The Situation
Resident Evil 5 begins with an opening cinematic that has our protagonist, Chris, driving in a jeep towards a small town in Africa. Along the way we listen to his thoughts that touch upon events in the original RE, including the tragic loss of his partner Jill and the events in Raccoon City. The story basically takes place about a decade after the Spencer Manor incident from 1998, and a little after the events in RE4. Chris has come to Africa on assignment from the BSAA, or Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance. His mission is to locate and halt bioterrorist related activities. His contact on site is a newcomer to the Resident Evil series, Sheva Alomar. Sheva is a combat trained and ready agent of the BSAA’s African division. Together the two will face dozens upon dozens of virus infected people, animals, and other hideous monsters as they try to halt the sinister plan of Excella Gionne and the deadly Albert Wesker, who Chris first encountered at Spencer Manor in the original RE.
The interaction begins in a small town of the fictitious African country of Kijuju. The story is spread out over six chapters, each with roughly three sub-chapters giving you about eighteen missions to play through, or about fifteen hours of gameplay. As with a lot of the RE games, there is a good amount of replay value to be had here, and I can already see myself playing through the story mode again sometime this year.
The Experience
It’s actually not the story itself that made the experience so enjoyable and open to a lot of replay, though. The story in RE5 is actually pretty forgettable, although veteran RE players will be able to appreciate the tie-backs and connections to the older RE games. The story, in a nutshell, takes Chris and Sheva throughout various parts of the fictional country and off of its coast, at first attempting to track down and capture a character named Irving. Irving is a lightly developed, shady weapons dealer that is more of a stop-gap on the way to the final third of the game where the focus turns to Excella and Wesker.
Chris and Sheva visit a variety of locations as they work through the story mode to discover the truth and breadth of the African operations. You’ll begin in the town, doing battle with infected locales (including dogs). The locales carry a few different melee weapons, but your pistol makes efficient work of them, except for the very large ‘axe guy,’ aka The Executioner – not a bad idea to take the high ground and avoid him until air support arrives.
Anyway, the third chapter mixes things up by adding a vehicle to cruise around in, a motorboat actually. This particular chapter has you searching several very small islands for pieces of a stone tablet to open a door. The tribal locals aren’t exactly welcoming, and come at you in swarms, some with shields and large masks that are meant to intimidate, but they also protect against head shots, too. The boat driving mechanics were pretty cool I thought; controlling the boat is easy, and it’s important to know that the character driving cannot shoot – you can however switch positions if both characters commit to do so just by pressing X. This is very useful for a variety of reasons; in our case, I was carrying the S75 sniper rifle which made picking off the locals at range very feasible and it helped a lot, as by this time we had seen quite a few armed with crossbows with flaming, even explosive, arrows. A few parts in this particular chapter even have you hopping out of the boat and into the water, with large, hungry crocs waiting to insta-kill you should you get to close to them.
The story and danger are far from over once you’ve gotten out of this area, however. Ahead lie dark caves, an oil refinery, a massive, secretive underground facility hidden inside a cavern, and a large tanker ship. As you progress through the various locations, usually split by chapter, the enemies change too, as do the weapons available to you to either find or purchase. At the outset, you’ll fight infected townspeople and then tribesman. You’ll also encounter chainsaw wielders, Lickers, large spiders, Popokarim, Maijini Cephalo, large insta-kill insects, infected gunmen, and of course several nasty bosses. Most of these enemies are killed with firepower, although sometimes you have to use evident environmental aids to defeat a boss. Ammo was rarely a problem during play as well, so long as you and your teammate play smart and split up tasks. For my friend and I, once we were able to purchase weapons, I bought the first machine gun, he bought the first shotgun. We both upgraded our pistol, and then I got the S75 sniper rifle next, while he took a machine gun / magnum route. That way, for more than half of the game, we were able to maximize the usage of ammo and we were set for any kind of situation.
The wide variety of weapons and upgrades keeps the action fresh and the replay value high. Each type of weapon – pistol, rifle, machine gun, shotgun, and melee, has at least two weapons. In addition, there is a RPG and a grenade launcher that accepts several different types of rounds (explosive, flash, nitrogen, and acid). There are also incendiary, frag, flash, and proximity hand grenades at your disposal, and even mountable gun turrets during a few instances. Most weapons can be upgraded several times, although some cannot; personally, the loadout I used for most of the game included my VZ61, M3 Shotgun, and S75 sniper rifle. A fully upgrade S75 proved very useful for us during the final chapter, and the 300 round capacity of the VZ61 didn’t hurt either. My friend’s upgraded magnum revolver did some hellacious damage, too. I don’t know that we have unlocked or found all of the weapons though, and that is part of the reason it will be fun to play through this game again, as well as having the ability to further upgrade some of our current weapons.
Another good reason to go back and play RE5 again, and part of what made it a lot of fun the first time, was just exploring the levels trying to find the treasures. Treasures are exactly what you’d expect them to be, various gems and artifacts (most of which belong in a museum, by the way) that you can sell at the “loadout” screen in between chapters or any time that you die. Fallen enemies will also drop gold (as well as ammo, and sometimes keys) that you can use to upgrade and purchase weapons, ammo, protective vests, and health sprays. Health sprays, eggs, green herbs, and green + red herbs are all part of what keep Chris and Sheva going, and one really cool feature about playing co-op was that if one character uses a health item in the proximity of the other player, both players get the full effect of whatever health item was used.
