Leveling Down

Resident Evil 5 is definitely more action than adventure this time around

Being underwhelmed with the game at first, I’ve finally come around to accept that it’s still a good game. While not as phenomenal as Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5 has enough that it is still worth a look for not only fans of the series, but action/adventure gamers in general. I’ve beaten the game on all difficulties with the AI partner, and have spent some time with The Mercenaries mode. Read on for my thoughts based on that.

Good
- similar gameplay feel to Resident Evil 4
- lots of extras and unlockables that increase replayability
- online & splitscreen co-op

Bad
- less adventure and more action than previous Resident Evil games
- pacing and level design not as strong as Resident Evil 4
- forced to play with an AI partner for co-op

Intro
Resident Evil 4 is the biggest selling Resident Evil of all time and came from Shinji Mikami, the creator of both the Resident Evil and Devil May Cry games. While Shinji Mikami declared that Resident Evil 4 would never see the light of day on any other console except the Gamecube, the higher ups at Capcom decided otherwise and released the game on the PS2. This caused Mikami great shame, but at the same time, had the game sell almost twice as much on the PS2 than on the Gamecube, and combined with the Wii remake of the game, Resident Evil 4 has sold over 6 million copies worldwide. Since the completion of the Gamecube version of Resident Evil 4, Shinji Mikami has left the studio to work on other projects.

With Resident Evil 5 being the first Resident Evil game not being headed by the original creator, how did things go? Not too bad. The remaining members at Capcom decided to follow the premise of Resident Evil 4, and instead of trying to really push for innovation, they were content with just not breaking the model. The most drastic change to the game is the addition of co-op.

The game had to deal with controversial racism claims though, with the game taking place in Africa. Original trailers showed Chris taking on local inhabitants that were of darker skin and that the whole “white male killing black males” motif was cutting it a little too close. However, later trailers would indicate that the infected Africans were more diverse since there were white “zombies” as well. Also, with the other lead protagonist and supporting characters in the game black, the case was eventually thrown out.

Is long time Resident Evil series villain, Wesker, involved in this one?

Storyline and Premise
Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield, one of the two main protagonists from the original Resident Evil game. We discover that since the events of the original Resident Evil, he has joined the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA), and is deployed to Africa to investigate someone selling viruses on the black market. Here, he meets up with a woman named Sheva Alomar, who becomes his partner the entire game. The two discover that the trail goes much deeper than a guy simply selling viruses on the black market, and work together to put an end to it.

The game is the first in the Resident Evil series to have co-op. Chris and Sheva are together the entire game, and the second character can be controlled by another player or the AI. The game is also the first to break up the areas of the game into specific missions: there are about 15 missions split up into 1-1 through 6-3 (sounds like Super Mario Bros. or something) and total gameplay time in my first run through was 10 hours (subsequent times through were about 4 hours because I had upgraded weapons and didn’t stop much to pick up items). Each mission can be replayable at any time, on any difficulty. The player’s progress is saved after every mission, so you can keep “farming” the same mission over and over for items if you desire as the player’s money and items are always saved separately from the missions themselves. This makes the game more accessible, but again, makes it feel more like an action game than an adventure game since there is a lack of continuity.

There are a handful of times in the game when you can send your partner up a broken ladder to help cover you from above.

Gameplay Mechanics
Combat
Resident Evil 5 plays very similar to Resident Evil 4: a 3rd person shooter with a few differences than a traditional shooter. There is location specific damage, so if you shoot enemies on their leg or their arm, they may crumple over, drop their weapon, etc. Headshots are also a big deal, as they can instantly kill an enemy.

Meleeing is also a big deal in the game. If you shoot an enemy in the leg and they crumple over, if you get near them when they are in this stunned state, you can hit the corresponding button highlighted on the screen to melee attack them (whether it’s a punch, uppercut, neckbreaker, etc.). Melee attacks do a large deal of damage in the game – and surprisingly, probably more than bullets. New to Resident Evil 5 is the ability to chain melee attacks with your partner, for combos. Basically, you can stun an enemy, go in for a melee, then your partner can melee right after than, then back to you, etc. You and your partner can also melee enemies off one another, as some grab you.

The most obvious and complained about combat mechanic is not being able to move while aiming your weapon. You are literally locked in place when you want to fire your gun, but this has been a staple to Resident Evil since the first one so the developers have a hard time changing that because they argue that it wouldn’t be Resident Evil if you could move while you aimed. While I hated it at first, I got used to it – it’s still annoying to have to lower your gun, run back, then turn around and raise your gun again when you could have simply walked backwards with your gun up like in other shooters, but it’s not game-breaking.

