With the release of Resident Evil 6 about a month and a half away, I figured I'd play RE5 Gold Edition again for PS3.
What do I think of it? Well... it's a mixed bag. Firstly, most importantly, and the thing you have to come to terms with from the second you start this game up: It's not scary. It's not even close to being scary. Gone are the days of tentatively creeping around corners wondering when you were going to hear those chilling moans and groans which you just knew was the precursor to one or more undead denizens beginning their slow yet inexorable advance towards you. Gone are the days of knowing and praying that you had enough bullets in your puny little handgun for a headshot or two because if you didn't, you would get a face full of rotting flesh which you could do nothing about save push the lumbering brute feebly away, turn tail and leg it down the corridor.
Instead you get a veritable arsenal of guns, grenades, mines, stun rods, sniper rifles, body armour, and a set of melee moves which would make a Tekken character blush. Added to that, you get music which starts up once you meet one of the game's Nonbies (yeah, not zombies), and which continues on until you've obliterated everything in the vicinity, leaving only bloody red stains on the floor. That pretty much gets rid of any uncertainty about if there's anything left to kill. It's like Musical Slaughter - when the music stops, you're clear.
Considering RE games of old, this is a big departure. There's even a section shooting things from the back of a Hummer, for pity's sake. It's an action game, pure and simple. With a checkpoint seemingly every five steps, it removes the Survival aspect, and Horror has been replaced by 'kill everything which moves and then do a few QTE's before you get to the next map'.
Does this make it a bad game? No. It just doesn't make it a Resident Evil game. The areas themselves are gorgeous, the graphics overall are stunning. Especially the backdrops and the environments. The Manjini (the name for the misanthropic inhabitants in this game) are devious. And fast. Which, again, departs from the lumbering zombie theme of the first few games in the franchise. They will duck and weave when you aim at them, sometimes making it hard to get a shot in. As you progress, they get as tooled up as the characters do - gaining armor, firearms, riot shields, heck even miniguns. Cover mechanics come into play and the game drifts further and further away from its roots in order to purvey a very action orientated experience. Which, it has to be said, it does very well. And if that's your thing then you won't be disappointed.
The partner mechanic is good in theory, and in a co-op game with two human players, I imagine it's a fun experience. Unfortunately, the AI partner in a single player game can act like they've been at the tequila slammers, and do some insanely stupid and reckless things to the point where you have to take their guns out of their inventory because if they die, well... to quote Hudson from the movie Aliens: "Game over, man, game over!"
As you play you earn money which you can either find, or which is dropped by the Manjini once they disintegrate in a bubbling heap on the floor after you pump them full of lead/explosives/acid/big-fist-to-the-face etc. Added to this are a plethora of treasures you can find - gems, rings, jewelry etc - which can then be sold at the inventory screen brought up after each sub-chapter or whenever you restart a checkpoint. This money is used to upgrade your arsenal and buy more WMD's (Weapons of Manjini Devastation). However, you can replay a sub-chapter as many times as you like which not only breaks up the flow of the game but can be utilised to 'farm' certain maps containing a lot of treasures in order to power up your gear very quickly and overpower your characters for the rest of the game.
The boss fights are fun, though, and often involve more than just shooting until they're dead. They're also pretty epic in scale. The different environments are really nice, too, although as I said at the start - not scary. As the Versus modes and Mercenaries modes show (both of which I royally suck at since they're way too 'actiony' for me and I can't think ahead fast enough to react), the game was designed more like a series of multiplayer maps you might find in a first person shooter rather than primarily as a coherent, flowing game world. It does its thing well enough, and as an action game it has it's moments. Adrenaline junkies would probably love it. But for fans of survival horror like myself, the more traditional kind, it's a little lacking in the atmosphere and tension which gives you the sense of satisfaction. Especially since, as I recall, there are no RE-style puzzles in this game at all. None.
The DLC pack 'Lost In Nightmares' is actually closer to RE of old than the game it's added on to. And is a lot of fun.
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Yeesh. Didn't intend to write that much.
