Resident Evil 5 is a mediocre third person shooter. I can only recommend this game to fans of the series because there are a lot of good reasons not to play this game. The plot, story, and characters are three good reasons not to play Resident Evil 5. All of that can be forgiven if the game play is genuinely fun. For example, R-Type was a fun game that had absolutely no plot, story, or characters. The game play of Resident Evil 5, however, is annoying at best and frustrating at worst.
Resident Evil 5 follows Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they slaughter they way through Africa. The game starts out with Chris and Sheva as back up for a sting on an arms deal. The Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA) that Chris and Sheva work for believes that some poorly defined African group is going to buy biological weapons from another completely undefined group. Unbeknownst to the BSAA their sting op will take them into the middle of zombie central. The BSAA is obviously one of the most incompetent organizations to ever exist. First they send people into the middle of zombie central without knowing what they are getting into. Second, they don’t even bother issuing Chris and Sheva weapons and they are supposed to be the backup. Chris and Sheva have to get their cheap pistols and knives form Mo the generic Arab snitch. So Chris and Sheva slaughter their way through a village full of zombies and burn a boss that wasted the SWAT team that they were back up for. Everything else is really downhill from there.
The characters are two dimensional at best, and I have no clue why Sheva even sticks around past chapter 2. The BSAA gets ordered to stop their operation in chapter 2 after getting their collective ass handed to them on a silver platter, and Sheva instead of being a good soldier and pulling out decides to follow Chris on a half baked quest to save Jill Valentine. Disobeying orders in a paramilitary organization like the BSAA should screw up Sheva’s career at the least but it’s like this possibility never crosses anyone’s mind. No one cares though because the recall of the BSAA is a feeble plot device to get the useless cunts out of your hair and Sheva only sticks around to keep the two player co-op mode alive.
Keeping the co-op play alive was the only smart thing that Resident Evil 5 did, because co-op play was the only fun part of Resident Evil 5. Trying to play the game by yourself is boring. The character dialogue is so cliché that the only way to enjoy it is to mock it with a friend. The zombies are annoying without a buddy to roundhouse kick them off you. Resident Evil 5 is not a game I am ever going to pop in and play alone. Honestly, now that I have beaten the game I don’t think it will ever play it again. But enough explain that the only thing that made Resident Evil bearable was the co-op mode and get on with the game review.
After chapter 2 the story centers on finding and rescuing Jill Valentine and the duo of two dimensional morons has to travel to a village of mud huts. Once in mud hut-ville the duo blasts their way through a legion of spear chucking zombies. I am not trying to be racist by calling these primitive African villagers spear chuckers, because they actually chucked spears at me. After mucking their way through the village the duo makes it to an oil rig. After killing everything in the oil rig and escaping on a boat the oil rig blows up to fill the game’s quota for pointless explosions. The next level turns Chris and Sheva loose on an Incan ruin so they can play Indiana Jones for a bit. The reason for having an Incan ruin in the middle of the game is silly, but the Incan ruin is the last bit before the game becomes Gears of War so there is no point in being too harsh. Except that being harsh to this crap game is fun, so it’s time to flog the Incan level.
The level in the Incan ruin is only there to make the game longer. The payoff for playing this level is that you can pretend that you are Indiana Jones and collect enough gems and ancient artifacts to sell so that you can max out the damage on the Smith and Wesson revolver. The level ends with the two idiots finding a flower garden. The flowers have something to do with Albert Wesker’s doomsday plot but I have no clue where they fit in. It might have all been explained in the random documents scattered about the game but reading them was boring as hell and kept me from blasting zombies so I didn’t bother. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to only explain half of what was happening in the story with randomly scattered documents? And while we are on the subject of unexplained crap, what the hell happened to the T-Virus.
Apparently, the zombies in RE5 are made by jamming overgrown testicles down poor African’s throats. I am no bioweapons specialist but I am pretty fucking sure that anything that big is not the T-Virus. The overgrown testicles are called las plagas, which must mean fucking retarded in Spanish. The whole damn game they are calling las plagas a virus when it is obviously a parasite of some sort. The back story that gets shown on the loading screens mentioned the T, G, T-Veronica, and progenitor viruses. Apparently, the series switches viruses every other game. How many ways does this series need to make zombies? They are just zombies for fuck’s sake. The Resident Evil series must switch between viruses like Resident Evil 5 switches between settings, and Resident Evil 5 has no clue what kind of setting they want.
After the Incan ruin the games goes straight to some kind of experimental facility or factory with nary a blink of an eye and all the zombies get AK-74s. You read that last sentence right, the zombies get AKs. From here on out the game becomes a bad version of Gears of War. A cover system is used to get into firefights with zombies and a boss gets beaten with an orbital laser. It was bad enough when the game couldn’t decide what tone to take and flitted from one setting to another like a retard with ADHD but now the game flips from survival horror to a poorly made shooter. Not like the game could ever be seriously taken as survival horror. It becomes hard to believe that the characters would be scared of zombies when killing their zombies is their job. I am getting tired of flogging this game for having an inane story, silly choice of environments, and moronic characters. It is time to flog this game for having no immersion.
