Slashdot Mirror
Review: Resident Evil 5
- Title: Resident Evil 5
- Developer: Capcom
- Publisher: Capcom
- System: Xbox 360, PS3
- Reviewer: Soulskill
- Score: 7/10
Resident Evil 5 starts you off as Chris Redfield, a familiar face from earlier in the series, as he chases down a bio-terrorism threat in Africa. As you soon find out, there is a New and Improved Las Plagas parasite, which sends its unwitting hosts into a zombified and suggestible state. The new breed is, on the whole, smarter, faster and more dexterous. While some zombies are content to swing their fists or throw an empty bottle at you, others will fight complex gun battles, using cover, deadly accuracy, and aspects of the environment to try and take you out. You'll still meet the shambling, growling hordes you're used to, but there's a much greater range of bad guys than before. They essentially fill any role an uninfected human might in a traditional action game. Newcomers to the series probably won't give this a second thought, but long-time fans may be bothered by it.
Accompanying you on your journey is Sheva Alomar, a young African woman in the Bio-terrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA) who quickly becomes Chris' loyal partner. This is the foundation of the game's focus on co-op play, since a second player can take control of Sheva and work in tandem with you, either locally or over Xbox Live. For solo players, Sheva is controlled by the game's AI, to generally favorable results. Chris and Sheva each have their own inventory space, and you can shuffle items, guns, and ammunition between them as necessary. They back each other up in fights; when a zombie grabs and holds you, your partner can come to your aid and knock the zombie away. If you are close to death, your partner can resuscitate you.
The AI does a pretty good job at being where you want it, coming to your aid when you need it, and doing a respectable amount of damage to your enemies. It has no qualms about running itself out of ammo, but you can give it more or tell it to pick up more off the ground. The one major problem is that you can't really set up a plan with your AI partner. You can't tell them to stay here and cover you while you advance to a different spot, and you can't direct them toward a particular threat. The enemy AI is by turns intelligent and quite stupid. They'll chase you anywhere, scaling ladders quickly or jumping between rooftops, and they'll duck behind walls for cover. Unfortunately, they also have a habit of running up to you and standing still for five seconds before deciding to attack. You can also just run through big groups of some enemies without a scratch. It's probably necessary for the sake of letting the player have a chance to survive, but it's not believable stupidity, and makes it feel like they're just giving you something at which to throw your extra ammunition. Boss AI is almost nonexistent; they usually play out more like scripted encounters. For some of them, this works well.
The difficulty in fighting any of the game's enemies is strictly tied to how you control your character. Capcom made the decision to forbid movement while using your weapon in Resident Evil 5. If you don't like the idea of being unable to "run and gun," you should definitely try the demo first to see how it plays. The effect it has on gameplay is to make shooting your guns something that takes more thought and planning. Firing for extended periods becomes a dangerous proposition because zombies tend to come from all directions. If you stand still long enough, one will eventually come up behind you and attack. It makes situations where you're frantically firing into a group of onrushing enemies all the more tense, knowing that death may be creeping up on you unseen. Oh, and for whatever reason, Capcom decided to prevent you from moving while brandishing your knife as well. I can understand stopping to aim a gun, and maybe having your feet stop moving while actually swinging a blade, but why can't you walk and hold a knife at the same time? Perhaps they just didn't feel it was worth the time to code the changes for an infrequently used weapon. Either way, trying to hit things with your knife is annoying and often useless.
That said, Capcom didn't balance the stationary firing restriction with more responsive aiming. Even at the highest level of sensitivity, the controls are quite clunky to use when enemies are surrounding you. They did implement a button combo that flips you 180 degrees, and this helps to some extent. However, it's still fairly slow, and you almost always need to spend extra time finding your target after spinning around. Worse is when there are zombies to your right or left; button combos that flip you 90 degrees to one side or the other would have been quite welcome, but you're not given that option. Many similar games have implemented a tracking system for nearby enemies, either as dots on a mini-map or arrows on a HUD. Not so in Resident Evil 5; you're often forced into simply panning slowly around the room to see if anything is heading toward you.
