Having played this to death and having 900/1000 points (for now) I’ll share my thoughts about it. But to give some perspective we need to take a look at it’s legendary predecessor. (spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t played either game)
Resident Evil 4 was a brilliant game in it’s day, totally reinventing the series for the better. The clunky tank controls were gone, replaced by slightly less clunky tank controls which actually suited the game and a new 3rd person camera. Cheap scare ‘dog through the window’ moments were replaced by genuinely creepy environments and moments full of tension.
Who could forget the moment you walked into the village and suddenly the music changed and you were assaulted by hordes of crazy villagers, especially when the guy with the chainsaw came along.
Or in the castle when all you could hear was the sound of those chanting monks coming to get you.
Or when you were trapped in the house with Luis and Ashley and had to hold your ground against the angry mob.
Or when you see the regenerator for the first time, you know you it will come to life and you can’t kill it.
Now we get to Resident Evil 5. I was eagerly anticipating this game since it was announced, and I had pretty high expectations for it. Did it deliver the great experience that RE4 did?
The answer is no. Lets my point out my issues with the game.
Too many times in the game am I reminded about awesome moments in RE4. Within moments of starting the game, I’m greeted with almost the exact same village scenario at the start of RE4. Later during the game, the El Gigante from RE4 makes an appearance, except this time it’s a stupid vehicular shooting minigame instead of the epic boss fight it was in the previous game.
The controls. Despite the ‘slight’ improvements they’ve made such as being able to choose the control schemes, this time around the controls don’t sit quite as well despite being almost exactly the same game. Despite the new schemes, I found myself setting it back to good ol’ RE4 style. But even after the Wii edition’s perfect control scheme it feels very outdated. More on this later.
The laser pointer aiming. It sucked faceplanting into the TV to aim at some guy in the distance last time and it still sucks now. Why couldn’t we have a crosshair at least this time?
The addition of a partner. I feel that this game suffers from what I call ‘co-op’ syndrome, in which the developer decides that co-op is a good inclusion in their game then decides to (re)design their game around it. Resident Evil was always about being alone, and that was part of the tension. In RE5, you’re fighting the same amount of enemies but now you have a friend with you to help out. They really should have upped the number of zombies you fight at once to balance this, and I’m talking about Left 4 Dead numbers here.
Guns and ammo carrying over and chapter select. Chapter select isn’t a bad idea, but when your inventory is continuous across all difficulties it can make the game too easy. Say you run low on ammunition or health, you could simply reload a previous chapter, grab some herbs and ammo, save your game and voila, you’re fully loaded again. Even worse, there’s a particular level which has a rocket launcher easily accessible right at the start of the map. This combined with the partner and the way save games work gives birth to duping tricks which totally ruin the difficulty.
Too easy to get superweapons. In RE4, you had to play Mercenaries to unlock the holy mother of all guns, the Handcannon. And by play, I mean you had to fucking own it, by getting 5 stars on each of the 4 stages with all 5 characters, and having done this, let me tell you it’s no easy feat. Furthermore, to unlock unlimited ammo for it you had to collect a rather large sum of money which you could only hope to amass by finishing the game yet again. This made owning the Handcannon after all that work so much more rewarding to own. In RE5, you can simply unlock the Handcannon by purchasing the best magnum and upgrading it fully. This combined with the above trick means almost anyone can do this.
Rather uninspired boss fights. From the get go, you were captivated by awesome boss fights in RE4. Nothing in RE5 even comes close.
The plot. RE4 was simple. You rescue the president’s daughter (are you a bad enough dude?), and this does not change throughout the game. In RE5, there never seems be a clear context as to what you have to do or why. You spend the first half of the game chasing after ‘some guy’ for no clear reason, and after that you just happen to stumble onto Wesker’s plot to destroy the world.
As you progress through the game, you eventually get to the token secret death star bottomless pit lab where the baddie always hides out in. Here’s where the game gets kinda fucked up. It’s at this point where you encounter zombies WITH GUNS. This is not just once or twice like RE4 either, but about 50% of the enemies from this point onwards carry guns and shoot at you.
And suddenly you can press X (or square in PS3 version) to take cover to pop and shoot.
Then it hit me. I was really playing Gears of War all this time. The controls, the partner, the cover system. This is confirmed later on when you have to fight a large boss using the Hammer of Dawn from GoW. And it’s this combination GoW with RE4 controls that really bugs me.
The problem with this game is that while it tries to be RE4, it’s also trying to be different at the same time. The result is a game which doesn’t really know what it is. Is it a survival horror game? No, the horror is nowhere to be seen. Is it an action FPS with zombies? No, the controls don’t suit it at all. If CAPCOM had decided to go all the way with either genre, chances are I probably wouldn’t be complaining right now.
Despite all it’s flaws RE5 is still a great game and one that I enjoyed immensely. It’s one of the best looking games on a next gen console at the moment by but it’s certainly doesn’t push any boundaries and it’s just not GOTY material in this day and age, or even Resident Evil anymore.