Quick Time Events
Also carried over from Resident Evil 4 are the implementation of Quick Time Events. For those that are unaware, it’s basically certain set scenes in the game where you have to hit certain buttons at the right time to pass. For example, if you are being pursued, the screen may indicate that you have to rapidly press the A button, and then tap the B button to jump at a certain instant. Fail to do that and it’s game over. While most QTEs are the same button every time, some vary it up, so maybe one instance you may be told to hit L & R, but the next time you may be told to hit X & A. I personally find them to be pretty stupid but Resident Evil 5 tends to handles them better than other games.

Item Management
In-game item management regulates Chris and Sheva to nine spaces, where every item in the game takes one space – whether it’s a large rocket launcher or a tiny herb. Even bullet proof vests and melee vests take up spots in your inventory. You are able to move items between the two characters at any time, although the game does not pause during item management so things can get hairy in the middle of a fight. There are also hotkeys: hitting a d-pad direction equips the character with whatever is in the corresponding spot in the inventory. It’s useful to switch weapons on the fly this way but with only 4 hotkeys (4 directions), it’s not exactly feasible to easily switch between weapons, grenades, and healing items without opening the inventory screen.

The Stash, the Store, and Upgrading
In between missions (and whenever you continue from a checkpoint or savepoint) you are able to access your “extended” inventory. You have an infinite stash that allows you to move items in and out between Chris’s backpack, Sheva’s backpack, and the stash. If you keep dying at a boss and continuing, you can change what each character is carrying – maybe more health packs, different weapons, etc. You can also buy/sell items and treasures from a generic shop in the stash management window. New items appear as you progress through the chapters of the game. You can also upgrade weapons for a price, and the purchasable upgrade abilities for each weapon continue to improve as you progress through the game.

Co-op
Co-op supports online and offline co-op and is structured around two different gamer profiles that would hold onto their own inventory and unlocks. When you join someone else’s game, if you pick up ammo or use it up, when you quit you can save the update to your profile so the items (or use of items) carries over to your own profile when you play later. The host can also choose whether to allow infinite ammo weapons or not for both players if either of them has unlocked it on any of their guns.

For online, you are able to create a game open for anyone to join, or only if you invite someone. Offline, it simply works by having someone hit start on the second controller. Of course, after hitting start on that controller the player is prompted to sign in. The split screen in Resident Evil 5 is done a bit differently than other split-screen co-op games – in Resident Evil 5, the ratio of the screens are kept for both players so there’s a lot of black space around the two screens. The screens are pretty small since Resident Evil 5 decided to keep the aspect ratio when splitting. It’s not like in Gears of War, for example, where the screen just gets cut in half right across the middle and on my 32″ LCD, it’s not really comfortably playable for two people from the couch.

When playing solo with the AI partner, you will come across some annoying habits. The AI partner will work with whatever weapons you want it to use, but will not conserve ammo of any sort or aim for vital areas on enemies. If you’re conservative with your ammo like I am, the AI probably uses about 3-4 times what you would use. The ammo issue is not as big a deal in subsequent playthroughs since you can give the AI an unlimited ammo weapon. The AI is also programmed to heal you when your health reaches a certain level, but it’s somewhat annoying that it is also programmed to combine green herbs whenever it has more than one in its inventory.

You can also call the AI player over whenever you want, and can even set the AI onto two different modes: Attack & Cover. Cover is the default mode, where the AI will stay close to you and use less powerful weapons. If you set the AI on Attack, the AI will switch to its most powerful weapon, pick up items, and charge forward. For the most part, the AI is decent with positioning, but on harder difficulties where it’s basically one hit kill you will be restarting a lot if you can’t get the AI to avoid dangerous parts. A bit frustrating, but if you’re patient you can beat the game on the hardest difficulty with an AI partner.

Extras
There are a ton of extras in this game, which allow you to keep playing long after you’ve finished the main campaign. The first noticeable extra is if you beat the game on Veteran difficulty, you unlock Professional difficulty, a mode that pretty much has you dead after one hit from practically anything in the game. To alleviate that difficulty, Resident Evil 5 has implemented a score system in the game that allows you to buy various things. Each mission you beat in the game is ranked based on how fast you were, how many enemies you killed, your accuracy, and how many times you died. The higher the grade you earn, the more points you get.

These points allow you to purchase action figures and infinite ammo on every possible weapon. The infinite ammo reward is often times very limited but has always been a hallmark unlockable in past Resident Evil games, and it continues with Resident Evil 5. If you beat the game in under 5 hours, you can also unlock the infinite ammo rocket launcher for free. Even just beating the game unlocks an infinite ammo chaingun for Chris and an infinite ammo bow and arrow set for Sheva. In other words, your subsequent times through the game will be a lot more enjoyable with infinite ammo. Using a magnum with infinite ammo is quite something.

