Final verdict: F for Fuck you
Final playtime: 5-6 hours

 

 

Yes we already did this one. No we didn’t do it hard enough.

Alright, so where to start? Let’s say the beginning. The game starts out zoomed in on Sheva’s ass, and that sets the tone for the rest of the game. There’s plenty of cleavage and plenty of ass. Especially when you unlock Sheva’s bikini outfit and tits and ass fly all over the place. And then there’s some woman who always has her tits out called Excella or something. And then there’s Jill, who has something on her tits that you have to take off of her tits.

Yeah.

Now, I’ve not played a Resident Evil since the original, and I’m certain that this is a bad one to pick the series back up on. But, my god I wasn’t expecting this. Isn’t Resident Evil supposed to be scary? Resident Evil 5 just fails to evoke any fear in me, which is odd considering the game’s primary aggressor. If a horde of black guys ran up to me in real life brandishing machetes, spears, wrenches and lead pipes I’d be scared out of my mind. That’s not a racist thing or anything, I’d still be just as scared if they were like, Mexicans or something.

I don’t think it does the game any favors that the enemies are all pretty generic, which is particularly noticeable when you’re fighting two or three of the same enemy at once. There I am, trying to suspend disbelief when all of a sudden two identical fat, shirtless, bald black guys with white pants on lunge at me and all I can think of is “Hey, didn’t I just kill your twin brothers just a minute ago? Yeah, they weren’t scary either.”

But it’s not the game’s generic enemies that really bother me. I can deal with that. I know there are limitations when it comes to video games so it’s not like every enemy can be unique. But couldn’t they have at least fucking hired some decent goddamn writers? The game’s dialogue is bland and trite. I know, picking on a Resident Evil game’s dialogue is like bullying the Down’s syndrome kid at school but what the fuck, this is a new low. Sheva in particular talks like she was written by a 13 year old whose writing experience is derived only from watching movies starring Keanu Reeves.

Here’s an example:

Chris: Ready, partner?
Sheva: Locked and loaded.
Chris: Suck on this, Wesker!
Sheva: Time’s up you son of a bitch!

I shouldn’t even have to explain why that is awful. If you think there’s nothing wrong with it, you’re not the kind of person I want looking at my website, so leave right the fuck now.

Something that really, really pissed me off is the cutscenes in general. The fight scenes with Wesker are ripped directly from The Matrix and Equilibrium. It’s sickening. Like, REALLY sickening. He even looks like Neo down to the tiniest detail. It’s all as if they’re trying to appeal to pre-teens who still think this shit is cool for some reason. Why not just put the effort into writing something that at least TRIES to be original? Or was that just too hard? I guess they had to cut budgets and let the trainees make this one.

I have a hell of a lot to complain about with this game, so forgive me if I quickly jump between subjects to cram in as many insults as possible. Next thing I wanna talk about is the boss fights. WHAT THE FUCK. Are you fucking KIDDING me?! Everything has a giant glowing orange weak spot, and you kill them by shooting them in the weak spot. I guess that’s pretty standard for video games, but most games TRY to vary it, and don’t go with obscenely obvious “Shoot me here” signs. And the few bosses that don’t immediately have a weak point are the extreme opposite and it can be ridiculously hard to figure out what the fuck you’re supposed to actually do. It’s very counter-intuitive. When you fight Wesker and Jill (by the way, I guessed that the masked woman was Jill the second Chris mentioned her name, and I’m not even familiar with the story, so I wasn’t in the slightest bit surprised by what I assume was supposed to be some kind of shock reveal) you can’t shoot them. What? But this game has taught me you have to shoot EVERYTHING. Okay, fine, I’ll fucking run around for seven long minutes until this pointless event ends. And then I have to fight Jill again, right? And you have to grab her from behind and let your partner grope her tits. Then Jill kicks your partner off. And then she breaks free and tries to punch you, and you dodge. And then you grab her from behind and repeat the exact same process over, and over, and over.

I got bored and shot her – apparently she became ridiculously frail during those seven minutes in which I had to run away from her, because where she could previously take about a hundred machine gun bullets, one pistol bullet to the ass now kills her. So, fine. I’ll jump through your hoops. For at least 5-10 minutes, my friend and I were going through the motions, grabbing her, touching her tits, etc etc. We honestly thought we were missing something – surely there was SOMETHING more to this, we can’t just be expected to do this same thing OVER, and OVER for THIS LONG. But, the game wasn’t giving us any hints, so we carry on, and FINALLY we win. What the FUCK was that? That whole sequence was a monumental waste of time. What could have been a thirty second cutscene was instead a 20 minute cutscene in which you press the A button enough times to void your controller’s warranty.

While I’m on the subject of Jill – early on the game shows you a cutscene in which Jill and Wesker fall from a window many hundreds of feet up, apparently to their deaths. Years later, Chris is absolutely positive that Jill is alive, and yet he is surprised when Wesker is also alive. HEY. JACKASS. THEY FELL OUT THE SAME WINDOW. AND WESKER HAS GOD POWERS. WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR COMMON SENSE. WHY WOULD HE DIE BUT JILL LIVE? JACKASS. JACKASS. But I guess I shouldn’t try applying common sense in any form to Resident Evil 5.

Now, the inventory system. Okay, where to begin? It’s horrendous. Your inventory is a 3×3 grid, and you can have an item in each of the 9 slots. These items can be 1-50 bullets, an egg, an RPG, body armor, a first aid spray, a herb, or two herbs combined. I won’t go into too much detail on the obvious reasons why it’s stupid, because Yahtzee did that for me already and he explains it all very well. I’m sort of willing to let that whole nonsensical mess go, because it KIND of makes sense in some impossible-to-explain-video-game sort of way. My major issue with the inventory is that you have to fucking stand still while using it. Yes you can quickly switch to items in the top, left, right or bottom spaces using the D-pad, but what about the other 5? If you have to quickly combine two items or switch to a health spray or herb or something, and it’s an emergency and you’re being chewed on by about 15 different things at once, it can be indescribably frustrating because you just have to stand there being attacked. This also applies to reloading, aiming, shooting, or using your knife. You can’t move while doing any of those things, and frankly that’s the only reason the game poses any challenge – it forces you to be slow and take hits.

It’s not like it would ever offer any challenge otherwise – the enemies run at you, then stop about 5 feet away and glare angrily, but they don’t attack, so you just stand still and shoot them in the head. I could sort of understand that if this game was a survival horror, but it isn’t at all – it’s just another action game, and it’s doing it wrong.

So, yeah. Fuck this shit, this game is terrible. Dialogue awful, cutscenes awful, characters flat, tits huge, racism abundant, poor design choices everywhere, shitty control scheme, clunky engine. Ugh, I can’t even talk about this game any more, it’s giving me a headache.

Final play time: 5-6 hours I guess

Final verdict: F for Fuck you.

Oh I almost forgot to mention. The last part of the game you crash land a plane into a volcano but everybody’s fine – apparently raining lava and the heat don’t affect these dudes. So, okay, you’re running around, distracting Wesker or whatever and then you have to PUNCH A FUCKING BOULDER. A boulder. Like, a several ton boulder. You punch it. You just punch it to get it out of your way.

You punch a fucking boulder.

A boulder. You just… punch it. You punch a boulder.