Resident Evil 5 Demo – Our First Impressions
Oh, Resident Evil….
You tricky bitch, you…
Remember when Resident Evil was that cute little girl in the corner? She was all into the same geeky things you were, she was goofy, and she loved to get weird every once in a while? She was always around, too. She’d hit you up for some great dates every now and again. Some quality ones – really!.. Oh, and then remember how a few years went by, and you didn’t see her as much, and then suddenly she dyed her hair blonde and lost all that weight? That was really something! Man, what times you had then!.. But then it turned out that deep down she was still pretty weird underneath that new coating. Yeah, she had hottt third-person action, but she was still pulling out the living-statue-in-a-creepy-castle-owned-by-a-badly-voiced-tiny-man card….. Eh…..
Yeah. Well, she’s back. And she’s bringing with her a whole new slew of gameplay tropes to rope you back in. She’s got prettier graphics, naturally. She’s got some co-op gameplay. She’s got some on-the-fly inventory management. Yeah. The RE 5 demo is out now ( sorta ), and we’re lucky enough to have put our hands on it. But, did we like it?
It pains me to say this, but I have to bring another game into this discussion before I can really tell you what this demo achieves and what it doesn’t: Left 4 Dead. Without going too much into it, L4D is a stellar game. Not just a stellar zombie game, mind you, but a stellar game. While L4D offers little in the way of story, what it gets oh-so-right is its sense of vivid, fluid gameplay that gives instant gratification. While also a zombie game, RE5’s shambling masses play by different rules. RE5’s zombies, much like the ones found in RE4 are scary, yes, but slow. They’re deadly, they’re nasty, but they require twenty slugs apiece to takedown. They drop glowing bullet boxes on the ground. They fill their towns with wooden barrels, also containing bullet boxes and stacks of gold….. Ho-hum….
RE5 is a beautiful, fun third-person action game with ridiculously large muscles, and when it hits retail, I will probably buy a ( second-hand ) copy; but on the heels of a game such as Left 4 Dead, it seems to be stuck with a number of gameplay conventions that tie it to an older generation. See, it seems to me that games are mostly an evolutionary medium. We are more used to slow refinement than all out reinvention with every game we play – and that’s a good thing. But, when you have a company like Valve who takes big risks with their products, it ( un )fortunately changes how we see the conventions of the now…
RE5 is a completely competent game, but I don’t know how thirlled I’ll be once it’s out. I mean, shooting one human thirteen times only to watch them flail around oddly, then get up again, then get shot eight more times, and then disappear in a weird bloody, bubbly mess is just kinda tiresome. I want some real action from my weapons. I want a man to be crippled in a couple of shots. Yeah, RE5 is more of a sci-fi game than L4D, and yeah, it may not be fair to compare the two in the sense that one is a third-person game and the other, first-person… Still, when it comes to real fear and anticipation, a game like Left 4 Dead trumps RE5 in every way. Chances are, the final version of Resident Evil 5 will be just fine. A just-fine game content to have a foot in the last generation.
Oh, and on the intro screen: < really, super-creepy tone of voice > RESIDENT EVIL …5!!!!
Really?? Get out of here with that shit! Jesus’s mother!!
“Where maaaah cookies!?!”