You'll also get to deal with a several types of enemies — such as dogs, spiders, and some bosses — who sometimes move more quickly than you can track them. They don't pose a huge threat to your character by themselves, but they often grab and hold you, allowing other, more dangerous enemies to get close. Those have their own associated problems — for one, a few of the more difficult enemies will just outright kill you if they get within melee range. While this makes sense from a realism perspective, it can be frustrating given the slowness of the movement system, and the requirement that you stop to deal damage. Add to this the huge amount of damage some of them can take, and you end up with regular enemies that feel tougher than the end-of-level bosses.
The boss encounters themselves are hit and miss. Resident Evil 5 makes gratuitous use of Quick-Time Events both during fights and in cut scenes. As the boss prepares to smash you with some tentacled appendage, you'll have a window of a second or so to press a button or get killed. This works decently when you're actually able to control your character, and it's used as part of a normal fight. In one of the later chapters, you get to fight a giant spider that's hanging onto a big, circular platform. As you attack the legs holding it in place, you dodge the ones that are free to swipe at you. It's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, many of the other QTEs are simply distracting. It's used continually in cut scenes to, presumably, keep the player engaged as the game characters are forced into decisions about fighting or dodging. But there's no real consequence to those actions; it's either linearly continue the scene or die (and start again very close to where you died).
One thing you'll notice is that many of the boss fights are just variations on a theme: chase bad guy, catch bad guy, watch bad guy turn into nigh-invulnerable, many-tentacled super zombie. But he has a weak spot! Some of these fights work better than others, and there are more original battles scattered throughout the game as well. For example, a battle with a hulking monstrosity that looks like a troll from Lord of the Rings is unique, but quite simple. The fight scenes with the mastermind who's orchestrating all these events (or, as I call him, "Neo") are more complex and interesting, but tend to suffer from QTEs that rely on fast movement, which is not the game's strong point.
The game ships with over 50 cut scenes of varying length. They're quite impressive to watch, and fans of the Resident Evil story won't be disappointed. They do an amazing job of developing the plot and tying the various levels together in a logical way. The scenes are framed and rendered in such a way that they look like movie footage shot by an actual camera, and it's done well. Monsters, characters, and explosions all look amazing. The story itself isn't high drama, but it's entertaining and serviceable — it's what you'd probably expect from a high-budget zombie flick. The big plot twist is depressingly predictable, but it sets up a cool fight. The settings and scenery during actual gameplay are excellent as well. You're taken through modern slums, primitive villages, underground labs, and a variety of other locales. There's quite a lot of detail, and Capcom took care to make everything colorful and interesting to look at.
Resident Evil 5 is a game that gets much better when you have somebody to play with. As I mentioned earlier, the AI is reasonable, but it doesn't compare to having another human to watch your back or help you kill something. The movement and aiming issues become much less problematic when playing with a friend, since you can stand back to back and limit the area one person has to cover. Once you've defeated the main campaign, you also open up Mercenaries mode, which can be played solo or with a friend. Much like in the previous games, you're dropped into a level with plenty of ammo and plenty of zombies to fight. You have a time limit, but glowing pillars scattered around the map will add time to the clock, and enemies will get stronger as the round goes on. The primary campaign forces you to manage your ammunition fairly strictly — if your accuracy isn't great you can expect to run out of bullets frequently — so being able to just fight without worrying about it makes Mercenaries even more entertaining.
The inventory and weapon selection systems are dominated by ammunition limits. Since you aren't given much of any one type of bullet, you're forced to carry around several different guns. These guns and their associated ammo don't leave much room for healing items, grenades, or proximity bombs, so those are used sparingly. You get the standard shooter-game implements — pistols, shotguns, machine guns, rifles — and the lack of ammo will force you to switch between them fairly often. It can be annoying, especially when you're restricted to a pistol or machine gun when you want to use something more powerful. They also give you a few more impressive weapons as the game goes on, but those are used less frequently. Regardless of the ammunition situation, the weapons themselves are nicely designed. You'll have a broad array of tools for the situations you're given, and each gun has a distinct feel.
It wouldn't be a Resident Evil 5 review without mentioning the concerns of racism that were raised when it was revealed that the game would be set in Africa. To put it bluntly: it's a non-issue. The plot is a natural development of moving the Resident Evil story to a new continent. They make it clear that the zombified people are victims, and that the real evil is the corporation behind the experiments.
