Dissenting Opinion: Resident Evil 5

3/18/2009 7:17 PM | 7 Comments | Page 3 of 4

The wonderful weapon upgrade system drives this home. There's an economy in Resident Evil 5, built entirely around the shortage of ammo and the increasingly powerful weapons. You upgrade your weapons to make your shots more effective, to minimize the downtime between reloads, to maximize the chance of a fatal headshot, and so on. As I said before, every bullet counts. It's like a role-playing game, but instead of characters you have guns. I leveled up the MP5 first, and then the Dragunov a little, but now I'm working on the pump-action shotgun, which is a real beast. As I do it, I'm earning money, improving my ratings, and stockpiling ammo and grenades and proximity mines and medical supplies. And all the while, I'm revisiting old levels and settling scores. These recurring levels work because the basic combat model, the bad-ass gunplay, and the purity of the zombie motif all hold up even in relatively canned situations. Resident Evil 5 is good enough that replaying a level isn't just replaying a level. It is a revenge story.

Capcom has carefully built the game out of replayable set pieces, with treasure, collectibles, scaling difficulty and leaderboards. You'd think the Tomb Raider bit in the middle would feel out of place in such a game. Why would I ever want to return to pivot some mirrors around? Oh, wait, I remember now. Because solving puzzles spawns zombies. This is an action game, through and through. Those puzzles aren't even puzzles. They're excuses for you to grab a doo-dad that will spawn more zombies. The boss battles are mostly simple, thrown in almost out of a sense of obligation. Speaking of which, there's that bat/beetle/scorpion boss in the Tomb Raider level that I ran from instead of fighting. I wonder what he'll think when I come back with a grenade launcher and a stockpile of acid shells? Hey, jerk, remember me?

Of course, if I ever get sick of all this, I can take the gunplay to the skill-based Mercenaries challenges, which won't let me rely on leveled-up weapons and stockpiled firepower. Unlike the rest of the game, I cannot brute-force my way through these. And of course, in a few weeks there will be the Versus mode available for download for a paltry five bucks, for which I would be a lot less cavalier about paying if I weren't enjoying myself so much. Capcom knows the gunplay fantasy is good enough to be played different ways and even paid for.

I'm with Sheva

Which brings me to the co-op. While Resident Evil 5 plays fine solo (a couple of boss fights excepted), it deserves recognition for the co-op. This sort of calculated shooting is so much more gratifying with two humans calculating it instead of a human player and an artificial intelligence. Whereas Scott says it takes him out of the game, on the contrary, I find the game is built to draw two people in. You cover this side, I'll cover that. You take the shotgun, I'll take the sniper rifle. I'm throwing a grenade now. You get the flamethrower, I'll distract it. Do you have a red herb? Okay, we died, so I'm going to get my shotgun this time. If you have any shells, I could use some. Bring that first-aid spray. More than any other co-op game I've tried, Resident Evil 5 is carefully built for two.