Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a third-person action shooter in a zombie-survival-horror scenario set in Africa. The player again assumes the role of Chris Redfield the American protagonist from the very first game in the series. The story picks Chris up as a BSAA (Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance) operative deployed to the fictional city of Kijuju in order to investigate the activity of Umbrella, a bioterrorist organization and particularly a pharmaceutical company called Tricell, its African chapter. Immediately after arriving, Chris is met by his BSAA partner Sheva Alomar who alerts him of suspicious activity. The two, on guard, make their way toward the known Tricell areas in search of answers for the outbreak.

Resident Evil 5 Review from a famousblueraincoat
Played 20+ hours on PS3
Available for PS3, Xbox360 (and PC later in 2009)
"The Sadist Slaughter of Zombies"

Whether you play as Chris or Sheva, gameplay takes place in third-person view behind the character looking over their shoulder. The controls are stiff and movement is slow and slightly awkward. This is not a game in which you can make headshots from three hundred meters away while strafe-running up a flight of stairs. I don't even think you can jump. In order to fire your weapons, you must be planted firmly on the ground and rotating back and forth. This, for some, might be frustrating given the limitation of movement.

Although it may sound restrictive and frustrating, I found that this limitation created a atmosphere of panicked intensity. By restricting movement it naturally heightens your awareness of your fragility and forces you to reassess your ability to cope with the given situation. The specific enemies you chose to suppress at first may take away form the time required to turn around, or reposition to take out those zombies sneaking up behind you. There are several instances in the first chapter when you engage in what feels like very threatening situations heightened even further as ammo for your weapon is even more limited than your motion.

The sparseness of ammunition and the restricted movement of your player makes cooperative play all the more fulfilling. Playing alone, its difficult to experience that same kind of intensity. Your partner's A.I. is just not good enough to adequately support, cover or attack in the way that this game demands. The A.I. will often walk out in front of your fire-line, or stray too far away from you only to call out for your rescue not long after. Additionally, playing this game alone also emphasizes its ridiculous story-line. Although, by the fifth Resident Evil (seventh in the series) we should know that these games are not played for their convoluted non-sensicle, all flash and no substance story-lines, but it must again be emphasized how dreadful this setup is. Always character driven with no real reference to or stance taken on real-world issues (other than the overarching 'pharmaceutical companies are bad'); The plot (as usual) is to 'kill zombies in africa', and the plot twist is that 'someone who Chris thought was dead who used to be his friend is now potentially his enemy'. Enthralling .

Where RE5 really shines is in its cooperative play. All of the control design is epitomized by the support and contribution of a second player. Again, to limitation of motion is truly conquered when you can work together with another person to overcome it. I played this game for a solid 6 hours with my friend Stu, who happens to have an honest fear of zombies. This, if anything, added greatly to my experience. Not only because he would scream every time a horde of zombies lumbered within melee distance of him, but his knowledge of the game and gameplay was so limited that he was literally fighting himself to control the game, and by control, I mean mash the buttons. Eventually, he really found the groove of play, and by the time we reached the end of the first chapter we were adequately planning out our attacks to support one another, and swapping health, ammo and weapons on the fly. We would often end up finding a clear position, and standing back-to-back as we would wait for an opportunity to reposition when there was a break in the crowd of zombies shuffling toward us. The heightened sense of terror and stress that you feel as the horde slowly surrounds you, and the counting down of your twenty-or-so bullets in your gun added with the constant need to reposition, collect ammo, find one another, and plant back-to-back again is simply delightful.

The simple Role-Playing elements add a lot to the gameplay. Throughout the maps you come across a lot of loot. Finding gold and money to purchase, or increase attributes of weapons not only benefits gameplay a great deal, but makes ammo sharing and conservation all the more important. It wasn't until much later in the game where I realized that the specific parts of the body that you shoot will prompt a quick-time event that allows you to do a melee deathblow if the enemy is in range. At first, I had thought this was entirely random whether or not a quicktime even would occur for you to somersault-kick a zombie to the face, but once you get the hang of how this mechanic works, it's so much easier to conserve ammunition and take out more enemies more often.

