Resident Evil 5 Review (Xbox360)
Category: Reviews Published Date Written by Loserly
Mom’s pot roast is great. Amazing, in fact. I brag to all my friends about how delectable and tender the dish is- how wonderfully homecooked and full of a mother’s love and warmth. Mom has made the same recipe for eleven years.
Today, she’s trying a new recipe. She found it in her edgy cookbook that follows all the latest techniques of the trendiest, fanciest restaurants in the world. This is not my mother’s pot roast. I mean, sure, she made it. It’s good. But it doesn’t feel or taste the same at all.
RE5, why are you a new pot roast?
You’re fun. You’re outrageous. You’re beautiful. Hell, you have a heroine who is even hotter than Jill. She’s smart, too. When I’m playing single-player, she knows to avoid my line of fire. You’re innovative enough to create areas where only one of us can go, so the gameplay experience in two-player, (which is an awesome feature, btw,) is unique for each player. You even have online co-op! But you don’t feel like a Resident Evil game. Where are the huge areas to explore in a non-linear fashion? And the eerie music that’s way more subtle than the STOMP! concert recorded as Silent Hill’s soundtrack? Where are the puzzles? I’m feeling more like Gart Williams from The Twilight Zone being told it’s a “push push push” game, when really, I just want atmosphere. I want psychological thrills. I want to have to think my way through things occasionally instead of just shoot. Where’s my Resident Evil: Willoughby stop?
It’s neat that I can buy weapons at the end of every act, but why are there acts? Is this some ode to Dragon’s Lair? And we’ve been seing these PRESS (X) commands in RE games for a while, but they make me feel like I’m playing God of War; and therein lies the issue. I’m not upset about your controls. They could be better, but they don’t hinder gameplay. I can’t help but think about my twelve-year-old cousin who is playing the game right next to me. You see, when I was twelve, the very first RE game was released. My cousin has never played the original games. When he goes to school to tell his friends about playing RE5, he’s going to describe it as a FPS/Action game.
RE5, you are not a survival horror game. I can see that Capcom maybe got a little excited about the success of RE4’s integration of action with survival horror. They had shiny new graphics, and they also had a lot of naysayers who whined that every RE game was the same. When RE4 proved them wrong, Capcom maybe felt the stakes were too high to stop there. But you see, RE5, that’s where Capcom went wrong. You should have been an ode to fans of survival horror- not an answer to those who begrudge it.
- I stole this from Sarcastic Gamer. It was too amazing to pass up.
That’s not to say you don’t have worth as a game. Like I said, you’re fun. A lot of people will love you, and hell, maybe I can too, in time. But I’ll always feel like I’m at the latest gourmet cafe in Paris when I really just want to be in my mother’s kitchen.
