September 27, 2010

Don’t Worry, The Guy Saying “Resident Evil” is Still In This Version.

Capcom was having a sale in the iPhone App Store this weekend, and a lot of their games were a dollar. I’ve been sick all weekend, as well as depressed, so I wanted to waste some money in a stupid attempt to cheer myself up. Since it seems better to spend a dollar than, say, significantly more than a dollar, I took advantage of this sale.

For some reason, I’ve been on an RE5 kick recently. I’ve really, really been wanting to play it. Has it been from watching these Mercenaries videos? I don’t know. But man, I was suddenly in love with the game. I look back on playing through most of it in co-op with Jonathan, and I’m like, shit, that was fun. Co-op is what those games needed to make me want to play them.

Basically, as my madness about things I am obsessed with is wont to do, I nearly spent more than I spent on my 360 copy of RE5 to buy a PC copy of RE5 to play with Brer. But then I compromised and bought RE4 Mobile for a dollar instead.

In a lot of ways, RE4 Mobile is really impressive. The graphics look top-notch for the iPhone, and are very similar to the originals. I mean, Leon’s hair looks like one solid helmet mass, but it’s pretty good. The controls, too, are fairly solid. You’re never going to be perfect with virtual buttons and d-pad, but you have pretty solid control over Leon, and it gives you many sensitivity options to choose from so you can make it feel just right. Or at least something similar to right. It does seem like it might control a lot better blown up on an iPad, but maybe that’s just me wanting an iPad. It works fine as is.
The only real problem with the controls is that there’s no way to reload. I understand not having that while actually playing the game: screen real estate for virtual buttons is limited, and you want to have as few as possible. However, I can’t even find a way to reload my guns in the menus. This is really baffling to me, and really makes it hard to fight effectively at times, as you can only reload when you’re all out of bullets in your clip. Still, it’s bothersome, but not a game breaker.

Basically, the game is broken up into a series of combat arenas based on key bits of the actual game. They’re tied together with still-frame cutscenes to explain the plot. I completely skipped this. In between these combat missions, you can go spend your money to do upgrades at the trader, who is just a menu, but they still kept some of his sound clips in, which was nice of them. You also unlock “Mercenary” missions as you go, which I’m sure is only vaguely like Mercenaries in the actual game, but is a nice little remix of the combat scenarios. They also let you earn money that you can take back into the “story” scenarios to upgrade your guns, buy ammo, and so on, which is nice of them.

However, the game is kind of crazy hard. I got to the first area with Las Plagas, the tentacle bitches you have to shoot in the tentacle to do anything to, and I just couldn’t beat it. Even on the lowest difficulty setting, I just couldn’t stop these guys fast enough. The lowest difficulty setting has a “auto-aim” you can turn on, but turning it on did nothing that I could see. The red dot jumps more quickly to valid targets with auto-aim on, but it’s useless against enemies like the Las Plagas, where you have to hit specific points. It’s easy enough to move to center mass and shoot with these controls anyway, and the game gives you plenty of ammo to do so, but when faced with these enemies I couldn’t do that to, much less multiple ones, I could do nothing. Maybe it’s an issue of my lack of skill, or maybe I need to just grind out more money in Mercenaries, buy a bunch of shotgun rounds, and just blast through there. Still, difficulty seems to be an issue.

Is it worth a buck? Oh, completely. It’s fun enough, and if you enjoy the post-4 Resident Evils, the combat is very similar to what you enjoy. There’s plenty of levels and upgrades to work on, too. It’s a pretty smart thing. However, I would have extreme trouble paying the 5 dollars it supposedly is off sale. If the sale has ended by the time you read this, maybe you’d be better off putting it on your appshopper list and waiting for another one. Still, I think it’s kind of neat. I’ll probably keep fiddling with it for awhile.

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