Staying in close proximity is the only way to stay alive in RE5, although some sequences in the game force players to split up, like in Gears of War. Usually during these times, one player faces a considerable challenge either alone or from a vantage point where their partner can assist from a distance. Besides being able to split up the work load of killing off the infected, and sharing health items, staying close is great for several other reasons. These include being able to quickly assist each other should one player become immobile or otherwise subdued by a foe, like a spider that has hopped onto your partner and has them bound up. When this happens, the victimized player can rapidly move both analog sticks around to get out, but what works better is having your partner in the area to simply press B when the on screen prompt pops up. When this happens, the partner does a melee attack to knock the enemy off of the victim. It’s satisfying and effective, and a good mechanic.
The same thing happens when one partner is near death; during this brief Dying state, the damaged partner is seconds away from dying, which you can monitor by looking at the receding gauge in the HUD. If the other partner can get in proximity before it’s too late, they can press B to heal their comrade. Players can also request, exchange, and give items between each other to maximize inventory efficiency. Furthermore, there are dozens of elevators, doors, a few switches, and even a few object-pushing sequences whereby both players must meet at a certain area (usually at load/chapter end points) and press Interact together.
It’s rare to find a game that isn’t instantly more fun when you play cooperatively with a friend. The same goes for RE5, but there are a few other mechanics in RE5 that I thought really helped make it more enjoyable experience. For one thing, the load times are short. There are anywhere from say, six to a dozen load sequences per sub-chapter, but load times tend to only be around ten seconds, and during this time a segment of a timeline of the “History of Resident Evil” is displayed. These load screens provide brief tidbits about important events in the history of the long-running story.
Furthermore, RE5 is smart about checkpoints, for the most part. There were literally just one or two spots throughout the entire game where I thought “darn, another checkpoint would have been really nice here.” One or two spots in a fifteen hour game is being extremely nit-picky though, with the point being that RE5 drops in checkpoints at the right times. Anytime you’re preparing to fight a mini-boss, boss, or just a tough sequence, you’ll get a checkpoint so that you don’t have to go through the area leading up to the more difficult part over and over again. Boss fights are another nicely done aspect of RE5, although I thought the last boss fight went on a little too long and was a little too stringent on how gamers had to play it. Otherwise, the boss fights are a comfortable blend of being challenging, yet not too hard nor unforgiving; and, should you die, you can restart right at the start of the boss fight. Additionally, when you die, you have the chance to alter your loadout to better prepare yourself with more health items or different weapons. All in all RE5 has a good sense of difficulty that is balanced and reasonable. Ultimately, it’s not really a hard game, and most times my friend and I got at least a B, usually an A (and sometimes an S) on end level stat for Number of Times Died. That’s not to say RE5 is a walk in the park however; the atmosphere and how quickly you can die will keep you playing cautious and smart.
The Issues
RE5 is a great game; there is no doubt about that, but it does have some issues. These issues are largely minor, but they’re worth mentioning. I’ll begin by just mentioning the story, as I did briefly earlier. The story in RE5 is, frankly, pretty forgettable and there is a lot of forehead-smacking moments or lines of dialogue that just make you smirk in how cheesy they are. I don’t know how many times Chris and Sheva burst into a room with one of the antagonists, have them at gunpoint, and demand answers, only to let the antagonist slip away again. Chris and Sheva also have epiphanies at points in the story when one or the other finally seem to understand something that the player has known for sometime, and maybe even assumed that Chris or Sheva knew. Additionally, some of the dialogue is clichéd and uninteresting. Overall, the story, dialogue, voice acting, and cutscenes make a coherent and respectable offering, so the sum effort outweighs the minor individual shortcomings.
The controls and inventory are two other notable points. For the controls, my two major issues were just not being able to move while reloading or while slashing with your knife, and the sensitivity of the on screen prompts for certain actions. Not being able to move while reloading or slashing is simply a by-product of being an RE game, I don’t believe any RE game (except maybe Outbreak 2) gives players the ability to move while reloading, which is part of why most guns have upgradeable reload times. I can appreciate the point of keeping that tradition, but at the same time I feel like it’s an old mechanic that takes away from the believability of the game (i.e, you can readily move and reload a weapon or swing a knife in real life, so why not in RE?).
As for the sensitive on screen prompts, this too isn’t a major problem, I just wish there were somehow a little more of a window to execute your melee attacks. These attacks not only look cool, they do significant damage, but it’s a nuisance (or maybe just a nuance that I haven’t gotten used to) to have to scootch in close to your enemy and wait for the prompt to pop up. Using some type of new control scheme (like having to press a shoulder button plus a face button at the same time or something) to execute a melee attack would have been neat to see.
I think the Inventory system could have been tweaked a bit too. You can only organize the placement of your items in your inventory during the “loadout” screen, which only happens in between play, not during. It seems archaic that you can’t adjust your item placement while in the middle of a mission. Furthermore, accessing your inventory while under attack to access your items can be a real pain – I think it would have been cool had the developers included a mechanic to slow the game world down for one, maybe two seconds while players accessed their inventory while under attack. I think this could bridge a ‘believability gap’ in the gameplay, but again, this is just me being more picky than anything – the current system in place does work fine.
Other than these things, RE5 is a technically sound, very enjoyable experience from start to finish. It’s also a visual treat as I’m sure most of you have discovered by now with the demo or the full game itself.
The Conclusion
My time playing through RE5 with a friend in cooperative mode was a lot of fun. As someone who is familiar with, but has never beaten an RE game, I had a hell of a time. On the other hand, my friend who is very familiar with the RE universe and the games had a great time too. At this point, whereby I have only played through the campaign in co-op, I would definitely consider RE5 a great game and a wise purchase for any fan of the genre or RE series.