This post is spoiler free!
Recently I played through both Dead Space and Resident Evil 5 (coop) within a week of each other. I thought this would be a good idea since I’ve heard a great deal about what Dead Space has done with the RE4 formula. The following is just a collection of thoughts I had about the two games.
My recurring thought when playing Dead Space was “this is what Resident Evil 5 should be” – everything about Dead Space fits together perfectly, and that’s not even counting the completely coherent menu designs. The controls are also flawless other than the slow aiming speed.
While playing Resident Evil 5, I had a few recurring thoughts rather “Here comes the <insert encounter/event from Resident Evil 4 here> part” and “They could have learnt from Dead Space?”.
To be fair, Dead Space arrived around 6 months before RE5 and even the late addition of the strafe based control scheme for western players (which I disabled, I personally prefer the RE4 based controls). This would mean that any addition made to the game at this late time would have changed the balancing of the levels and game as a whole drastically, more than likely making the game far too easy. There were other things that could have been tweaked more easily though, like maybe having the ability to move with the analogue stick while navigating the inventory with the D-Pad.
RE5 actually feels like a Japanese game, simply playing the game and getting a feel for the controls is enough to make that obvious. Like in RE4 triggering events still has the ability to cheat death in many situations (for example a chainsaw guy wont be able to cut you up if you’re in a “punch” animation attacking another group of enemies, or picking up some ammo makes you temporarily invulnerable too). Context sensitive events are the order of the day, but only in developer-approved locations, an example of this being the “cover” element featured a few times throughout the game.
Resident Evil 5 is a great game, maybe a better game than Dead Space, its just a shame that it turned out to be Resident Evil 4: Multiplayer rather than even changing the formula slightly other than adding another playable character to the mix while Dead Space was able to take the RE4 blueprint and create something entirely different and refreshing. It has already been said in interviews that Resident Evil 6 will offer the next redefinition to the franchise, how about having more than 1 puzzle next time.
That brings me to one nagging issue with the RE5 coop – one player slashes a barrel with their knife, and by time the animation is over and they’re able to pick up whatever is inside the other player can grab it first. This actually led to a weird meta-game in my play-through where me and my friend would both stand around a barrel in a stalemate.
Resident Evil 4 is one of my favourite games of all time, Resident Evil 5 is more of a good thing.
