Game series that last for many years and contain a large number of titles inevitably at some point go through some evolutionary changes of greater or lesser quality and approval or disapproval from the players. There are few such series that have found themselves in the paradoxical situation in which Resident Evil found itself – which is that the commercially most successful installment also bears the title of the worst.
Since Capcom is on a trajectory of remaking all of its titles and since they have already finished with the major part of those that marked the second half of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s, it is inevitable that a Remake of the most controversial game in the 30-year-old series will happen soon. Before that happens and everyone starts talking about how the original is underappreciated, I would like to reflect in this text on what is good about Resident Evil 5, what is bad, and in some way to apologize to it – because in my eyes as well, it long bore the status of a game to be avoided and one that dragged the series with it into what would turn out to be a not-so-deep abyss.
Suffering from RE4 success
The biggest problem in the making process was how to meet people's expectations after RE4. For me, RE4 is a masterpiece, the peak of the series, and at the same time one of the best games we have ever had the opportunity to play. Besides the quality, one should also take into account that it inspired a whole generation of shooters that came after it, both in terms of gameplay and in terms of art direction. It is not to be underestimated how big of a task lies before the team when expectations are at their highest and the crucial question poses itself – in which direction exactly to go?
What Capcom decided on was to go a step further towards action gameplay and build upon the fundamentals that the most successful project until then had established. This implies including more types of weapons, using the same upgrade system, including environmental objects within the combat dynamics, and of course, expanding the number of melee attacks. And of course, besides that, the biggest change is that the entire experience is built around playing in CO-OP as the foundation of everything, so even if you decide on a solo approach, you get an AI partner.
Resident Evil 4 Pro Max
RE5 combines tank controls with elements of modern shooter games – this implies that while running we can only turn left and right, and while shooting we must stand still. Unlike its predecessor where the Ganados had 2 points for initiating melee attacks - the head (for a roundhouse kick) and the shin (for a side kick or suplex), a third point consisting of the arms is also introduced, and this time the position from which the strike is initiated becomes important. For example, if you play as Chris and hit an enemy in the knee while standing looking straight at them, you can do an uppercut, while on the other hand, if you do everything the same and just stand behind their back, you can do a neck breaker which is an instant kill.
Finishers can also be done with a partner where, for example, Chris hits an enemy in the arm, performs the first strike, then Sheva follows up with the second, and then Chris can perform an attack that sends them to their eternal rest. Now there are also contextual ground attacks that quickly finish the job and give the player i-frames. Since the beat 'em up combat is this developed, I would only wish that those ground attacks were a bit "juicier" so that if Chris stomps a Majini with his combat boot, their head and other body parts burst in all directions, purely so that the feeling would be stronger.
To all those elements, another detail should be added that few people know about, and which raises the entire combat to a completely new level. I am talking about the menu reload, that is, the ability to reload the weapon during some sequence and thus avoid the animation. While you are doing one of the previously explained melee attacks, you can completely prepare the weapon for combat with quick clicks, and that mechanic itself is very important because it is in perfect correlation with the elements of combat and makes the game completely active.
To understand its fundamental importance, take a look at the RE4 inventory system. It requires a lot of pausing because every time we open the inventory, the game pauses, and then we have unlimited time to decide what to do next. It becomes unnecessary to have knowledge of the resources we possess, so we can initially open it with the intention of taking a shotgun, but then make a different decision when we realize we don't have too much ammo, or that a grenade would be more suitable at that moment. One should then also take into consideration that RE5 is significantly faster and that this change kills potential passivity.
This is a horror game… for our enemies
One of the greatest successes of RE4 is that it made a system in which every weapon has its own specific role, so pistols serve for making combos using beat 'em up elements, shotguns serve for crowd control, rifles are for shooting from mid and long distances, and magnums are for boss battles. The first cooperative action installment of the series did not succeed (nor did it try) to achieve that, because it gives us much more ammunition and types of weapons, and by upgrading them, you can find yourself in a situation where you are walking through daylight-illuminated parts of Africa with a pistol that has 100 bullets in the magazine.
Because of that (and because of 2 players), it was necessary to make more aggressive enemies along with a larger quantity of them. That is exactly what Capcom did, but they went even a step further and made special reactions that enemies can have to your moves. It is very obvious that the head is the weak point of most Majini, so they will very often react to a shot fired towards their head by bending their body backward. Here, again, a mini risk-reward system is formed, because such an approach can lead to a multitude of shots ending up where they were not initially intended.
If you ask me, the Mercenaries mode has become an integral part of the experience of playing this series, and as such, I value it significantly. In that regard, Resi 5 is the absolute peak of the series, because it offers the most refined experience due to a perfect, cohesive blend of action and beat 'em up elements, and it has no problem with the scoreboard even at a high score, which cannot be said for previous, or even subsequent iterations of this mode.