Mercenaries
After beating the game on any difficulty, an extra mode called Mercenaries is available for play. The Mercenaries mini-game was introduced in Resident Evil 3, and since then has been present in Resident Evil 4 and now Resident Evil 5 as well. In Mercenaries, the player is able to pick from one of several characters, such as Chris or Sheva, and each specific character has their own weapons. The gametype is actually quite similar to The Club, where the player is given a set amount of time (2 minutes) to achieve the highest score possible. Points are earned for every kill, and in Resident Evil 5′s Mercenaries mode, chaining together kills (killing an enemy within a few seconds of another) results in a score multiplier. There are also items on the map that allow you to lengthen your time, and as you kill more and more enemies, more difficult ones show up. There are a total of eight different maps for the mode, all taken from the game and are only unlocked once you achieve a decent score on the preceding one. You can also play the mode solo or co-op.

The in-game map is very useful as you can get lost sometimes in larger areas.

Achievement Design
I’m glad that Resident Evil 5 is one of the more recent co-op enabled games that doesn’t have Achievements related to playing the game co-op. Instead, it has pretty general Achievements – beating the various levels, beating it on various difficulties, beating enemies with different weapons, etc. It is perhaps a bit too generic and simple in its Achievement design.

What bothers me about the Achievement design is that you are graded for every mission you play in the game – based on how quickly you make it through the level, how many enemies you killed, how many times you continued, etc. However, there are no Achievements for ranking highly on each mission. And with the fact that all of your weapon upgrades carry over from one difficulty to another, is it really an Achievement that you can beat the game on the hardest difficulty if you’re using an infinite ammo magnum? I would have preferred for difficulty levels to not allow upgraded weapons, just so that when you do earn difficulty related Achievements, they actually mean something. In any case, the game on normal without upgraded weapons is probably more difficult than the hardest difficulty with infinite ammo weapons and that just doesn’t seem to balance well.

I also don’t like how there’s a glitch in the game to earn infinite money, making the game significantly easier for everyone to max out their weapons early on. How this occurs is that when you play co-op with two different gamer profiles, if you move inventory from one player to another and quit the game, you have the option of saving or not saving on each profile independently. That means, if you move all of the valuable items from one player to another and quit, you can save for the player who just got the items, but not save for the player who gave up all the items. Then you can sell the items Player A just got, and then start a new co-op game with both players where magically, all of the items Player B gave Player A are still in B’s inventory because it wasn’t saved. It would have made more sense if you were only able to save both or not save both players’ inventories. That way items aren’t constantly magically being duped.

Nearly every encounter in Resident Evil 5 consists of at least a half dozen enemies at once.

Final Thoughts
From a single player perspective, Resident Evil 5 is not as strong nor as innovative as Dead Space. I still find Dead Space to be the better game of the two, and if you are interested in more of a survival horror game along the veins of the original Resident Evil games, Dead Space is a good fit. However, Resident Evil 5 is still an altogether enjoyable experience both solo and co-op – providing for a deeper co-op experience than Army of Two (its closest co-op comparison). I do miss several things that were introduced in Resident Evil 4 that were not carried over: the merchant, combinable treasures that become more valuable, more personable villains, an expandable item case that allows you to manage your inventory better, etc. And there doesn’t seem to be as much adventure in Resident Evil 5 anymore – the game seems to be all about action, sending a half dozen enemies at you at pretty much every encounter so you’re often throwing grenades more so than shooting a handgun.

I give the game a B+. A lengthier and better designed campaign would have made me happier as well as the ability to actually play the game without an AI partner. Being able to walk and aim at the same time would have also been nice. The pacing seemed strange because the first couple of levels were excellent and the last couple were excellent as well, but the middle was kind of bland. I found it odd that so much was packed into the final 6-3 stage. The game could have honestly been much longer. I’m also disappointed that paid DLC for online versus modes was announced right after the game’s release (just released today). The public is somewhat annoyed that it was kept out of the game simply to make an extra buck afterwards. Of course, I won’t be buying it.

For those wondering whether to buy it, I’d say the game is enjoyable to play and while it’s about half the length of Resident Evil 4, it’s not much shorter than Dead Space. With all upgrades and inventory carried over between difficulties and the ability to ulock unlimited ammo for all weapons, replay value is certainly increased. I think I capped out at about 30 hours on this game, so there’s plenty of gaming to be had if you’re wondering if it’s worth it. If you have a friend who you could play it with, I’d say it’s definitely worth checking out, but if you’re playing solo, consider Dead Space first as playing with an AI partner in the game certainly detracts from the overall experience.

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