Resident Evil 5 – By Dogma
I’m starting to wonder if anyone at Capcom still remembers what “Survival Horror” is supposed to be. Although, recently the only games that really do justice to the series are Condemned 2, and Dead Space. But more often then naught if they’re not suffering from going completely banana’s at about midway through it, it’s problematic in being really jumpy but lacking horror and the enforced survival aspect of it all.
The key is always subtlety and/ or pacing. You sacrifice the desire to create a screen full of enemies, in order to very carefully put you in a scenario with just a few blood thirsty zombies, willing to grab and kill for brains, and in turn have them hiding and waiting behind you where the camera can’t reach.
If you give the character too much ammunition, it becomes a hindrance. As the zombies aren’t really zombies or at the least really all that scary. Horror games are horrific because they are frightening, and the survival aspect of it all is the thing that need be focused upon. Fighting to win and kill everything that moves, with all the ammo and med kits you picked up along the way are alittle hard to brag about when the enemies are supposed to be mindless brain eating machines, but if you simply replace that idea with low ammo stores and the really shitty hand to hand combat. At that point the once mundane task of shooting everything that looks the least bit menacing, now causes you to run away shitless afraid that an enemy will be waiting for you, with friends and they don’t die.
Resident Evil 5, is not a survival horror game. In fact it’s got so few scary moments that it doesn’t look like a even a horror game, but instead an action 3rd person clone with the gore ramped up and slightly smaller ammunition stores.
But I suppose I can only blame RE4 for butchering the idea of Survival Horror in Resident Evil, as while being legitimately shocking from time to time, that game was really all about the action, and boss fights with more ammo then a small country.
But while Resident Evil 5 tries it’s best to leave a good impression of it’s big brother, and yet still goes different routes, most of what the game will actually feel like is a very competent game, that doesn’t really achieve much, or destroy anything in particular. It takes very few risks, and hardly moves any hearts with innovation. Unlike RE4, RE5 is just a clone with co-op.
The story this time, is that your Chris Redfield, a protagonist from past RE games, and former partner of Jill Valentine. It’s okay if you didn’t know that from the Redfield name, as not only does the game go out of it’s way to make most of that needless, but when it doesn’t, Chris’ annoying whining about Jill all the time will be all the reminder you need.
Your partnered up with Sheva Alomar, a woman who was born in Africa, then taken to Britain to learn how to speak, act, dress, tan, etc, and then brought back to Africa apparently, and while I’d have liked her to have a thick Kijuju accent for the lulz, I suppose it’s understandable why Capcom took the lesser of two evils.
The two embark on an epic journey throughout Kijuju, which bleeds of inconsistency from every orifice. To say that I dislike RE5 would be a lie, but please understand that there’s a lot of things I don’t like about it.
The complete lack of subtlety and pacing is one thing, but just the sheer amount of random crap stuffed into the plot is laughable.
RE5 strikes me as a game that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, the beginning makes it seem like it wants to be scary, but that doesn’t quite work when you have another living, breathing, sane partner right next to you the entire fucking time!
The scenes change almost infinitely, from the initial village encounter, to a ghetto, to a train yard, somehow you ended up on the back of a jeep gunning down motorcycle zombies with a machine gun, and the next your playing a cheap Tomb Raider Co-Op adventure sequence in the middle of a temple.
It’s just ridiculous, and if that doesn’t make it bad enough, the game still takes itself completely serious the entire time.
Enemies seem to get infected around the time that you find them, giant boss monsters are ready to show up just because your there, and the last noble soldier from Delta and Alpha are more then willing to hold back death for another few seconds until you get see them die in front of you and always ask something stupid.
“Are you okay?” says Chris Redfield to a random infected wigging out on the ground with blood coming out of his eyes. The natural response would have been something other then “Damn man, I hope your allright” when he’s clearly dying and gasping for air.
“We have to save the world!” remarks Sheva Alomar, ten seconds after you save the life of an old partner, and now Chris is having a sudden change of heart and has his panties in a naught because she has a flesh wound.
There’s even a sequence, where Chirs and Sheva are capable of shooting thin bike chains, and the spokes on a gun turret from at least 30 feet away on a boat, with a snipers precision. But for some reason when an important character is involved they miss every vital point imaginable, unless of course you did it in a quicktime event.
Which leads me to another point, while Resident Evil 4’s quick time events didn’t really bother me all that much, not too many in number and usually in such well placed fragments that they’re useful, and keep the tension going, they were still strangely forgiving.
Most of RE5’s quicktime events are usually in bunches of one or two, sometimes far apart enough so that you’ll either be caught with your hand down your pants and are now dead, or are able to see it before even the game thought it was coming. I can’t help who’s idea it was to make a cutscene largely skippable until you press L and R at the same time before you can even get to the boss fight, I just can’t shake the feeling that it somewhat misses the point.
Albeit, it reminds me more of Kindom Heart’s style of quicktime action events mixed in with some gore or getting eaten by an alligator when you mess it up.
Also, I can’t help but think it takes the piss out of a survival horror game if you judge players on a scale from D to S based on how well they completed a level. I thought the intention was survival and something legitimately frightening, not a rankable scale of how well you were able to deal with blood crazed Majini within 30 minutes and how many you killed being a factor. It just removes a lot of the immersion the game was going for..
But allow me to conclude like so, as while I’ve said all that about the game, there’s something to conclude upon.
While Resident Evil 5 is really just a co-op Resident Evil experience, shy of 4’s strange amount of quality and above Outbreak in terms of practicality. It does good to note that RE4 is still a really good game, and Resident evil outbreak was a good idea, so combining the idea isn’t really volatile. With that out on the table, that leaves Resident Evil 5 somewhere between average and above average in terms of scale.
The gameplay itself is usually well rewarding, or tense enough to enjoy shooting off hordes of zombies with nothing more than a pistol. Conserving hordes of ammunition between you and your partner is frustrating, but a step up from having stockpiles for just one guy with a mache case, it balances it out, poorly but it’s better then nothing.
The Co-Op aspects are still really fun. I played with Kakuzu through the whole storyline seeing as splitscreen makes everything harder to see, and for the most part it was enjoyable to get through, when not laughing at the ridiculous storyline, dialogue, or location swaps.
The Majini and the bad guys do cock things up a bit, with not really being all that scary, but I can’t say I can condemn a zombie game for giving Zombies fully automatic AK-47’s but I don’t like it. It makes me wonder if this game was meant to be a zombie game or something scary anymore, or really just a “kick ass” action game, shy of Gears of War’s humor and chainsaw gun, but with virus’ and botched supersoldier research.
As that’s pretty much all I’ve been able to grasp.
I do recommend Resident Evil 5, very few people who like the idea of resident evil, and an action game will particularly hate it, and while it’s competent and able to stand on it’s own, many other action and survival horror games have been done better, and should be looked at before you look at this.
But on a lighter note, I am ecstatic that they’ll be making the next game completely new, and that they’ll finally scrap Umbrella’s retarded schemes, or Chris and Weskers infinite retarded dialogue with one another. It really means that another of the small line of Survival horror series’ are going to get a chance to really step out and listen to some feedback. Instead of looking at success and trying to recreate it until it’s been beaten to death.
And while suggesting that all the soldiers are killed halfway through to give room for something much more hilarious, like somebodies housewife/mother being the hero of the game is unlikely.
It’s just good to know that the mailbox will be open, and we can finally put an old dog to rest.