’ll stagger again.

Weirdly, knife damage is tied to framerate in Resident Evil 2 remake, so if you’re on PC, you can accelerate this fight if your framerate is high enough. On average, you’ll go through about a knife and a half to take him down, so if you go this route, make sure you start the boss fight with at least two full knives. Before this fight, there are 2-3 available for you to pick up. You can get one from Marvin (1st run only), one near a body in the library, and one in the Safety Deposit Room out of one of the lockers.

Resident Evil 2 Birkin Second Form weakness | Sewer fight

You’ll meet Birkin a second time after you solve the chess piece puzzle in the sewers. This fight requires you to use little ammo if you can get everything to go your way.

The first thing you should do is hit the button to start the container swinging around. The key is to play cat and mouse until the container is in position. When it comes to a stop, you need to make Birkin kneel as close to the opposite end of the area from the crane control panel as you can.

Once he’s around where you want to drop him start attacking his eyes. The one on his arm is the most obvious one, but this time you also get a smaller bonus eye on his back. It doesn’t take a ton of ammo to “pop” one, and when you do, he’ll kneel. Of particular note is G-2’s weakness to fire. You can get him to kneel with the Flamethrower as Leon, and he’ll stay down for as long as he’s on fire. Strangely, Flame Grenades do not have the same effect.

When he kneels, rush over to the panel and hit the button. If everything goes right, the container should smash into him just when he’s gotten up from being stunned. If you can do this, twice the fight will be over, and you’ll have only used up a bit of ammo.

Again, if you’re just flat out of ammo and you run out of the handgun ammo and magnum bullets you can find in the location where you fight Birkin, you can use the knife to make him kneel. If you want to run the risk, you can even win this fight without firing a shot if you can somehow hit Birkin with the container twice without getting hit yourself. However, this method takes a lot of luck and iron wills.

Resident Evil 2 Birkin Third Form weakness | Lab fight

The third fight with Birkin consists of three stages, but it’s not immediately apparent that’s the case. You cannot defeat him until he rips the huge chunk off the wall, so you can use that, along with the color of his eyes as an indicator of when he’s closed to death.

When you start the fight if you’re low on ammo you can check the four corners of the room for bullets, defensive grenades, and healing items. Though the munitions you get here can help, they aren’t enough to down Birkin on their own. Additionally, this fight doesn’t have any particularly great gimmicks to help you cheese Birkin, so it’s more of a straight-up battle.

When you start the fight with G-3, go for the eyes. There’s one on his back, front left leg, and the big one in the right arm. When you take them out, he’ll kneel, and a bunch of googly eyes will come out of his chest. Shooting these speeds up his transition to the next stage, but won’t kill him, so beware of dumping too much ammo into him.

The second stage of the fight with Birkin’s third form begins when he is no longer guarding his chest googly eyes. They’ll just kind of poke out. Remain focused on his arm, leg, and back eyes, and hit his chest when he kneels.

After taking enough damage in his second stage, he’ll run over to one of the walls and pull a huge chunk of it off and slam it on the ground. After he does this, you can take him down. Just pour ammo into all his eyes, and he’ll keel over.

As stated above, there’s no big way to cheese your way through this fight. If you’re low on ammo, the best thing you can do is to make sure you’re not pouring the damage on too thick. Birkin will not die until he pulls the chunk of a wall down, so it’s entirely possible to “overkill” him in the first or second stage and not have enough ammo to take down the third and final one.

Resident Evil 2 remake Guides and Walkthrough

Resident Evil 2 Birkin Fourth Form weakness | Train platform fight

This is a Claire-only fight, and the game does you the solid of giving you a minigun beforehand. Unfortunately, G-4 is tanky so the 400 rounds you get with the minigun likely won’t take him down.

Your first order of business is to empty your new weapon into his eyeball/mouth. Only open fire when you know you’ll hit. It’s easy to get excited and spray the wall with a burst of bullets that could be used on Birkin. When he jumps up on the wall, do your best to avoid him landing on you and hold your fire.

The best strategy in this fight is to stay on your feet. G-4’s most deadly move is a quick charge that can catch you from all the way across the platform. To counter this, you want to try and stick to one end of the train or the other so you can quickly duck around it if he decides to use this move.

This is another fight you can use Birkin’s eye color to gauge his health. The more damaged he is, the redder his eyes will turn. Eventually, he’ll slow to a crawl and start making awful moaning noises. This means he’s almost dead. However, he’s still deadly, even if he’s lost his speed.

You’ll likely run out of minigun ammo before the end of the fight. If that’s the case, you have a decision to make. If you’re on a 1st run scenario, go no holds barred on him, and aim for his eyes. If it’s you’re on a Claire 2nd run; then you’ll want to be more conservative and try and use your weaker weapons.

Resident Evil 2 Birkin Fifth Form weakness | Train fight

This fight is exclusive to the end of the 2nd run scenarios. You don’t have to worry about maneuvering, but you do need to deal a ton of damage in a very short time.

Leon has the easiest time with this fight. You’ll have the rocket launcher and three rockets left from your battle with Super Tyrant. Just wait until blob Birkin drags himself far enough into the car for the mouth in his eye to open and nail it will all three rockets. This should be enough to kill him if you hit him dead on with all three.

Claire has a harder time ahead of her. Your minigun is likely depleted, and chances are your other heavy weapons are empty or only have a few rounds left. Leave any healing items behind and load up on as much ammo as you can with an emphasis on grenade rounds if possible. If Birkin reaches you in time it’s an instant kill, so you don’t really have to worry about health, just dealing damage.

One thing to note about this fight is that the base handgun doesn’t do enough damage to Birkin to kill him before he kills you unless you start firing from as soon as he enters the car, the Flamethrower doesn’t do anything, and the Spark Shot is pretty useless as well. This means you pretty much need to have at least a few grenade rounds as an opener.

The Colt SAA is marginally better than your standard handguns since its rounds carry a bit more power, so make sure and use the bullets for it up first before switching to another pistol. Also, note that if you’re a particularly good marksman, there’s a smaller eye that appears on his right shoulder that you can hit before he opens his main eye that will do damage and possibly cause him to be stunned for a moment. However, he flails around so much that you’ll have difficulty hitting it before he’s right on top of you.

Resident Evil 2 Super Tyrant weakness | Mr. X Final Form fight

Leon’s exclusive end-game fight is intimidating at first, but you can actually win it without firing a single bullet. The main thing you have to keep in mind is avoiding the Super Tyrant’s insta-kill move. Other than that it’s just running down the clock until you get the rocket launcher.

If you don’t cause any damage to the Super Tyrant, the rocket launcher will be dropped around three minutes or so after the fight begins. You can speed this up by causing damage to him to as low as two minutes. However, if you’re low or out of ammo, you can still beat him by just waiting.

The best strategy to avoid his swiping attacks is to stay away from him. If he gets too close, run right and try and get around him as he’ll always attack with his clawed right arm. Mr. X is at his most dangerous, though, when he begins winding up for his charge attack. He’ll stand in place, square his shoulders and look up when he’s about to do it.

The best way to stop him from charging is to throw a defensive grenade when he’s in his wind-up phase. Both Flash and Frag Grenades work equally well at stopping him, but Frag Grenades also have the bonus of doing damage to him which will speed the clock up.

If you’re out of grenades, shoot him in the head a few times. One shot with the magnum will stagger him, and even with the pistol it only takes a few bullets to stop him from charging.

When the time runs down, a rocket launcher will be thrown in front of Leon from the shadows. Don’t get cocky here, though. Mr. X will likely get one last hit in on you as you go to grab the launcher. Once you have it though, it just takes one rocket to take him out.