Exclusive : Resident Evil 5 Gamers’ Day

It’s just two short weeks until Friday 13th March and the long awaited release of Resident Evil 5. Words like 'must have' and 'triple A title' are somewhat overused nowadays. There is, however, no denying Resident Evil's pedigree. With the earlier controversy over racism and the more recent complaints about the demo with game play stuck in 1996, has Resident Evil changed? Well, Capcom were quick to tell us this was a preview build so still contained bugs that 'would' be ironed out of the final release - take that statement with as big a pinch of salt as you like. Firstly, the game looks fantastic, the level of detail and overall quality of the graphics is nothing short of stunning: at one point I stood on a jetty on a beach and was literally just looking around at the water crashing in on the beach, the detail of the surrounding buildings and generally taking it all in. Unfortunately all my admiration of the scenery caused me to neglect the hoard of zombies that had climbed the fence and began chewing on my head. It’s nice to stop and smell the roses in a game that looks this good, but do it too long and you’ll be pushing up daisies.

I tried both single player and co-op, both have their pros and cons but the biggest differences in my opinion are balance and screen real estate. In single player you have a much harder life: Sheva acts more as a standby paramedic and is a drain on your resources. Sure, she jumps in to revive you whenever you need it and will do her best to engage the zombies with whatever weapons you give her, but it’s the little annoyances that cause the pain. If Sheva runs out of ammo and you offer her some handgun ammo, unless you are fully stocked up she will take all you handgun ammo -  there is no way to select how many of your bullets you give her. There are some arbitrary pseudo co-op parts in the single player where you give her an assist lift or jump to another area and then watch her struggle to do the simplest of task whilst you try to shoot the zombies hanging off her. The game does seem more geared to co-op play, but that too is not without it’s annoyances: the biggest one for me is the split screen, or lack off - instead you get 2 window boxes representing each player’s view: one top left one bottom right, and a whole lot of useless screen real estate in-between. People without 40+” TV’s may struggle to enjoy the game.If you played the demo and have hopes that the control scheme has been changed or tweaked, in a word it hasn’t (again this was preview code so in their words not the final release version)

It is standard Resident Evil and if you have played any game in the series before then you will know what to  expect: you can’t move whilst aiming, you have to bring up and navigate convoluted menus to combine ammo and herbs and give ammo whilst getting chomped on and its all in the 3rd person high and to the right of your player, making it a challenge just to look at things when you want to. Nothing surprising there - ‘why change a winning formula?’ - as some would say. Well personally I disagree, we’ve moved on. EA’s Dead Space moved the bar a little higher, moving whilst aiming and better camera angles, whilst maintaining the same live inventory screens.

So fans of Resident Evil series will love it (I especially liked the loading screens, in which you get snippets of history from the Resident Evil timeline), they will be used to the controls and the game looks stunning - just get used to seeing the same 5 models of zombie attacking you though as evidently umbrella not only infected them but cloned them too !!! The rest of us who may have played the games before but not to the fanatical level or are new to the series will get used to the controls eventually, it didn’t take me long to just accept that I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do and got used to the way it wanted me to play. The bosses and level puzzles I saw were very nicely done, but not too challenging and in co-op mode can be dispatched relatively easily. So niggles and annoyances aside which for the most part could be adapted to by diligent game play (for example you could avoid Sheva robbing you blind, but ordering her to pick up stuff as often as you do) Resident Evil 5 is the game the fans have been waiting for and I don’t think they will be disappointed, everyone else will need to put in some work to get used to it.

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