Resident Evil Five for the Xbox 360

 In my review of the last remnant, I began by saying that the game wasn’t all that good. Then I sang it’s praises for three pages. Here, I will be doing the opposite. Resident evil five is a pretty fun game, but the frustrations are many, and some of them made me want to throttle small children. So here we go, Resident evil…. FIVE!

The Premise

Chris Redfield has joined group called the BSAA who are responsible for trying to keep illegal bio-organic weapons (B.O.Ws) in check around the world. The shit has hit the fan in Africa and the parasite from resident evil 4 (Las plagas for those with short memories), has been modified by tricell (Umbrella 2.0) and is running amok. To make matters worse, the original T-Virus (Progenitor) is also present in this region. Chris teams up with the token black chick, Sheva Alomar and goes on a crusade of revenge and justice that will leave a lot of dead black people in his wake. Confused yet?

On this note, a point on racism.

WHERE THE HELL WAS IT!? There’s been so much fuss about this game being derogatory to black people that anyone would think it was being developed in the Deep South. What, was there a secret side mission where Chris dresses up in a white pointy hood and beats zombies to death with a burning crucifix that I missed?

Newsflash: Africa, for some reason, has a very large black population. Thus it stands to reason that if a zombie making parasite is on the loose (apart from Gordon Brown), many of those infected will be… well.. black. At no point did I see anything even approaching racism. Hell if you want racism, all the villains where white. The black guys where just the poor sods caught in the middle of whitey’s latest attempt at racial domination. For those who’ve played the game, notice how Wesker’s ouroboros virus never seemed to take in the indigenous population (Or anyone, even the white characters for that matter)? Maybe that’s where the racist tones are. Still, seems pretty weak to kick up a fuss about to me.

The co star (Sheva) was presented as a strong, resourceful and competent woman, every bit the equal of her male/white counterpoint. That said though, her AI was probably hammered out by the infinite-monkey Shakespeare company. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Apparently, black zombies in Africa is racist.

Gameplay

Resident evil is dead. Long live resident evil! Resident evil 5 continues Resi 4’s break from survival horror into a sort of… well… action, horror, survival, hellish trinity. However the style is now far more focused on action and arcade style gameplay, while trying to stick to its survival horror roots in areas such as limited inventory and low ammo supplies. The zombies now move quite fast and are actually scary in and off themselves, rather than the game throwing little set pieces out to frighten you. Inventory management has been dumbed down a little since resident evil 4, and the game does suffer for it. Plus some moron thought that putting alone in the dark’s ‘the game does not pause for you when you open your inventory’ feature would help enhance the tension. They were wrong; it’s frustrating more than anything. Okay, you can hotkey items to the D-pad, but often you’re juggling 3 weapons (a handgun, a submachine gun and a shit kicker for emergency boss fights), this leaves one slot for a healing item, and in a protracted fight, you will need more than one of these. And if you want to add grenades (which are pretty shit anyway) into the mix, forget it.

Combat is pretty much identical resident evil 4, only now the easiest way to kill enemies is to shoot them in the legs so that they stumble, then run up to them and punch them in the face. For some reason, a fist does more damage than a point blank shotgun blast. But this is where resident evil is moving, away from its horror roots and into the realm of an arcade game. The entire thing had an arcade feel to it, far more so than most Capcom games, which let’s face it- generally fall into that category. That’s by no means bad, it’s just… different. The problem is that it’s trying to still be a survival horror game at the same time. Imagine house of the dead with limited ammo. You get the picture. The first proper fight of the game has you trying to defend a small house from a horde of zombies and a large boss with a big sledgehammer. This is insanely hard for a first level, but does have the bonus of meaning that by the time you finish it, you’re well versed in the game’s controls.

Chris Redfield, Biceps the size of Bournemouth.

One thing I wish that they did port over from resident evil 4 was the merchant. Now, instead you can only buy and upgrade weapons at the end of each stage (Another nod to shifting the game towards an arcade style), or when you die. But, most infuriating of all is the fact you can’t actually buy ammo! You can buy rounds for the grenade launcher, but anything else, the only way to get ammo is to buy a whole new weapon. If there was a good spread of ammo in the game, then it wouldn’t be an issue, but as it stands the game drops ammo in big groups, and then leaves you fallow for ages. One particularly tough zombie, or one poor choice of combat style and suddenly you’re left high and dry as the balance is totally disrupted. One bad choice should not leave you screwed on normal difficulty. You can’t have an arcade style game without plenty of ammo, it just doesn’t work.

I’ve always thought that cut scenes where one of the best things to happen to videogames. You’re just completed a long hard slog, now sit back for five minutes, watch some action, catch your breath and then get back into it. Resident evil 5 kills this dead, thanks to the wonderful idea of sticking in gaming’s most hated pass time, QUICK TIME EVENTS. PLEASE, GAME DEVELOPERS EVERYWHERE. NOBODY LIKES THESE F###ING THINGS! STOP PUTTING THEM IN! The only games that ever devised a real, useful purpose for quick time events where the last remnant and Naruto: Rise of the Ninja. Resident evil 5 sticks with the standard fare of quick time events being “Press this button or you need to reload your save- whoops you missed it”. Granted resident evil 5’s QTE’s are fairly easy, but then again that just begs the question: Why bother?