Whether or not you enjoy Resident Evil 5 is likely to be dependent on how much you like the controls and whether or not you have a buddy you can play with. The plot is cheesy, but in an entertaining way, and it's basically shown to you as a movie interspersed with gameplay. Fans of the story will be pleased — there are tons of unlockable visuals and bits of information. If you were hoping for a more traditional survival game, you may be disappointed. The action is definitely ramped up, and there aren't really any scary moments. However, it's definitely a worthy addition to the Resident Evil franchise, and the amount of care and effort Capcom put into this game is quite evident.
no PC release?
have you been defaced today?
They keep using 30-year-olds playing teenagers.
And you can tell the character models are not African. They just put darker textures on the white models. Sad.
The game is set in Africa. Remote villages in Africa. I'm guessing there's not a whole heck of a lot of white people out there in remote parts of Africa.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Sent from your iPad.
Capcom said they would reboot the series, hopefully they mean bringing it back to its roots. As much as I enjoyed playing re5, it just didn't feel like i was playing an re game. It was just action after action and got tedious after a while. At least re4, which was similiar to this had some quiet, atmospheric moments.
I still find it unbelievable how the developers actually caved in after some (overly sensitive people, mind you) people accused them of racism.
A game set in Africa has blaaaaack people: Ohno!
Where were those people when RE4 was released (set in an, iirc, Spanish town), shouting that it was clearly racism to only shoot Spanish people!
Blegh, so bad to see political correctness being brought in by overly sensitive people: I'd even go as far as to say those people are the -real- racists in this society...
Nevertheless, had a go at this game a few days ago; If you liked Resident Evil 4, be sure to get this one. It's more of the same, but has some amazing action sequences (though it wasn't as 'scary' as RE4 was for me).
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Discussed here
also here
Best Slashdot Co
Can anyone comment on something? In the demo, the laggy controls then an instant death in melee, followed by a nice restart from the beginning did not create a good impression. Did the game actually fix this or should I just expect more of the demo?
Anyways, from the demo, I felt this was a game that had the RE name attached to it because it wouldn't sell with any other story. I'm sure it's got a great Resident Evil saga attached to it, but
I'll pick it up on gamefly, but I doubt I'll get the same terror of hoping that a zombie hasn't turned into a crimson head when I've only got 8 pistol rounds and 4 shotgun shells or frantically running away from a suit of armor while weaponless from RE:4.
import system.cool.Sig;
Here's some late breaking news on technology
You can disable the games section of slashdot for your account in less time that it took you to post your complaint about them posting news about games.
I don't think that RE5 on the 360 or PS3 could ever compare to RE4 on the Wii. The use of the pointer in RE4 made the game control perfectly. No matter how good the graphics on RE5, it's going to seem like a step backward. A bit like playing the same FPS on a pc with a mouse, then on a console with a gamepad, I suppose.
The RE5 demo underwhelmed me. Same old control issues. I think Dead Space could be the new pillar of horror games as long as they don't bring back the fraking asteroid shooting minigame in the next one.
Capcom has released all the main RE games on PC, but usually they wait a few months to a year. And sadly usually the ports suck- see RE4.
Where were those people when RE4 was released (set in an, iirc, Spanish town), shouting that it was clearly racism to only shoot Spanish people!
A white guy was doing the shooting there. Of other white people. I guess the lesson is that fewer people have problems with white-on-white racism, possibly because that's not really racism. Why am I playing devil's advocate? Boredom.
How did they cave? I played the demo and skimmed the articles accusing the developers of racism, but I'm unaware of any changes they made in response to the charges. So what did they change? Not that I'll buy the game, I really did not like the controls in the demo.
It's not "white people shooting black people racist". The images people are objecting reflect back to colonial days. It's the image of a white strong superman coming in to aid the poor impoverished dark skinned people.
It's Curious George racist, not Rodney King racist.
So if it were game about a Nazi exterminating zombie Jews you would have no problem with it, right? I mean, it can't possibly be racist because a game set in a concentration camp during WW2 logically would have Jews in it.
It's all in the context and innuendo. Is it set in Africa because that's a convincing setting for zombies? Is there artistic value to the decision? Or is it just a lot of fun to shoot at a bunch of dark-skinned people? It's a fair question, no matter what the answer is.
