I have finally played Resident Evil 5, and boy did it take me a while. Apparently a couple of game of year awards wasn’t enough to convince me that this was a good game, it took several friends and co-workers to get me playing this game. I am not a big Resident Evil guy, I have played Resident Evil 4 (have yet to finish it), and Resident Evil 3 (which I love it). The thing about Resident Evil is that I feel that it is the kind of game that is suppose to try to scare you. Resident Evil 3 left that impression on me, having Nemesis chasing me around was by far the scariest thing I have ever faced in my gaming career. From the videos and screenshots I seen from Resident Evil 5, it did not leave me the impression that the game was scary, so I was a bit turned off. However, I have finally given in and played the game to see it for myself.
I started the game with a friend in co-op mode, my friend had already played the game so he showed me couple tricks like using melee and upgrading capacity in your weapons in order to get a free reload. Co-op is pretty fun, but playing split screen is awful. A good chunk of my screen was empty for some reason, this is not the first game I have played that has that issue in split screen. I do not why developers do it, but do not give me an excuse that “system can’t take it,” if Gears of War can do it, Resident Evil 5 can do it.
After the first chapter my friend decided to have a social life and left me to play with myself. I usually hate playing these types of games with an AI, mainly because the AI is useless. But I was surprise to find out that the AI was not only useful, but sometimes even better than a human. The AI always healed me right when I need it, killed just as much as me (sometimes killed even more,) and gave me it’s ammo whenever I ran low on it. That is not to say it didn’t irritate me sometimes, but I was pleasantly surprised with the co-op AI.
I played the game on normal, and I think the game was just right on the difficulty. I got stuck in some parts, but never felt like it was impossible. While I definitely think I would had been much better off with a human has my partner, the AI did a pretty good job helping me. Of course there were moments I found myself yelling at the TV like some type lunatic (looking back at it now, it was pretty funny.)
I am not a big fan of the all aim shoot, approach enemy, punch and repeat gameplay style that Resident Evil 4 introduced. But after a while I got used to it. It is definitely fun to give your enemy an uppercut so hard that it breaks his skull. One thing I rather hate it was the layout of the levels, it felt very cramped and did not give me a lot of freedom to move around.
One thing I recall quite well from Resident Evil 3 is the how tight you have to be with your ammo. In Resident Evil 5 it did not feel like I needed to be that careful with ammo, that is not to say I didn’t run out of ammo a bunch of times, but it definitely felt that the game was much more forgiving in that aspect.
Inventory was much easier to manage, no longer did “X” item occupy “Y” amount of space. Every item occupies only one slot, making less frustrating to control what you carried. The only down side is that items you discard disappear forever rather than just dropping on the floor. Managing the AI’s inventory was not very easy thing to do in game. While you can tell the AI to give you a certain item, or to collect an item on the floor. You can’t tell the AI to just discard an item, I had to request an item from the AI and discard it myself.
As I said before I am not a big Resident Evil nerd, so the story was hard to follow at points. In all fairness, the game does try to explain some of the Resident Evil story line in the loading screen, but I did not feel like reading it. The story felt quite bland, no twists, nor any emotional moments that made me care about the characters. However, from what I understand the stories in these games are weird so it is not just me.
Boss fights were not too complex either, aside from the boss in 5-2 (which I had to use Rocket Launcher), none of the bosses gave me a hard time. What is really cool though is the cinematic right before the bosses, not because it looks nice, but because you think you are watching a cinematic but out nowhere the game tells you to press a certain button. I was caught off guard plenty of times because of this perfect blend between cinematic and gameplay. My suggestion is, do not put the controller down for a single second.
I must say that my expectations for this game were definitely exceeded, while Resident Evil 3 is still my favorite in the series, Resident Evil 5 is a pretty fun game to play whether you’re playing by yourself or with a friend. I am seriously considering downloading the extra chapter and playing the game for that extra hour or so. If you are like me and have your doubts about the game, I would highly suggest you play it. For $15 dollars, it’s definitely worth the money. Get a friend to sleep over and play the game all night, you are going to have a blast.
Written by Giovanni Costa. Copyright © 2010-2012 Rewind Replay Publications LLC, all rights reserved.
