AN EASILY SURVIVABLE SURVIVAL-HORROR

By Philippe Buteau
Copy Editor

Imagine if Freddy Krueger entered your dreams and you Muhammad Ali’ed him until the sun came up. Or if the big breasted blond turned around and used Jason Voorhees’ own machete on him.
Despite the fun I had with Resident Evil (RE) 5 that is my major gripe with it, basically, not being horrified of the horrific characters.

Resident Evil as a series has been moving towards the action genre more and more but has, until now, at least tried to be scary. RE4 set in Europe had monster closets, eerie destinations, haunting music, dark and stormy nights and a wide variety of enemies. RE5 has none of these. Sure the bosses are creepy enough, but in arenas with plenty of ammo at my disposal, I wasn’t scared, or even worried, about facing them, no matter how many tentacles they had.

Knowing that throughout the game my partner, Sheva Alomar, would be by my side helped in keeping me from getting scared. I wouldn’t ask to remove her, but I would tell the developers to remedy that by adding the elements mentioned above.

As similar as RE5 is to the previous game, Alomar being there is the biggest difference to my time in Europe. While Leon Kennedy was alone, RE5 has a cooperative mode that allows two people, online or split-screen, to play through the entire game together. When alone the computer controls Alomar and handles her well enough but is too quick to use those green herbs.... They’re for healing.

Another place where the game took a misstep is in the “why” of its story. It’s been about a week since I finished the game and I’ve been thinking about it since then for this review, but I still don’t understand everything that happened for those 12 or so hours.
I was sent to a town in Africa to capture some guy who I think was a biological terrorist, or maybe my bosses didn’t like his voice as much I. Then I received some information about an old friend and former boss. I had to rescue the former and stop the latter. He’s bad so I had to stop him, I get it. But why did he want to wipe out the human race? Agoraphobia?

Whatever the reason, my most basic objective of staying alive had a few steps in order to complete: pick up any of my laser-equipped weapons, aim and shoot. However, like Kennedy, Alomar and I (Chris Redfield) cannot multitask, or in other words, move and shoot. I certainly would like to but I knew going in that this game wouldn’t have that and don’t really mind because the game is still fun to play.

Capcom somehow managed to improve and screw up the inventory system at the same time. It is fixed in that I can now designate spots on the D-Pad (up, down, left or right) for quick weapon swapping; screwed up because it is limited to nine spots where in RE4 I had a case that could, with proper management, fit as many weapons and items that I could find.

So despite my complaints, I still enjoyed the game overall and would recommend it. It does feel like a $60 special edition of RE4 but I didn’t finish it with a feeling of having been cheated. Was it worth the money? To me it was. I plan on playing through it maybe three more times, I have to uppercut a zombie while wearing a safari costume.