The long awaited review for resident evil 5 is here! Long awaited by no-one, no doubt.
In the words of that Avid… Merrian or whatever his name is: “I don’t know what you are ozzy!”. I’m not sure Resident Evil 5 knows what it is too, it’s kinda a cross between a clunky action shooter and … something that has the name Resident Evil.
The control system plays like the original resident evil but the problem is the game has evolved and is nothing like the originals. The “Problem solving” in the game is laughable and amounts to medial activities like turning around statues to co-ordinate light beams into opening a door lock. Really primitive pointless shit like that, that i managed to work out and run through in a matter of minutes.
It’s a fairly fun game to play in places, extremely frustrating in others, mostly due to the out of date control system that is not responsive enough to meet the needs of an action shooter, which we have already devised is what RE5 wants to be. Stupid shit like not being able to move around whilst aiming a weapon or your knife, things that are indeed faithful to all that came before it. The problem with a major change in game design and the vast majority of the game now being action driven, the control system staying put means it simply can’t keep up. Even on the most sensitive setting the character on screen still takes about 3 seconds to turn 180 degrees and you can’t quick turn whilst aiming.
The player is located physically on the side of the screen, left or right dependant on which character you are playing as. It has been done in a kinda of weird 3rd person view, so you’re not exactly behind them or looking out of their eyes. What this means is that for aiming in one direction and cornering on one side it’s brilliant, however aiming another direction or turning another way means that sprite completely blocks your view. This also makes aiming up close a fucking nightmare, as the FOV is so limited that if an enemy gets too close you’ll often panic and not be able to turn fast enough to see them before they hack at you.
Don’t mention dogs too, if the dogs get too close you can’t actually aim down at the floor far enough to be able to shoot them if they’re at your feel. The fact that aiming up and down on the most sensitive setting takes fucking years, by the time you’ve taken a hit and the dogs have run off, you’ll be left stood gawping at the floor in a useless fashion whilst they are lining up another attack. Mildly unforgiveable but you can manage.
One of the worst things about the game is the quick time event bullshit of hammering buttons to get past certain obsticles and the fact the rules for the quite time events (QTEs) change when you get to different difficulties in the game, without warning. All the way up to verteran you will be prompted to press buttons (often without warning), if you hit the WRONG button it doesnt seem to matter unless you get the right one eventually.
Problem is on veteran difficulty the amount of time you have for the QTE changes to a lesser level (as you might expect) but on professional it changes again so that if you press the wrong button the QTE is automatically over and the event fails - you’re dead try again. Now as I’ve said, this shouldn’t be a major problem, make the QTEs a little harder as the “skill” level progresses, but at least put in a system that explains what a fucking QTE is in the first place and how the rules are going to differ as you progress? Just ramping things up with no warning what-so-ever is NOT intuative or something you can learn without simply dying and trying again.
That leads me on to the fact that the game doesn’t allow enough room for people to develop skill. That might sound a bit unfair as you can clearly get used to the aiming system and become more accurate with the weapons. What I really mean by that is, the only way you get past certain points in the game is playing them over and over and learning what is going to happen within a level. Sorry but that is a really pathetic way of designing a game, and it seems a trend for console titles as a whole these days. They seem filled with infinite continues and rapid save points sprawled throughout the game, presumably to counter the spastic design or not being able to predict the future and getting killed outright by either a wrong button press or being ambushed. Other than learning how to aim and developing an affliction for predicting the future, there isn’t much more you can actually do to get better at RE5; you don’t really need to use your brain past a certain point short of taking in what happens when you die and not repeating it.
Now for the real kicker though, well. there are actually 2.
Massive problem number 1 is the computer AI. Sometimes it will work perfectly, mostly in the lower skill levels. Other times, usually as the skill level is increased in the game, the partner AI will not improve at all whilst the computer AI and agressiveness will rocket. This means your support completely falls down and does not deliver what you need in the way of decent help to actually play the game properly and succeed. If your partner dies, the game is over, when you can’t control what the fuck they are doing and the enemies can kill your partner in a couple of shots it becomes an utter nightmare; especially relevant on professional skill when 1 hit is generally an instant kill. If you get lucky and the shot doesn’t register an instant kill you then have about 1.5 seconds to perform a heal on your partner.
On numerous occasions I’ve seen the AI do some very retarded shit which instantly got her killed and ended the game straight off. Behaviour you simply have no control over which then lays the blame squarely with you for the stupidty of your computer partner, in the form of a nice game over death sequence. You see, at the end of each level you are awareded skill points on 4 different areas, accuracy, number of enemies killed, times you have died and total time for the level. To get a good S class score you will need a good combination of S rank and A ranks. One death loses you your S rank, 2 deaths gets you a B. So from this you can imagine the sheer frustration of going for an S, the computer partner doing something utterly unexplainable and getting herself killed 3 times in a row for no reason.
