Capcoms Resident Evil survival horror series has grown into an extremely popular series that has a large following audience. Capcoms latest instalment in the Resident Evil series had to meet high demands after the previous fantastic Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 5 is the first Resident Evil to meet the Xbox 360, could Capcom take full advantage of them? In short, yes.
Resident Evil 4 centered on twitchy gunplay against fast moving enemies, over-the-shoulder viewpoint and the introduction of a laser sight to greatly improve aiming accuracy. Resident Evil 4 also increased action by making the zombies quicker, sharper and all-round nastier; they were infected with the Las Plagas virus and would chase you with vengeance.
Now, four years later, we finally have Resident Evil 5. You start out as Chris Redfield, ex-STARS agent who was last seen in Resident Evil: Code Veronica. Chris is deployed to Kijuju, Africa, to partner up with Sheva Alomar and apprehend Ricardo Irving, who is attempting to sell viruses on the black market. Sheva remains by your side until the end and a second player can take control of her at any time as part of the games drop-in/drop-out co-op play. Generally, Sheva will operate intelligently and do useful things such as, hand you ammo, automatically heal you and pick up items. You can also play with a real-life person when taking the co-op experience online. Fans of the series will also be glad to hear that the very popular Mercenaries game mode is included which sees players compete against the clock as they try to defeat as many enemies as possible in the given time!
You can access the radically changed inventory menu which allows you to swap weapons and items, although, this can be very risky as gameplay will continue as you make these changes; picking the right moment can prove important. You have the ability to upgrade weapons using money you collect from crates and dead enemies, each armour can then be upgraded a number of times in several categories and a big part of the strategy is how you share the upgrades between the two.
There is a large amount of guns and accessories to choose from which include, multiple types of pistols, machine guns, sniper rifles, grenades and shot guns in addition to, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, mines and a stun rod.
Graphically, Resident Evil 5 is a stunner; the texturing is incredible with surfaces displaying amazing clarity no matter how closely you look at them. Light reflects off objects just as it should and facial animations look very realistic. It all adds up to one amazing looking game. Angles in the pre-recorded videos are intelligently selected, visually it’s a masterpiece.
Voice acting is unbalanced, in areas it’s perfect, but in parts it’s simply awful. Music is very well placed with the video effects and generally adds to the thrills.
If you are a Resident Evil fan or someone who likes action games developed around movie cut-scenes, then Resident Evil 5 should surpass your expectations. The jaw-dropping graphics, the great (sometimes twitchy) AI partner and amazing gameplay add to areas that were missing from the brilliant predecessor, Resident Evil 4, making it one of the best gaming experiences yet to land on Xbox 360! All I can say is Buy Resident Evil 5 now – that’s an order!
