Resident... Pew-Pew?
Capcom continues the Resident Evil series' slide into action over horror with seriously mixed results in Resident Evil 5.
Published: March 12, 2009
To their credit, Capcom offers a few sections where you're forced to split up and take alternate, cris-crossing paths to help each other out. These are few and far between in the grand scheme of things, which is a shame given the kind of potential that this has -- especially since, as I mentioned before, Sheva ends up occupying a largely back-up role if she's not being handled by another action person, and even then there's a lot of ammo conservation that's needed until you end up getting an item about midway through the game that makes it a little easier to stock up on stuff.
A bigger missed opportunity -- and this ties into the game's lack of puzzles to begin with -- would have been to really blow out the idea of splitting up, coordinating movements and basically communicating like the pair of BSAA operatives with cute little rock star headsets that they appear to be in all those awesome cutscenes. The addition of a partner by no means feels cheap or tacked-on, but it doesn't feel nearly as fleshed out as the rest of the game's aesthetics and overall presentation.
I will admit that I actually liked both Chris and Sheva's characters. Chris might be the prototypical meathead, but he's hardly annoying, and Sheva manages to sidestep a lot of the typical "gamer babe" stereotypes and ends up feeling like Chris' equal rather than just a pair of boobs with guns. In fact, and I realize this might come off as sounding a bit nerdy, but I actually enjoyed the story as a whole. The final act of things is so ridiculously over-the-top that it passes the realm of insanity and just cruises right into "did that just happen? Sweet!" territory.
Unfortunately, the game isn't shy about trying to derail some of that sweetness at pretty regular intervals. I mentioned it before, and there's a good chance if you played through the demo that was released a while back, you've experienced some of the frustration that comes from enemies pounding on you while you're stuck in place reloading or getting hit when you're down. There's a lot of this in the game, effectively beating on you when you can't do anything to defend yourself, such as the open plains on-rails shooting section where -- I kid you not -- five molitov cocktails smashed into our truck one after another and essentially caught me in an endless loop of reeling from explosions... until I died.
Again, if the game didn't grade the number of deaths you racked up (as well as accuracy, time it took to get through the level and enemies kil--er, "routed") at the end of the level, and then uploaded that score to leaderboards, it wouldn't be as big a deal. Instead, it starts to make everything feel cheap -- or at the very least intended to get people to play through things again for intangible bragging rights. Given that I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff, it added an unnecessary sense of aggravation to things. When coupled with some odd design choices like particular wording on a QTE button prompt during a boss fight that was already uncharacteristically vague in what you were supposed to do, it just leads to a lot of seeing "You Are Dead" or "Your Partner Has Died" more than you should.
It also means an inevitable trip through the game's pre-level commerce section before you start again. I can understand the why of it, as it's entirely possible to get stuck in the game without being able to finish a boss fight due to running out of ammo (which actually happened, leaving me with no other option than to upgrade my weapons' capacity which automatically maxes out the ammo for said weapon).
Maybe it's just frustration at what could have been. It's clear that there was considerable amount of time and effort put into the game, and one could postulate given the delay in actually announcing it that the game that's arrived today, with co-op and bonus modes that we're not allowed to talk about, may not have been the original project, but it does no good to play what-if. What's here, presented on disc, is, if nothing else, a hell of a visual treat.