Oh, it takes place in Africa! Well, then it definitely isn't racist, since nothing racist ever happens in Africa.
I agree with your conclusion, but you really need to find a better way to reach it.
uhh.. what year are we in?
RE4 was racist, all the zombies were backwards "ethnics" wearing weird clothes with some kooky religion (foreign = dangerous), and all the sympathetic characters were Americans. Nobody really made a fuss about it like they did with RE5, though.
kid, you just do not get it. you simple, are ignorant.
Like some have already commented, I find it hilarious that people are offended by fact that there are AFRICANS in AFRICA!
... nobody would care! It would not have been blown out of proportion by the media. Another funny little tidbit is the fact that the female isn't actually caucasian at all... but, well, nobody cares about that of course.
I laugh at the obvious insecurities of people because it really goes to show you how tiny they feel.
It is definitely apparent that people in today's society do not have enough to do - so they spend their energies on useless crusades such as these.
If the game involved black-killing-whites, or hispanic-killing-blacks, or black-killing-hispanics
The racism problems were all wrapped up when they made half of the local zombies into a combination of Mexicans and Asians. The whole scenery was amusing.
Anyone else find the irony and racism in the parents post? In not so many words, the parent has successfully stereotyped all black people as being knee-jerk reaction-ists, akin to Jessie Jacksons, who wouldn't or couldn't possible think that context maters. *rolls eye* It's people like this who perpetuate racism and racist stereotypes, but point fingers claiming otherwise.
Didn't think so, I'm leaving it on the shelf. Don't care squat about the plot/graphics - those two are deal breakers for me.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Just remember it was blacks that sold blacks to the whites..... Where do you think they got black people from???? Everyone is racist - blacks hate whites, mexicans hate blacks and whites, whites hate everyone not white. Who cares anymore......
The Truth is a Virus!!!
There's a disabled joystick shown at the top of the article.
Blegh, so bad to see political correctness being brought in by overly sensitive people: I'd even go as far as to say those people are the -real- racists in this society...
You're sick of political correctness, but I'm even sicker of people complaining about it with this type of response. All political correctness ever really was about was the desire for people to not be goddamned racist pricks. RE5 is great fun to play and all, but anyone who plays it and thinks that the way it portrays black people isn't the slightest bit fucked up needs to have their head examined. Calling racism and bigotry what it is is always going to piss off people like you and you're just going to react with your feigned defensive outrage. Unfortunately, the REAL racists are the ones who continually deny that it exists, even in the most obvious places.
including werewolves, vampires and other less obvious or more decomposed individuals we find the entire Resident Evil series to be very offensive and in poor taste! And we prefer the term "differently alive."
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
that was the first thing that came to my mind.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Yes, that would be stupid. However, that's not the criticism that's being made. (At least, by the vast majority of people. COnsidering the stupidity of humanity, I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's actually arguing that.)
First tip to deal with accusations of being offensive - Try finding out why something offends people instead of employing straw men. You still may not agree with their proposition, but at least you won't be adding insult to injury.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
Since that's completely not the argument that's being made you get *double* racism points. :) Oh sure, there's probably some idiot somewhere who is honestly offended that you shoot black people at all in a game. There are a vast number of idiots in the world, as your post proves. But that's honestly and seriously NOT what most people who are concerned about racist overtones are concerned about.
When you discover that you've inadvertently upset someone, perhaps you could try finding out WHY they're upset instead of deciding to assume that their reasoning is the most stupid thing possible and then mocking them for YOUR false assumptions.
I don't really care about RE, I do care about people being dicks to each other, which is what you're doing.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
I find it hilarious that people are offended by fact that there are AFRICANS in AFRICA!
I have yet to actually see ANYONE who is offended by the presence of africans in africa. I charitably assume some troll under a bridge somewhere has this opinion, but it's certainly not the opinion of ANY person I've actually encountered who was concerned about RE5.
If the game involved black-killing-whites, or hispanic-killing-blacks, or black-killing-hispanics ... nobody would care!
I laugh at the obvious insecurities of people because it really goes to show you how tiny they feel.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
So...about this Sexy Sheva unlockable costume.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2009/03/shevas_sexy_secret_costume.html
Capcom providing another can of worms?