.. crap.

This is my first real incursion in the Resident Evil franchise, after playing some RE4 at a friends for a whole 5 minutes, and i thoroughly expected it to be atleast decent. The T&A department was there, the zombies were there, the guns were there. Even at the worst, how bad can it be?

It’s ‘Dawn of the Dead-remake’ bad.  The controls are absolutely all over the place and bad design choices abound.  On the PC atleast, it makes you believe it’s a third person shooter, all while not allowing you to strafe as you would, aim as you normally think you’d aim or reload while walking. So i said ok, let’s do this the RE5 way, the way it should be played. So i learn the movements, call in a friend and start fresh.

We start out.. or i do, since on the PC drop-in/drop-out is not quite so drop-ish. My friend is allowed control at the next checkpoint. Sure, not far, 20 seconds later my friend is controlling the luscious Sheeva. So we start out, trying to get our drunken characters in the general direction of our objective and not long into the game, we meet our first zombie. After desperately trying to kill it, and being faced with quick-action events… the goliath was dead. We cheered, grabbed some ammo then did somersaults out of windows to progress in the level.

After being totally pumped from that, we get a sequence where zombies are coming at us. Again, being pumped we said “BRING IT!” and proceeded to kill them. Two minutes later, and a few herbs and no ammo later, we notice the fact that they’re still coming. Five seconds after that we’re dead and we’re forced to restart. Now we found out we were supposed to run, even thou we were left facing them after the cutscene. Call us thick but we just did not understand that the game wanted us to run.

Now that we were in our element, we continued past that little ambush, and faced our first ‘boss’, the  executioner dude. That’s when the fun ended, and the annoying control schemes really start to bug in. Also bad decisions in regards to what your character can or cannot do really punched our cards. He can’t reload while moving? Trust me, it’s not so hard.

We managed to kill him, eventually, but we both decided that was enough for the night. Not because it was late, but we just didn’t have enough will to continue playing.  And as far as i can see there are a ton of people and reviews out there that agree with me.

In the end i doubt i’ll be able to write a review for this game myself, since i have a policy of finishing all games i review. And no, i don’t think i’ll be able to finish this.