RE5 suffers greatly from 'demoitis' in the same way other recent releases have. Similar to the presentation found in Mirror's Edge, Resident Evil gives you the hook at the beginning of the game, and proceeds to re-use it for the next 30 hours of play. What I've described above is found in the first few hours of gameplay. In those first few hours, you're sucked in by the intensity created by the limitation of movement, but once you learn to adequately adjust yourself and support your partner, after several bouts of stressful firefights the intensity wears off and the cycle is used over and over.

The way that RE5 attempts to break this up is with the "bosses". Again, at first these are terrifying. A burly Reaper-zombie with a giant hammer that kills you with one thwump is terrifying when you're just learning the controls. Also, the first introduction of the "crazy bag-head chainsaw guy" (known from the demo) is incredibly terrifying, and to take him down you really have to work with cooperatively to distract him while the other partner hits them from behind. Why would a zombie with a chainsaw need a bag on his head? The thought is revolting! But something about that character is lost when another bag-head zombie shows up later on, and then even further in to the progress of the game, you're in situations with three of four of them at a time. The point being is that the initial visceral "holy shit" experience is lost as soon as you learn how simple the mechanic really is. It gains a kind of 'gameyness' to it, and it loses its initial fierce intensity as you progress. I haven't even described some of the later bosses like the "Bat-terpillar", "Giant Slug Seamonster" or one form of the final boss; "A Big Boulder". I didn't think that I would be hoping for less range of motion, or more limitations of my character in a game, but I constantly wished for these kinds of scenarios and as the story progressed they occurred less and less often.

In terms of finding a verdict on Resident Evil 5, I'd really like to discuss a huge issue I take with it besides the medial mechanical or design issues outlined above. From writing papers, listening to lectures, or having a typical conversation, I expect a certain level of maturity and intellectual development of my audience or cohorts. I expect that they have some at least basic understandings of things like race, sex, or class. I also expect they have some understanding of world politics and geography, even if it's very limited. I can't help but feel disturbed by a game in which you slaughter hundreds and hundreds of zombies that are prominently black. The plot is that you are sent to an village, somewhere in Africa, to investigate a region taken over by a man-made plague, but your solution to this problem begins and ends with killing as many of the infected people as you can.

My initial reaction was "Hmph, is this a bit racist?", my following reaction was "Am I being racist for thinking this is racist?" In the same way I have certain expectations of my audience, I'd like to assume that CAPCOM has done the same with their release of RE5. I would expect it to be well researched with considerations that there exists many negative misconceptions of race. No doubt, they must have been aware of the very real allusions to colonialism this brings up, and I can't help but feel that its extremely insensitive in this way. A case can be made for RE5 as it outlines the very real fact that Africa is being used as a pharmaceutical testing ground, but there is never any real resolve.

Is it 'racist'? Ultimately, I have to say no. There is no way that these developers intentionally designed RE5 in a way to slaughter hundreds of virtual Africans, however, that doesn't mean it's not racially insensitive. In previous Resident Evil games, the mass killings of mid-western Americans in the fictional Racoon City is terrifying, but removed given that these kinds of scenarios of exploitation have never really happened. Historically and presently, the mass slaughter and exploitation of Africa as a continent is something that is very real.

On a greater note, all of these games are all about killing people, and which is worse? Killing Arabs in Call of Duty 4? Killing Germans in Battlefield 1942? Killing Africans in Resident Evil 5? I think the most valuable point that RE5 brings up is that they all involve 'killing' and your only interaction with that digital space is limited to violence. Although I think this is a huge topic in itself, I think we really have to take it in to consideration.

If you're reading this review to get an idea of whether to purchase Resident Evil 5, the answer is absolutely YES under the necessary pre-conditions that you will only play it co-operatively with a friend, and that you also have some knowledge of Africa being a continent, not a country. This excludes ex-Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, given that she probably doesn't have any XboxLIVE friends (too late for Palin jokes?). In all seriousness, RE5 is extraordinarily fun to play cooperatively with a friend (via XboxLIVE or split screen) given that its intensity and your necessary reliance on a cognitive partner to resolve the simplest of conflicts. It's particularly enjoyable on higher levels of difficulty as the ammo is even more sparse and the enemies pose an even greater threat.