Things like being told to get to cover (or cover yourself, whatever it means) then watching your partner amble off into a big arena to get chunked by machinegun fire that was obviously coming her way, for no particular reason at all. Seeing as you can’t MAKE them run for cover they happily just walk around getting shot at often ignoring targets in their entirity, which really, really seem to have it in for you in professional mode. Or you can call them over to cover you and they will usually proceed to follow, only to run off and do their own thing again as soon as they’ve hit their desintation. The problem with that is you’d think “ah i’ll just call them back to cover, constantly”, but the game falls down here again by making the player stop stone dead on the spot and asks the partner to come to cover via an arm guesture, which when fighting a boss on verteran or professional will often get you killed.
I’ve lost count at the amount of times I’ve taken a hit in the form of a punch/kick, gone into a dying state and literally just had the AI stood over me screaming “Chris!!” and then proceeded to either do nothing at all and watch me die, or start lining up shots at people miles away for no aparent reason. Totally unforgivable that the control method and the AI simply do not stand up to playing past veteran, and you will have a hard time on that one too. The only other option, and it still remains a *very* hard option is get a human player to take over the role and just pray that they’re capable.
The second major problem is the bugs. The game is bugged. One thing that will trigger an event, stop you taking a hit, injuring a boss, pressing a button in a QTE etc, will work once and then not the next time. When fighting a major boss on professional that asks you to perform seriously quick QTE button presses to dodge incoming fodder, the LAST thing you need is the button flickering up for 0.1 seconds (just enough so you can hazard a guess at what it MIGHT have shown you) only to fail the QTE instantly and take a hit.
One boss requires you to shoot it in the face repeatedly with a mounted gun, and at random intervals it will wonder around and try and punch you. On professional mode, the swings will come without much warning, so whilst you’re trying to keep it at bay with the machinegun to the face, if the QTE starts and you continue firing, sometimes the game will bug and the QTE will fail instantly causing you to take a hit, mostly because it’s registered a button press, the same press you were using to shoot the monster in the face to stop you getting yourself killed. 2 hits on professional = game over in most cases. This game is seriously hard enough with the shitty AI and the general difficulty on professional that it really does not need crappy bugs ruining your playing experience further. There is one thing making a game hard, there is another leaving in bugs which make it impossible without human help.
So all in all, generally quite fun, but I’m not impressed. Dead Space shits all over it for fear, playability and storyline.
RE5 has fuck all to work out in the game in the way of puzzles, no real problems to solve or items to find and utilise and it often feels very uninvolving. To me it did not feel like a resident evil game in the slightest and the control system / AI was utterly flawed. I’d recommend you borrow it and try it first but I give it 6.5 out of 10, nothing special. The replay value after you’ve done it is very, very low too.
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Also, as one last side note, the controversy this game created because the zombies were black… christ alive. THE GAME IS SET IN AFRICA, fucking tossers! The zombies in this particular game happen to have black skin, oooh no, the weapons used in game mimic what is being used in the situations currently going on in war zones in africa right now. So fucking what?
Perhaps the zombies should be walking around calling each other nigger whilst “rapping” in broken english about how many hoe’s they fucked last week, or where their latest “bling” came from, or which rap artist they happen to like the best at the moment, just to stay real within the cultural aspects of having black skin here. I’m being ironic of course.
Two things come to mind, one, I suppose it would be far better to ignore the fact black people exist at all and make all the zombies white. Just incase some white ultra liberal cunt who regularly takes offence on other people’s behalf stands up and makes a fuss. It’s obviously easier to forget that people are people, no matter what their colour of skin and somehow suggest that it is utterly fine to slaughter people with white skin in their droves, but is unacceptable if they’re black skinned. What sort of logic is that? If a person is a person no matter what colour skin and we’re all equal just what is the argument here for one being acceptable and one being racist?
Surely it would pig ignorant to ignore the fact that Africa actually has black residents and make them all white, just for the sake of not wanting to shoot black zombies. What is this fucking world coming to. If all Resident evil games were brought out, set in totally different locations around the world and every single time all the zombies were black, then yes you might start to wonder if the creators had something against black people.
This leads me onto the second thing, does anyone actually remember RE4? All the zombies in RE4 were spicks, all shouting spanish / mexican style shit at you with their yellow - brownish skin. No one gave a fuck when you were shooting spicks, but black zombies are somehow unacceptable? Anyone who puts forward the notion that it is racist to suggest there are black people in Africa needs a fucking kicking to be honest. A proper fucking kicking.
And on that note, I will end.