Immersion is what happens when a game has no glaring flaws or plot holes that make you take a step back from the game and ask, “What the fuck?” Resident Evil 5 has at least one glaring flaw or plot hole every five minuets. For one, all but one weapon is given to the characters in a big silver box. The Smith and Wesson is the only weapon that gets pulled off a corpse. The developers obviously decided that the most powerful gun in the game deserved special treatment and the rest of them could fuck right off. The big silver boxes made me one of those WTF moments and made me realize that I was playing a damn game. After that the random ammo drops off of zombies and copy pasted crates full of handgun ammo and herbs just annoyed the hell out of me. In most games the item drops from corpses can be forgiven as long as effort is put into the rest of the game. For example, having a murderous swarm of mosquitos drop a rare magical axe in Diablo 2 did not bother me because the rest of the game was well done. In Resident Evil 5 the random drops ended up annoying me and even the cut scenes break immersion.
The stupidest thing a game can do to a beautiful cut scene is put a quick time event in it. Resident Evil 5 can barely have a cut scene without making you franticly press X not to die. For the record, there is no faster way to ruin a cut scene than to add quick time events to them. The second that anyone attempts to enjoy one of Resident Evil 5’s cut scenes they will probably die because they are not paying attention to the small section of the screne where the quick time prompt appears. Resident Evil 5 does not even let you just spam the X button and enjoy the cut scene because it likes to switch up the button that you need to press to survive. If Resident Evil 5 wanted to waste all of the hard work they did on their cut scenes then they did a great job. They also did a great job at keeping flaws in their combat system for no good reason.
The combat system has some major flaws. One, why the hell can’t I move after I ready my knife. It’s not like standing stock still is the key to winning a knife fight. The only reason that I can think of that the game decided to make knife combat like that is because that was how it was in every other Resident Evil game. Resident Evil, it’s OK, you can improve things for new games. You don’t have to keep the same shitty knife combat just because that is what every other Resident Evil game has done. Even if I could move and knife things at the same time the knife would not be useful because the knife has about the same power as a feather duster. The shock stick was a vast improvement over the knife except that it sucked up an inventory slot. If they would have just used the shock stick to replace the knife it would have been awesome, but instead Resident Evil 5 decided to fuck it up again.
Having the shock stick suck up an inventory slot would not have been a big problem if Resident Evil 5 gave me more than a nine slot inventory to work with. There is no good reason for giving a person only a nine slot inventory to works with. At least correct the mistake at some point and sell me a fucking backpack. The game is willing to break immersion over its knee and sell me guns, armor, and first aid sprays between missions it might as well sell me a backpack. The game even broke immersion to give me a score for how well I did on each chapter.
Giving the player a score for each chapter was intended to give Resident Evil 5 some replay value, but for me it just broke immersion. Not that I gave two shits about getting the best rank for every level. If I had thouroughly enjoyed beating the game the first time through I would have enjoyed beating it again for a higher score, but obviously I did not thouroughly enjoy the game the first time through. If I enjoyed playing the damn game in the first place I would have played it through again without getting graded on each chapter. As far as I can tell the grading system in Resident Evil 5 was never intended to please an American audience. Just look at the leader boards and see who is taking the time to get the highest scores on each level. The Japanese are topping all of the Resident Evil 5 leader boards almost exclusively. I have no clue why the Japanese enjoy that kind of twaddle, but I am starting to think that Japanese consumers are responsible for all the bad games coming out of Japan.
Another group of people that need to quit pandering to this kind of crap game are the game reviwers. For example, Metacritic gives Resident Evil 5 a score of 86 out of 100. Metacritic, for those that don’t know, takes game reviews and turns them into a weighted average. This means that Metacritic is telling us that in general Resident Evil 5 is getting scores of eight or nine out of ten from most reviewers. That is a fat lot of shit. Resident Evil 5 deserves a five out of ten at best and personally I would rate it much lower. Major reviewers need to pull their heads out of their collective asses and stop pandering to the big label game producers like Capcom. Big label game producers will never learn to make genuinely good games if no one has the balls to tell them they are making shit games. Most game producers would make games like Turd Burgler Eats Shit if it would make them money, and personally I don’t blame them for fleecing ignorant consumers if the consumers will let them get away with it.
We need to stop letting video game companies get away with making games like Resident Evil 5. The story, plot and characters are cookie cutter crap. The game play was mediocre to annoying. The lot of the cut scenes were ruined by quick time events. The game paid no attention to immersion. The whole thing was half assed and I am ashamed to say that I bought the game. Don’t make the same mistake I did and by this shitty game.