Over Spring Break 2 weeks ago, I bought the new game for the 360 “Resident Evil 5″. I have played nearly every game in the series, and I was quite psyched to play this game. I even bought an additional controller so that I could play this on co-op, but my review/critique will be from the single player perspective. I am also a seasoned veteran of gaming (or at least people tell me I am), so please keep that in mind while reading my thoughts on the game. I also beat RE5 in 12 hours roughly over 3 days, which also shows how enthusiastic and excited about getting to play these series. Oh, and there’ll be spoilers here, so sorry about that.

Story

RE5 puts you in the role of Chris Redfield, who has to go to Africa because there are reports of activity from Umbrella and terrorism going on there. Through the story, you end up going through the villages of Africa, oil fields, caves, and an oil tanker (of all places). At the end, you find Wesker trying to take over the world, citing the typical “destroying the world and rebuilding it to make it beautiful again” rationale. This was a very big let down for me, as it shows the lack of writing put into this game. RE4 had roughly this much worth of story, but at least it was disguised all the way up to the final battle, which this giant letdown was revealed to you in a file.

Anyways, from my perspective, the stories of the previous RE games were very MUCH better. This was probably due to the emphasis on the action, which will be described later. In addition, the pacing of the story of this game in peaks and troughs, given to you in very tiny bits at either in the beginning, or right before the end of each subchapter. The only linking glue to these events (before discovering them yourself) was that you had to stay alive since there were so many people coming after yo, and you had to kill them.

Action

The action was very intense. From the very beginning, the designers set the action to 11 (see a previous to see the reference) in the very beginning, and never let it go down. There was action almost all the time, and very little time to take a breath. There were mostly opportunities to shoot every zombie coming after you, but very few opportunities for 1-on-1 encounters to use the knife to save ammo. One had to also collaborate with the computer to get special attacks on zombies, but a lot of the time, this couldn’t happen for me (see below). Also, I had to barely survive through the whole game, as there was only just enough ammo to survive, unlike RE4, where there was TOO much, even on professional. There were also just health pickups, as opposed to having TOO much health in RE4. This amount of developed action was always present, and definitely squashed any attempt at major storytelling here, and this makes me a little sad at the series. In addition, by allowing one to keep the upgraded guns between difficulties takes away the difficulty of Hard, thus making the game super-easy.

Interactions

One of the better improvements I have found to this game than when I played the demo was the explanations of the different control schemes. Type A is the best, as it mimics the play style of RE4, which is close to the original control schemes on the PlayStation and GameCube (how they should be, for SURVIVAL). The default control scheme for RE5 mimics FPS and action games, which makes sense in the sense of where the designers want to take the series, which is away from the original roots and story of the series.

The UI for the game is much better when one has a full screen, as opposed to a split (when I played it on the demo). I get peripheral vision and depth of field, which allows me to plan my moves on how to get through the areas. Many times I had to use this in order to figure a way out of the areas, as many times there were too many zombies (and I only played it on Normal!). Essentially, my eyes only shifted from the upper-right hand corner of the screen, where the map was, to the center of the screen, where Chris was, to allow me to defend myself and find where I should be going next. They even put a colored indicator to show you where to go (it took away from discovery of the world and after beating it, one has to stop looking at the map to get all of the achievements).

The sounds of the game were very lifelike, along with visuals, and were helpful in cuing me to save Sheva (or myself). I had to abuse the primary game mechanic of saving each other to keep myself alive, especially when I ran out of health pickups (patting each other on the back is quite handy, especially when one was just shot or speared!). The satisfying sound of the gun being played when the guns were upgraded was gone, too. This is another let down.

There were interactive sequences during this game as well, but they were only stuck in when it only seemed relevant, and also when there wasn’t one for a long time. I especially hate these type of cutscenes, mainly because they are fancy means of negative enforcement and have to be done multiple times over in order to move on (e.g. Krauser fight in RE4). This was still annoying, and only added more annoyance when the designers put this mechanic in at the most pivotal of scenes. I also don’t like these, as they go against the notion of what a cutscene is (a chance to recontrol pace and let me put the controller down for a sec, for example, amongst other purposes)

Overall

Overall, while I did enjoy the action at times, there were very many negative experiences. Sheva shot me just as often as she did the zombies. In addition, she ended up kicking me down to the dirt quite often, too, as I was trying to knife the zombies to save ammo. For many of the areas, I had to learn how to get by the huge amounts of zombies by first using the checkpoints, and then learning what I should do from my earlier deaths. This was ultimately frustrating, especially on the boss battles (for the ones that weren’t extremely obvious, which were only a couple). There was only one really fun boss battle, in which I got to use the aptly named (from ATHF) “quad laser”, which beamed down a laser from the heavens.

I also was let down, like mentioned earlier, by the poor story. The use of terrorism as a main story device is quite lame, and could be done much better. And also what they did to Wesker in terms of the story was also anticlimactic, as well. The lasting impression from this game was from the interminable lengths of the levels and fights. Whenever I was done with a fight, I would constantly ask if they were done throwing zombies or bosses at me. Sometimes I had to put down the controller for a respite. But the most annoying part was the final Wesker fight. As you can see from the image above, it took me over an hour to finish him off. There was no self-destruct sequence in which I had to kill him in a couple minutes. That’s just a failboat. I would still recommend this game to others, but there is just as much wrong, in my opinion, as there is right with this game. It’s just a generic action game, not a Resident Evil game. There’s also a LOT I left out here, but please feel free to comment if you want to hear more.

And for those who want to see the quad laser from ATHF, here’s an AOL video of it: