Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360) review "It’s fine with me when the game starts to segue into cut scenes built right off the previous game’s frantic war against biological experiments gone wrong and hunting for brains, but it seems to go jarringly against what they tried to do with the last outing. For those of you out there who started the series at 4, prepare to be confused."

Maybe it’s a silly thing to say, but I think I might have enjoyed Resident Evil 4 more had it not been labelled a part of the coeval survival horror series. The problem I had with the game had little to do with the game itself -- which was a complete blast -- but, rather, that it lost everything that I’d loved from the previous titles. The most notable absence being the complete lack of needing to work particularly hard for survival. This could be labelled a bit of a drawback when it’s right there in the genre label Resident Evil helped bring to mainstream.

Leon’s blood-crazed rampage through infected Spanish serfs might have been overflowing with numbers, but you could find boxes of bullets laying around in dilapidated tool sheds, from fallen pitchfork-wielding old hags and even from the corpses of any crows you felt the need to gun down. By the time the game was all finished up, Leon had enough spare bullets to open his own munitions dump; a far cry from the hazy days of creeping around mansions flooded with the undead, scared to use that last shotgun shell on a gathering of zombies in case the next corner you turned contained a murky hunter just waiting to decapitate you with one single swipe.

Resident Evil 5 suffers from the same disappointing quirk. When I’d finally seen the game off, I had some 400 handgun bullets, 150 shotgun shells and a thousand machine gun bullets because, well, no one uses the machine gun.

I’m not a big fan of how the series seems unconcerned with forcing you to worry about whether you’re going to survive or if you have the resources left to fend off the next big threat. Moreso, it gets hard to work on forcing Quick Time Events to avoid parasitic hosts riding motorcycles lassoing you with chains, or surviving an Indy Jones-like dash through tumbling Aztec ruins. I’m not overly impressed in how the big boss fights ensure that low ammo counts (which you can only ever fall victim to if you feel an insatiable urge to fire at walls, barrels, and passing cloud formations) matter for nothing and supply a rechargeable super weapon like a scoped RPG launcher or a painter for an Orbital Death Ray to be the key to victory. The game is one brainless slog where you shoot people repeatedly until their heads explode and their bubbling corpses fall at your feet, dissolving into either a pile of gold or the millionth box of bullets you’ve seen in under a minute.

That bit of the game, though, I’m cool with.

It’s a silly thing to say that I would enjoy the game more had it been called something like “Chris Redfield offends uptight black people” but the new titles simply don’t feel like they belong under the Resident Evil umbrella [pause for admiration on clever pun], much like the lightgun-based Survivor games, but with significantly less suck. Res 4 was a reboot for the franchise, throwing in the second game’s rookie cop Leon S Kennedy in an adventure that hardly acknowledged the three base games that came before it, effectively marking Capcom’s intentions to start the series anew. Resident Evil 5 cockslaps that idea by dropping series veteran, Chris into the game to chase after long-time slightly-English badguy Albert Wesker and look for the other series staple, Jill Valentine.

It’s fine with me when the game starts to segue into cut scenes built right off the founding game’s frantic war against biological experiments gone wrong and hunting for brains, but it seems to go jarringly against what they tried to do with the last outing. For those of you out there who started the series at 4, prepare to be confused by 5.

It’s not the only alteration worth note; Capcom have decided now’s a super time to jump right onboard the co-op bandwagon, and this I cannot complain about. Chris is shipped off to Africa to chase down reports of odd goings on and is joined on his quest by native Sheva who’s more than Capcom’s attempt to sidestep the obligatory knee-jerk racism claims by supplying a black character to kill black ‘zombies’, but also a more viable option for fanservicey close ups of certain parts of the anatomy than a Chris Redfield who looks like he’s been snacking on a solid diet of steroids and Weight Gain 2000 since his last outing. The pairing works brilliantly, with or without a second player to control her. Their very first outing leads them into a bitter war against an entire village full of parasitic hosts wanting nothing more than to pulp them via unspeakable violence, supplying a near-infinite swarm of crazed villagers who throw themselves fearlessly at you, armed with machetes, glass bottles and unwavering homicidal urges. Much like the opening battle in the previous game, you’re forced to make desperate dashes from one bubble of safety to the next, trying to dissuade your attackers with small arms fire that doesn’t quite cut it when the hooded behemoth carrying an axe that’s twice your size smashes through the wall and tries his utmost to cleave you in half.

Sheva’s inclusion here makes life a lot easier. If you fall to these hordes, you’ve got a small pocket of time when she can resurrect you, allowing you the chance to limp through the level or get your health back up in time for the next flurry. The computer-controlled version might have some issues with how eager she is to keep you alive, often wanting to waste a full healing item on what could be considered a slight graze, but the second funnel of fire is invaluable. Sure, once or twice, I’ve had to drop the battle I was involved in to run away from a Sheva brandishing a First Aid Spray after doing the equivalent of stubbing my toe, but she’s always there with a knife should I call her after being snuck up on and slapped in a full nelson, or ready to kick the head clean off someone I just shot in the back of the knee.

Wasting precious resources is often a viable tactic thanks to the incompetent fumbling of the new inventory system that gives as much space to a small herb than a fully-loaded grenade launcher, which does nothing but ensure that space gets used up very quickly and is a huge step back from the fourth game’s clever systems of managing your items depending on the bulk of what you want to slog along on your travels. This new system means you’re often fumbling to swap that box of rifle bullets for the shotgun shells with your partner while malformed dogs chew on your face and incredibly rude peasants pelt you with flaming crossbow bolts.

It’s a big complaint, but it’s also forgettable in the face of what Resident Evil 5 does well and that to most people is “everything else”. Sure, some of you are like me and are going to miss lamenting the times when you used a box of grenades on that hunter gathering, wondering if it will return and bite you in the arse later. Even though 5 does reinvent everyone’s favourite slimy green homicide factories, you can just buy a new box of acid rounds from the shop you visit between missions and after every death to spam them to death with without worries. But most of you will end up getting carried along by an action-heavy title that rarely drops pace and always gives you something to shoot at until it falls down, twitches erratically and vanishes in a fit of bubbling. Whether you’ve decided to use up your rocket launcher on that creepy black tar monster that refuses to go down, or battle chainsaw-wielding oddities that might as well have been lifted right from the previous title with cultured blasts of your magnum, a commendable job is done of keeping your finger on the trigger and your eyes on the shadows.

Even if you no longer fear what might be lurking there, trying to beat your team-mate into making its head explode is still undeniably a lot of fun.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (April 19, 2009) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.