Remember the huge behemoth from Resident Evil 4? Yeah, he's back -- or at least his loincloth-wearing, dead-bodies-hanging-from-his-belt-sportin' bearded cousin. Like Las Plagas from RE4, the virus that's infected countless villages has a nasty habit of punching its way out of the bodies of its hosts, including the massive beast that descended on Sheva and Chris while they were still in the hummer. It led to an interesting sequence of just trying to unload on the guy, praying enough bullets would find their targets before the gun overheated and left Chris completely open to attack. Because everything was static, only well-placed shots and some carefully-timed button presses to duck under ripped-up telephone poles that the monster swung like so many baseball bats would actual fell the creature.

It helped highlight how Resident Evil 5 is trying to break things up. In addition to having more enemies charging all the time, adding to the feeling of being outnumbered by a murderous mob, there were rail shooting bits (and even static boss fights, as you can see above), wait-and-bait encounters and plenty of unloading all manner of machine gun, shotgun and trusty pistol fire into the faces of a horde of red-eyed baddies. No, nothing that the game is doing is especially new, but it's fun, and that's the whole idea.

Case in point: another boss fight we ran into (yes, there are plenty of them, and they're all quite awesome so far), pitting Chris and Sheva against something that may have once been a bat, but that like scurrying around on the ground just as much as it did flying. The bat...lobster...thing would skitter about, and the only way to put it down was to drop a land mine, bait it toward one, and then unload on the only exposed part of the body while it was stunned: the underside of the tail (again, much like a lobster). Sure, it was fairly simple (though, sticking around near the thing did open up the possibility for a quick dodge move that just made us feel badass when we tempted death), but like the rest of the game, it was a quick "oh yeahhhh" moment and the rest was just in acting on that info.

This funneled into one of the most Resident Evil-y bits of the game that we've played so far -- which it to say it starts to approach being a little on the frightening side. It's not unfair to say that Resident Evil 5 has situated itself firmly on the "action" side of the fence where in the first three games things were definitely meant to provoke a feeling of persistent fear. Resident Evil 4 started the series on more of an action bent, and it's a course that RE5 takes and runs with, for good or ill.

But this part of the game, a dank, pitch-black cave lit only by the light of your partner (which requires some nice teamwork if you're playing in co-op, but the AI does a decent job of looking where you do on its own), definitely produced a few more frightening moments. Part of it is that, while holding the battery-powered light, you can't fire, so you either light the way or let your partner do it and provide the sole source of firepower -- a frightening prospect when at times all you can see is the glow of a crazed enemy's eyes.

It was only a short little trip through the dark mines before things eventually returned to their normal, more open locales (in this case the claustrophobic mines gave way to an open atrium with enemies firing flaming arrows from up above), and we quickly shifted from "ohcrapohcrapohcrap" back into filling enemies' faces with all manner of projectiles. By the time we reached the end of the chapter and squared off against the final boss of the little preview Capcom had assembled for us (we had to take down an overgrown, aquatic version of the sand worm from Beetlejuice with a pair of gattling turrets mounted at the back of a boat), we'd gone through a surprising amount of variety.

Resident Evil 5 is certainly a unique beast. It's not scary like the old games, but nor is it without some unease and tension. The idea of fighting through a single-minded mob (and even reading some of their logs as the virus takes them over), definitely ups the sense of danger, but it's an entirely different feeling from any of the past games. Whether or not this trend changes later in the game or if we get used to the more action-driven elements of things is something will have to hold off on confessing until the full game hits. Luckily, that's only a few weeks away. We'll have a full review then, so check back next month!