Resident Evil 5 Preview

Resident Evil 5 – Too Little, Too Late?

Preview written by Zikron on 1/31/09
Last edited on 1/31/09

The Resident Evil 5 English demo came out this week giving American gamers their first opportunity to take Resident Evil 5 online. As most people know the demo has been available in Japan for over a month and was available to download and play on English (unmodded) 360s if you knew where to look.

I'm going to start with the good. The game looks beautiful, from the opening menu to being dropped into the game play for the first time. The textures are rich and detailed, the characters look extremely realistic there isn't much to bitch about here.

However, there are plenty of other things to bitch about in this game. The biggest baddest enemy you will face in this game won't be the fucker with the giant axe coming to slice you in half, it will be the camera. The camera has been very effective in previous iterations of Resident Evil in limiting the players eye to try and scare the shit out of them. Yes it may have caused some frustration when running around corners and into rooms but it rarely caused a problem in combat.

The demo plays more like Resident Evil 3 than any other predecessor because of the large amounts of zombies you will be mowing down. The demo places you in a small house with zombies coming from all sides. Because the camera is positioned directly behind your character your view is limited not leaving you with enough time to react. The visibility problem is something every FPS has to deal with and they compensate for this problem by allowing you to quickly look, move and even gasp run and shoot! That's right, you still must remain completely stationary to fire your weapon. Now in the past gamers were able to look by this but after only a few months after Left 4 Dead I don't know if that is going to happen this time around…

Much like how Skate raped and murdered Tony Hawk I believe Left 4 Dead may do to Resident Evil. The one thing Resident Evil has going for it that Tony Hawk didn't have is a semi-decent story although each movie seems to kill that a little more. I guess my prediction will be determined by gamers deciding how many zombie killing games is too many to have in a collection?

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