The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I promised you Resident Evil 5, and you’ll get it!

I really enjoyed this game.
Often I’ve tried Resident Evils, to attempt to figure out what the game was about. It’s such a big deal, right? But I always hated them. Even RE4’s new direction was one I just didn’t get. I was no good. It was no good. Why was this a big deal?

Then Resident Evil 5 came along. Since Jonathan enjoyed 4, and it had co-op, I wanted to try it. We tried it.
It clicked. It was fun. I bought it from Gamefly so Jonathan and I could finish it at our own pace.

Then we stopped playing it. Jonathan did moving and whatnot. It was forgotten.

Then I watched some Let’s Plays of Mercenaries and got all gung-ho about RE5 again. I forced Jonathan and I to get back to it.

And then, over a year after we started the game, Jonathan and I finished it on Saturday.

I’m glad we did. The game was super-fun. Co-op fixes a lot of what made RE4 unpalatable to me. Mainly, the fact that there’s another person around means that your mistakes aren’t nearly as horrible, since the other player can save your ass. This seems simple, but really, it turns RE5 into a fun, more casual experience than RE4. The other main issue that got me to enjoy the game more was that I stopped trying to use the handguns. I had watched Jonathan play through RE4 with all kinds of Handgunning, and assumed that was how you did it. This was not the case at all. Once I switched to a shotgun/machine gun combo, things went much better for me. I was an asset! It was wonderful that way. I played the tank, running in front and controlling crowds with the shotgun while Jonathan sniped from the back with Rifle and Pistol. It was a pretty solid division of labor!

I had originally worried about the “Zombies with guns” parts. I thought they’d be really annoying and stupid. In reality, I didn’t find them that way. Sure, when you tried to use the cover mechanics and saw how awful they were, it was pretty bad. But you rarely needed to use them, and since you were so powerful, especially with two co-ordinated people, the zombies needed something to get at you from a distance. It was a solid challenge. I didn’t feel it unfair.

Know what was unfair? The whole endgame fights with Wesker. Holy shit, that was annoying. Very little indication of what to do for the first part, with the rocket launcher, and such an annoying bullshit sequence of required events the second time, around the lava. Especially the part where Chris was supposed to save Sheva. I could never attack things from a distance well, and having to snipe Wesker was the most annoying thing. I eventually had to put the cheap Rifle I had with like 6 rounds left in it in my inventory just for that part of the sequence. Ridiculous to have to do that. So stupid.

The plot, too, was really ridiculous. It’s so tied into the thrown-together bullshit “canon” of the Resident Evil series that it’s completely incomprehensible, really. I had read a lot of RE let’s plays, so I kind of had an idea what was going on, but it was all… well, I guess I don’t get what kind of person would care about the plot. Still, it was nice enough to let you skip things, even the non-interactive parts of the interactive cutscenes, so that’s pretty nice of it.

Those problems aside, my feelings on the game are still extremely positive. It does a great job of having you manage limited ammo and inventory without giving you TOO little, and it has plenty of great opportunities for great co-op interaction. It’s an excellent game to play with a friend, completely, and I really had fun with it. I don’t know if it was the sort of game a fan wanted to play, but it was exactly what I wanted to play. I’d buy another game based around co-op like that, easily.