Sheva

One of resident evil 5’s much vaunted features was that you now have a partner in crime to play through the game with. What can I say about Sheva? Well, no videogame has EVER managed to stick an AI controlled sidekick into the main game and do a decent job of it. Resident Evil 5 continues this proud tradition of shite, and Sheva is totally worthless. I know that she can be played by another person in co-op mode, to be honest 90% of the time I play videogames it’s because I want to unwind with some me time. I.E I don’t play videogames with other people.

Problems with Sheva

1. She always insists on standing as close as possible, blocking your view and cluttering the screen.
2. No matter what gun you give her, she will always prefer to use her handgun first. Even against bosses. And as far as I can tell, you can’t actually get the damn thing off her.
3. The AI does not seem to notice you when deciding if Sheva has line of sight to an enemy. While friendly fire is not a problems as you do not take damage, on the rare occasions Sheva uses a decent gun, having her unload half a clip of shotgun shells into the back of your head, when ammo can get scarce is irritating. This is made worse by point one.
4. Sheva always moves directly towards you until she’s standing next to you, then she stops. When you’re fighting bosses who you generally need to run away from, then turn around and shoot, she always blocks your view. And just stands there. While you have a rocket launcher pointing at her face. And the boss is right there behined her. What do you think I did? Totally worth reloading…
5. Sheva will spend healing items if you have so much as a scratch on you.

I can see the idea behind many of these things: Having Sheva stay close means that she can revive you if you’re dying, and if she’s in trouble you can help her. Having her use the handgun means that she conserves powerful ammo. Using health items sooner rather than later keeps your health up in case of the shit hitting the fan. But the problem is that all these are only the right course of action half the time. And the other half they will make you want to strangle chickens. Why couldn’t we have more modes for her instead of just ‘attack’ and ‘defend’ (Which as far as I can tell are exactly the same thing), is beyond me. Fallout 3’s sidekicks where quite good in this regard, though their best feature was the fact if they died you didn’t get an instant game over.

Boss Fights

As I’ve said, Resident evil 5 couldn’t decide if it wanted to be an action arcade game or survival horror. Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than the last boss fight. Trying to complete an arcade style action shoot out with virtually no ammo, health or support was the second worst experience I have ever had in my fifteen years of video gaming (The worst being the hour and a half I played vampire rain- easily the single worst game ever made). This stopped me replaying resident evil 5 (meaning I traded it in after less than 48 hours), as I needed to sell all my high quality upgraded guns just so I could get some ammo- And I can’t be bothered playing through the whole game again with my shitty standard weapons.

Other boss fights where equally irritating in some respects, with you needing to do specific things to kill bosses, but the game not being arsed to tell you what these things actually are. Some enemies are invincible the first time you fight them, but then become ‘cannon fodder’ later on.

Another trick the game pulled in one boss fight was that I needed to remove an item from a character’s chest which was controlling them. After disabling the character and trying to pull it off seven times, I got bored and thought “Sod trying to save this git.” Next time I disabled the charachter (Who remains namless for the sake of spoilers), I shot the device rather than trying to pull it off. Turns out that that was what I needed to do. After half an hour of trying to do what the game told me I needed to do, getting there by frustration was… many four letter words. As was figuring out how to disable the boss in the first place.

Don’t even get me started on the final boss and Quick time events. It took me ages to figure out how to finish off Wesker.

Wrapping Up Loose Ends

Resident evil 5 revisits many of the plot points of the older games and explores the history of the franchise. It tells you the origins of umbrella, the source of the T-Virus, how Wesker got his groove back, what the aftermath of racoon city was, how and why umbrella got started and so on. I like this, the story behind resident evil has always been interesting, and it was nice to see it fleshed out and making actual sense. However, the Las Plagas still remains something of a mystery, and we know no more about its origins now, than at the end of resident evil 4.

Las Plagas claims another victim…

In Summary

Resident evil is moving into the realm of the arcade shooter. But it can’t do this AND hold on to its survival horror roots. Resident evil 5 was not awful, but it had holes in it that you could drive a London bus through. The very core elements of the game play worked quite nicely, but the extras tagged on that made the game unique all had their own flaws and problems. All in all, I think resident evil 4 was better, and if Capcom want to continue this franchise, they are going to need to take some long hard looks to the future and decide where resident evil is going to go. As 4 showed, it can work as an action game, but it can’t work as both action and survival horror. If you like action games, resident evil 5 is certainly worth your time, but it may not be worth your dollar. Wait for it to come down in price first.

Graphics: 10/10 The best images I’ve seen on the 360 yet. Bonus points for Jill’s outfit…

Sound: 8/10 it worked.

Game play:  6/10. There were not many problems, but the ones that where there where very frustrating.

Fun factor: I can’t put a score in this. When everything is running smooth it’s great. When it starts to fall apart, the game is just disgraceful.

Overall: 7/10. Not a world beater, and not worth £35. A good laugh though.