SHEVA COME ON! HURRY!.
The AI partner is considered the biggest complaint to this very day, i.e., the way it makes the playthrough harder on its own. Although I agree with most of the criticism on that account, I must emphasize that I also think the whole problem is a bit exaggerated. Yes, the partner, whoever it may be, is completely irrational when it comes to ammo and health, but they can also be more than useful, because enemies in RE5 have a much higher tendency to grab, so if you keep your teammate close, you don't even have to worry about that, because a second after you are caught, they will definitely react and free you.
There are also sections where Capcom itself confirmed how a special script is activated, so the AI has objective-focused behavior. An example of this is the fight with Wesker where, if you play as Chris, Sheva will focus on dragging Jill into other rooms so she doesn't get in the way. Most of the other bad characteristics you have heard about are partially accurate, but in my opinion, problems are realistically not big enough to stop you from playing, if we exclude solo play on professional mode, which is a true test of patience.
Someone would dare to say that RE5 is one of the best CO-OP experiences ever made – and they wouldn't be wrong. To be fair, there are no complex and highly developed gameplay mechanics for two players here, but with the ones that do exist, the experience is certainly excellent. The most important one, besides the shared inventory, is the predecessor of the battle royale knocked-down mechanic where, if you take too much damage, you enter a state in which you can move slowly and from which your teammate must revive you with a quick reaction before the timer expires. But by introducing those two overlapping mechanics, the whole experience of playing with a friend becomes quite cohesive and natural.
7 minutes is all I have to spare to talk about story!
The narrative side is conceptually very similar at the beginning to what we saw in RE4, where the protagonist arrives in some middle-of-nowhere that exudes strangeness. After that, in the first house, he discovers people who are infected with a different type of the Las Plagas virus. This time, Chris takes Sheva as a partner because Jill sacrificed herself and "died" in a mission to find Wesker. It turns out that Wesker is behind everything, and that Jill is alive and working for him due to the influence of some strange device. From that moment on, the entire plot boils down to stopping Albert in his intention to create a genetically superior race of humans.
That is practically everything important that happens, and we ourselves know that the story in RE games has almost never been a strong suit. Although the overall quality of the story is not at the highest level in the series, the gentleman who stepped straight out of The Matrix absolutely is. The combination of his egoism with his visual identity and the charisma that D.C. Douglas raises to a completely new level makes him the best iteration of himself, but also the best villain in the entire series. This is further supported by the fact that everyone knows his iconic lines like "7 minutes" and his iconic scenes in which he dodges bullets.
Not everything is as bright as the African sun
One might think all sorts of things given how many words of praise I have expressed so far, but not everything is so bright. The quality of the level design is, after all, too subordinated to the CO-OP experience, and as such, it suffers from excessive linearity, which is a shame, because the truly great-looking areas of Africa mixed with the vibe of ancient civilizations would indeed be a suitable place for some minor side exploration. Along with that, except for the fights with Albert which are straight-up iconic, all the others are pretty lame and forgettable.
Personally, I consider the turret section and all the sections where the enemies carry firearms to be the problem of the largest scale. The initial idea is clear – to give the player a bit of a breather from classic combat encounters, but the very idea of how to do that is fundamentally flawed. The parts where we control a turret while on the back of a vehicle would completely fit a Call of Duty game. From the moment the Majini become intelligent enough to use rifles, the cover mechanic is brought to the forefront, which really is not well-implemented enough, and from then on, our complete adaptation to our opponents begins, along with a sharp slowdown of the gameplay.
The parts in which they wanted the player to take a bit of a breather should have been implemented differently, to match what the player had been engaged with up until then. For instance, imagine if there were a part where we get some kind of melee weapon and then we can finish it using only that and our physical moves.
Forgiving the sin, appreciating the craft
When all is said and done, Resident Evil 5 will probably never shake off the label of the game that completely dragged the series away from survival horror. Although that is true and although I agree that RE5 is a bad RE game strictly looking through the elements that made the original trilogy so fun, it is unfair to observe it solely through that prism. The elements of atmospheric horror did disappear, but in their place came an exceptionally deep and fluid action combat system that shines brightest in the cooperative mode and the Mercenaries mode.
After all these years, it is time for a sincere apology, because Resident Evil 5 is definitely not the abyss of the series, but a brave and at times flawed experiment that visibly suffered from the massive legacy of its predecessor. In the end, there only remains the hope that Capcom will manage to recognize the objective flaws and that they will retain the core of this title - because if they manage to keep that brilliant action intensity and the depth of the beat 'em up combat, while fixing the AI and completely remaking the parts that do not belong here, a potential action masterpiece will be ahead of us. Until that moment, the original deserves to be remembered, not as a black sheep, but as a title that provided one of the best cooperative experiences in gaming history.
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