Phew, ok, it’s here. Turns out playing through the whole game again wasn’t as necessary as I thought it was. And I apologize, if you’re looking for Jon’s comic, it’s 1300-1400 words down south. I’m in it! Me and the shirt I wish I owned. Jon and I both collected applications from a game shop called Play n’ Trade on Monday, and it the guy who runs it seems really cool, but he’s apparently not getting much business. So, if you happen to live in the KC metropolitan area, and you happen to be driving around 135th and State Line, give him a visit. He even holds tourneys sometimes, which is cool. We here at The Nerd’s Soup fully support things that are “cool.” Anyway, on with the show.
Resident Evil 5 Reivew: Viva la Revolution?
(or, Attack of the Hyphenated Phrases)
by Pat Trouba
We don’t think about it much, but the Resident Evil series must be crashing through what can only be described as its adolescent phase. For the first several games it played the same way; everyone thought it was cute until they got tired of dealing with its soiled camera angles and its cries for constant puzzles. So Resident Evil got older and tried something new. After releasing Resident Evil 4, it must have been surprised by all the attention it got. Eager to please again, Resident Evil 5 came out, trying to follow up with a similar formula. Did it work? All things considered, it did. Resident Evil’s adolescence, however, is coming to a critical point.
We’ll save further prophetic statements for the conclusion. For now, the exposition. Resident Evil 5 (RE5) follows Chris Redfield, whom we last saw popping Special Tic-tacs And Rescue Squats in the first game (or, in my case, in its excellent GameCube remake). As I understand it, though he’s been absent for several games, he’s still been something of a shadow in the Resident Evil franchise since then, only now coming out into the African sun. Following Chris is his new partner Sheva Alomar. Americans in a troubled African country are, as we’re told, about as welcome as an alligator nibbling on your toes, so Sheva’s there to help appease the locals. As the player will soon see, she does a fantastic job.
They can't see me... I have a third-person view!
See More Resident Evil 5 Various at IGN.com
RE5 controls much the same way Resident Evil 4 (RE4) did. The now-standard over-the-shoulder perspective is there (sometimes over a different shoulder, depending on what sex you are), the stop-and-aim-before-you-shoot is there, and the reloading action that looks like it’s on an ever-faster fast-forward button as you upgrade your guns is there. The new control features, specifically, the inventory options, are a roulette of goodness and badness, depending on how many zombies are chasing you. Do you remember RE4’s inventory system, and how it was almost a game in itself to organize your attaché case, and how you had to pause the game every time you wanted to switch a gun or grenade? Wasn’t it glorious? Look out, RE5’s mi-mi-mixing it up:
Inventory for each character (Chris and Sheva) is on a nine slot system, with no regard for relative size. The happiest benefit of this is the way the player can assign weapons and items to the compass point positions on the 3×3 grid, hit that direction on the D-pad, and the character will instantly pull that weapon or item out. The part you’ll groan about but will soon get over is that you only have a total of 18 slots to share between the two of you. The rest will be stored in a location undisclosed by the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance until the end of a subchapter. The saddest, most nostalgia-inducing part of this is that, when buying, selling, or upgrading, you’ll have to say the Merchant phrases yourself. “Whatcha buyin’? Whatcha sellin’? I’ll buy it at a high price.” *sigh*
Quick-time sequences take the stage in RE5 like a drunk party-crasher; you might be able to ignore him for a while, but he’ll pop back up again soon. RE4 had its share of quick-times, and perhaps it gets the benefit of nostalgia, but in 2009, RE5 gives off a different impression. There are entire sequences made with strung-together quick-times. The action fueled by the quick-times is cool enough, but once it gets to that point, one may wonder if the given control scheme is a little inadequate for the direction the developers wanted the action to go. It’s a question of design philosophy, one that may not really be answered until much later.
You're going to feel some... pressure.
See More Resident Evil 5 Screenshot at IGN.com
The plot, as it is, is one of epic proportions, so much so that it’s not only the action-centered gameplay that keeps the game astray from survival-horror proper. The tone of the conflict has changed. No longer is Chris the hunted, but the hunter. Unexpected uglies may rush your front line, but there is never a strong sense that the characters are shifting from the original mission into survival mode. The beginning set the game on a good path, with Chris and Sheva wandering through an African town among the villiagers. At one point, some stop kicking a thing in a bag (THE THING IN THE BAG) and just stare at you as you walk by. The cause of the evil is quickly revealed, though, and the game goes on as a third-person shooter.
Not that one could say there was ever a strong detour from the original mission in Resident Evils of the past console generation. Leon’s mission in RE4 is always to rescue the President’s daughter, but he wasn’t expecting zombies, and then they missed the rendezvous point and had to outwit a little Napoleon in a castle. Chris, on the other hand, is in an anti-bioterrorism military unit for goodness’ sake. It’s the little things in the characters that help drive the series’ direction.
Thanks, Chris, but my back doesn't need that much cover.
See More Resident Evil 5 Screenshot at IGN.com
Those who continue to make allegations of racism in RE5 are going to have a tough case to prove. Are there black zombies? Sure. It’s Africa (surprise!). Some infected tribal blacks attack you. One could even make the argument that since “buff” only begins to describe Chris (you could effectively substitute “Chris Redfield” for “Chuck Norris” in jokes), that RE5 is the gratuitous portrayal of the big white man beating up on the black man in a manner that is almost (I’ll say it) a masculine power fantasy. However, the concept of an attack on black people starts to fall apart when one sees a fair proportion of non-black zombies for every black zombie (but no white zombies. Is this Resident Evil’s version of Uncharted ?). One also sees that the main villains of the story are not black at all, and none of their motives have anything to do with race. The antagonists seek to be gods, hitting upon what I think I can call a very Japanese theme of rising above the rest of humanity—and reforming it—through an outside power.
Honestly though, the biggest hole punched through the racism cry for me lay in the movement of the zombies. These are RE4 zombies, who were white Spanish villagers. Ninety-nine percent of a zombie grunt’s actions, taken directly from RE4. In a way, it’s stunning. Capcom thought copy and pasting the zombie model was a good idea? Well, whatever. I know where to shoot to initiate the good melee attacks.
Hey, I can see the dangly thing!
See More Resident Evil 5 Screenshot at IGN.com
In other notes, the graphics are spiffy, motion capture has been good to the cutscenes, and The Mercenaries mode returns with some good variety. The “cover system” would be nicer if there weren’t huge icons in the middle of your screen instructing you how to aim and leave cover. I played the entire game in co-op the first time; what I’ve played in single-player doesn’t give me the impression that the partner AI is complete crap, but suffice it to say that a human partner is naturally going to be more reliable. Dialogue, however, is still crap. There are more gun turrets this time around, oddly, and I can’t decide if this makes Chris smarter or Leon more of a badass. Well, yes I can.
In the race for cashmonies, Japanese developers have yet to figure out that competing with Western developers doesn’t necessarily mean being the Western developers. You see it everywhere: co-op, cover taking, vehicle sequences and very muscular men. Can Resident Evil continue like this? Not for much longer, not if it doesn’t want to blend into every gun-toting Western game made popular in the last few years. There’s good stuff here, and you will likely still enjoy this game. It still provides something a little bit different from the competition. I just want to see the franchise bloom to full maturity.
There are no bioweapons, only the zombies that Chris Redfield hasn’t killed yet.
