When it was first announced, Resident Evil 5 had a lot to live up to after the success and wild popularity of Resident Evil 4. While the over-the-shoulder third-person gameplay was retained, the dark, dreary surroundings of rural Europe was replaced by sunny Africa.
In fact, Resident Evil 5’s initial trailer generated some controversy when it was first revealed years ago: a Resident Evil game set in Africa where you have a white guy shooting zombified black people? Tsk, tsk. Of course, the people who were upset ignored that all the previous Resident Evil games all involved zombified white people being shot. Plus, it’s hard to justify white racism in a video game that was made by all Japanese people. That didn’t stop them from trying, but it soon blew over. I imagine the controversy would be even worse if it released today.
Mechanically, Resident Evil 5 isn’t that much different than Resident Evil 4. The only real differences are that it takes place in Africa instead of Europe and you have a co-op partner throughout the entire game. The game is a lot prettier as well, as it was originally developed for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, whereas Resident Evil 4 was made for the GameCube. Even though it’s a fourteen year-old game, Resident Evil 5 still looks good. Capcom’s art direction is so consistently strong in just about any game they make that it covers up a lot of technical shortcomings of their older games, whether that’s Monster Hunter 4 and Resident Evil: Revelations on the underpowered 3DS, or Resident Evil 5.
Also, storage chests have been removed. Traditionally, chests were scattered all through the classic Resident Evil games for you to put guns, ammo, grenades, healing herbs, save ribbons, etc. that you didn’t want to carry in your immediate inventory. Those are gone. You can still store items, but you have to exit your game and access the option in the menus to do so. Or if you exit out and continue your campaign, the game will automatically take you to the item management screen before you start. You can also upgrade your weapons and sell any jewels and gold you’ve found. Item management became tedious at times with no chests, but it was somewhat mitigated by having a co-op partner who could carry stuff as well.
One of the biggest complaints about Resident Evil 5 is that your NPC partner, Sheva, is unreliable and gets in your way a lot. For all of the criticism, I was expecting to have a lot of trouble with her. That ended up not being the case at all. Having a co-op partner turned out to be pretty handy. Sheva turned out to be a crack shot with the sniper rifle. I had to save her a few times, but she saved me a few times as well. She was a great partner.
The game has more action than scares. There are a few creepy sequences, but co-op gameplay is the emphasis from start to finish. You’ll get to blow away lots of zombies and other grotesque monsters with high-powered weaponry, and it always feels very satisfying to do so. There are a few puzzles that allow you time to catch your breath and think for a bit, but it’s almost all action.
The gameplay tends to rely on QTEs a lot during boss fights, and during cutscenes as well, which can get annoying when you don’t know they’re coming. I got in the habit of not taking my hands away from the keyboard during cutscenes. When it’s your first time playing through the game, you don’t know when a QTE is going to flash on the screen and kill you. Personally, QTEs don’t bother me overall, although there were more of them than I remember Resident Evil 4 having. If you’re able to retry close to where you died, I kinda like them, as long as they’re used tastefully and not overdone. Resident Evil 5 toed that line at times, but never crossed it.
The story is…a Resident Evil story, which means it goes back and forth from being creepy to utterly ridiculous and back again. It’s maybe not as absurd as Resident Evil 4’s story, but I found myself wishing at times that the narrative was a little more grounded. There’s a certain charm to Resident Evil’s dedication to B-horror movie storylines, and it’s easy to imagine the writers laughing at some of the dialogue they come up with, but it also makes the game less scary as a result. It doesn’t make the game less fun to play though, which in the end is all that matters. For all its craziness, the story had a satisfying ending that was well done. Also, the game provides a ton of files to read through if you want to brush up on Resident Evil’s back story from previous games, which I found interesting, and learned some things about the series I didn’t know.
Unfortunately, like many older PC games, getting Resident Evil 5 running properly was not without its drama. Since its release in 2009, Resident Evil 5 on Steam has been very difficult to play natively because it was a port of the Games For Windows Live version of the game, and you needed to have a Games For Windows Live account to play it. Since Games For Windows Live doesn’t exist anymore, that made it almost impossible to play the game without the proper mods. Downloading all the mods I needed to get the game up, running, and tweaked to my liking, including replacing all the highly compressed Xbox 360 cutscenes with the 1080p PlayStation 4 cutscenes, and various other fixes and tweaks, was not difficult. After that, other than needing to go into the game’s .ini files to tweak the FOV, I had no problems once I started playing.
However, during my playthrough, completely out of the blue, Capcom hilariously decided to patch the Steam version of Resident Evil 5 fourteen years after its release, finally getting rid of the Games For Windows Live software that’s been plaguing it for years. Unfortunately, the patch also broke almost every mod that’s been made for the game since then to get it running like it should’ve been from the beginning, and made it unplayable. Thankfully, a clean install fixed it, but for a few crucial moments, I thought Capcom had broken my game and I wasn’t going to be able to finish my campaign.
I found it funny, but kind of strange, that Capcom would decide to patch Resident Evil 5 for the first time in 14 years right in the middle of my first playthrough. Good job, Capcom. Better late than never, I suppose.
The DLC content is Desperate Escape, Lost In Nightmares, and Mercenaries. Desperate Escape is all action. You’re blowing away as many enemies as possible while they keep coming. It’s not trying to be scary and is pretty short. Taking my time, I played through it in about 90 minutes. Lost In Nightmares is much slower and much creepier. Without spoiling anything, it resembles an earlier game in the series and provides some back story for Chris and Jill’s relationship. It’s about the same length as Desperate Escape. It’s short and to the point.
Mercenaries was disappointing. I thought it was going to be similar to the fantastic Raid Mode in Resident Evil: Revelations, but Mercenaries just has you taking out as many enemies as you can in a set amount of time, and then you’re graded on it. You’re only able to select one area from the game to play in at first, you can’t select your weapon load-out, or even rearrange your weapons in your inventory so you can access them easily.
Resident Evil 5 doesn’t reinvent the wheel the same way Resident Evil 4 did, but it’s not trying to. It succeeds in what it sets out to do, which is be a solid, mechanically sound, co-op third-person shooter with some minor scares and creepiness. It’s much easier to play on Steam now than it’s ever been thanks to Capcom’s new patch. If you’re looking for scares, Resident Evil 5 will disappoint, but if you just want a good shooter to play by yourself or with a friend, it’s a great choice.
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