The seemingly never-ending Resident Evil kick continues. After playing the masterful Resident Evil 4 Remake I decided that maybe it was time to go back and play a title that I didn’t have particularly fond memories of. I gave Village a second chance and ended up having a good time with it, despite the largely terrible final hour or so and I’m still in the mood for all things Resident Evil. Perhaps that’s the right mindset to approach Resident Evil 5 again after all these years? Perhaps that’s even enough to get me to go back to Resident Evil 6??!

RESIDENT EVIL 5

Resident Evil 5 is so much worse than I remembered. Not just in terms of the obviously questionable elements but as a game it is really quite poor. In my mind it was always the start of a serious decline in quality in the Resident Evil series, with a total misunderstanding of what Resident Evil 4 brought to the table resulting in a far more action driven experience and one that was completely beholden to the trend upon its release of online multiplayer being a necessity. It’s aged like milk, this one.

The entire structure of the game is shackled to this idea of a fully co-operative campaign to the total detriment of the single player experience. Playing on your own, you have an AI partner at all times who is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, either wasting valuable resources or simply failing to do the most basic stuff during combat. The levels are extremely linear, with none of the traditional Resident Evil puzzle elements, instead being a series of ‘siege’ sections to fight your way through or some tedious co-op gimmick, like where one player has to hold a level to keep a door open or both players are split across two different paths. Obviously this was a game largely shaped by the success of Resident Evil 4’s more action-based approach but what Resident Evil 4 did extremely well is retain the core of what made the series such a success in the first place. All of the great things you remember about Resident Evil 4 have ended up on the scrap heap. The impeccable pacing is gone because you’re just pushing forward through combat rooms. There’s no smart puzzles to break up the action - hell, you can’t even take a minute to yourself with a bit of item management because they’ve ditched Resident Evil 4’s iconic inventory for a really unwieldy nine slot system that has to be managed without the ability to pause the game. This doesn’t add tension, which is clearly what they were aiming for - it just adds frustration.

This feels like something that is trapped between worlds. It’s trying to offer more of what came before but also being influenced by the needs and wants of an audience who had played a lot of the games directly influenced by Resident Evil 4 - Gears of War and the like - and started saying daft shite about how Resi 4 is rubbish because you can’t move and shoot. Capcom clearly didn’t know whether to stick or twist and expand on their own classic title or desperately try to grab a bit of the Gears/Call of Duty market. It doesn’t get near the highs of any of the aforementioned titles by simply failing to understand why those games work and committing to neither style. In the final few chapters, the enemies start shooting at you with guns and there’s one of the most awkward, shoe-horned in cover systems you’ll ever see added into the mix to give you some way of avoiding fire. It’s a total mess, a game that never commits to a style and in doing so, is never able to play to any strengths.

Every boss encounter is dreadful, especially when a few of them rely on one player taking the aggro while another picks their shots - the AI can do neither part reliably, which usually means you have to awkwardly run around and do everything yourself, which is yet another exercise in frustration stemming from the near mandatory need for co-op play. The lack of any kind of real exploration means that you’re basically playing an action game, which would be fine if it was any good, but it falls way short of many of the other games in the genre, even those that were released around the same time. It claims to offer variety but they’re all variations on a theme - ostensibly tasking you with the same few co-op mini-game objectives but presented in a slightly different way. There’s just no reason you’d ever play this on your own.

Thing is, one of the great defences I see online of Resident Evil 5 is that it is ‘good in co-op, actually’. It isn’t. It’s one of the most repetitive and tedious multiplayer games I’ve ever played. People are simply getting “good with friends” mixed up with “having fun spending time with a friend”. Being trapped in a serial killer’s basement dungeon sucks but would be marginally less bad if you were trapped down there with a mate, right? Pretty much EVERY game is better with your mates. It just isn’t something worth singing about - there’s a million great co-op shooters out there, all of which are better than Resident Evil 5. All of the aforementioned issues this game has aren’t suddenly magically made better by the ability to play through the whole thing with your idiot mate.

Then there’s the whole “is it racist” thing, which has followed the game around for years. Now, one thing worth mentioning is that the actual setting and setup of Resident Evil 5, in a destabilised African country that has some sort of heavy military/militia presence that feels like a powder keg, an undercurrent of tension that could explode at any time, exploited by Umbrella as a sort-of testing ground for bioweapons and an easy place to sell their wares to the highest bidder is one that is genuinely unique and intriguing. Unfortunately, the piss poor way the story is actually told to you and comically bad voice acting almost immediately strips it of this context, turns it into a daft attempt at a cheesy all-action blockbuster and, without this context and framing, makes a lot of it feel a bit uneasy. Sure, I can accept that if you set a zombie game in Africa there’s going to be a lot of African zombies to shoot at and sure, you can’t just change the fact that series protagonist Chris Redfield is the whitest guy imaginable but there’s something about the way the infected are introduced and especially the extremely stereotypical tribal infected you encounter in chapter 3 that invoke the image of black people from this part of the world almost entirely as savages, with very little indicator on the in-game models that actually shows them to be infected zombies. It’s also a very non-specific, vague ‘Africa’, conveniently ignoring the fact that there’s a shitload of extremely different and varied countries that make up that continent. That doesn’t help, at all.

I do think that there is something that can be salvaged from this setting. I think a much better and nuanced approach to the narrative setup, that ensures that the necessary context isn’t lost within minutes of starting the thing, you could have something deeply unsettling that acts as a commentary on those outdated but clearly present feelings about African countries and the idea of some evil mega-corporation exploiting a vulnerable, politically unstable area for its own goals as Western media turns a blind eye. I think there’s something there that has real potential and still seems like a fresh concept in a genre that is in dire need of some. The overall aesthetic - washed out, bright and with a constant heat haze is something rarely seen in zombie fiction too. There’s something about this concept of mixing commentary on deep rooted racism and the unchecked rise of capitalism that has more than a faint whiff of the George A. Romero’s about it that I can’t just completely ignore - I just don’t think in a million years Capcom are the right people to pull it off. I’d like to be proven wrong but a remake could make a whole lot of the same mistakes.

Do Capcom remake this one? I’m not sure. It needs a lot of work. There’s some sections that simply need to go for a myriad of different reasons, I think it needs to be restructured and made less linear so that series staples ‘puzzles’ and ‘exploration’ can be added and I’d ditch the idea of it as a co-op game completely, too. You can’t just copy sections directly over from the original because, frankly, a lot of them aren’t very good and even little things like the inventory and upgrades systems would need to be changed substantially to be seen as a step forward from the incredible Resident Evil 4 remake. I’m less looking at Resident Evil 5 as a game that needs to be remade and more completely reimagined. The plot is also pretty stinky, with the stuff around Jill Valentine being particularly messy, a needless, trivial attempt at adding drama but with only a single flashback cutscene to try and get you invested in it, ends up being painfully obvious and adds nothing of value to that character, the plot of Resident Evil 5 and the overall Resident Evil canon. I’d use a remake as an opportunity to not only make a much better Resident Evil 5 but also maybe course correct a lot of the terrible overarching Resident Evil lore that was already out of hand by the time Resi 5 was originally released but went right off the fucking deep end with the notoriously messy sixth instalment.

It’s a big job. I’m not sure it is worth it.

THANKS FOR READING.

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