The best action games like Resident Evil 2 are Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Village and Dead Space. Below are 11, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made Resident Evil 2 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
The action end of the same series, and the most purely enjoyable of them.
The modern entry, and the most varied of the recent run.
Scarier, and strategic dismemberment changes every encounter.
The other pillar of the genre, and the one to play for the story.
A small indie that rebuilds classic survival horror exactly.
Survival horror welded to a detective story, and far stranger.
By Resident Evil's creator, and the closest thing to a spiritual sequel.
Fixed cameras and tank-adjacent controls, made deliberately.
Horror that unsettles by idea rather than by ammunition count.
Same era, same New York dread, with an RPG underneath.
Capcom doing the same thing with dinosaurs, and it works.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Resident Evil 2 that are not action games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Resident Evil 2 — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Resident Evil 4. The action end of the same series, and the most purely enjoyable of them.
No. Resident Evil 2 released on the PlayStation, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Resident Evil 2 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.