Giant Bomb Video Game News

It's not actually in German, but Capcom dropped this new story-focused Resident Evil 5 trailer to go along with the Leipzig Games Convention. (There's also a better high-def version courtesy of GameTrailers.)


The fiction has never been Resident Evil's strongest suit--the story in 4 was pretty damn absurd, when you get down to it--so I'm not even going to try to figure out who the dude in the cloak is here, or whether that raven-haired femme fatale is supposed to be Ada Wong or not. The best things about RE4 were the shooting and the balls-to-the-wall action moments, and it looks like that stuff is still here in spades, so I'm satisfied. Honestly, Capcom can cobble together whatever hackneyed B-movie horror plot they want, as long as I get to keep gunning down creepy-ass zombies and monsters in eerie environments. Come to think of it, there's a little too much sunshine in this clip. Needs more nighttime!

What I do care about is how RE5 plays. It was one of my most-wanted games going into E3, but sitting down with it I was reminded that, as much as RE4 modernized third-person shooters back in early '05, the genre has progressed even more since then--and RE5 in its current incarnation hasn't kept up. The demo version at Capcom's booth played exactly like RE4--you still can't move while in aiming mode, and you rotate on an axis to turn your character instead of being able to strafe with the move stick and control the camera independently. After RE4 flipped the script so much, the adherence to tradition in 5 was disappointing to me. Then again, post-show scuttlebutt made it sound like the team is considering some radical changes, so I wouldn't be surprised to see more conventional third-person controls in there before release. Hopefully we'll find out more at Tokyo Game Show. The team has till next March to change things up, after all.

What about you? If Resident Evil 5 is just a prettier RE4 and relies on the same gameplay and control conventions, will that be enough for you? Does the gameplay need to catch up with Gears of War 2 and Dead Space to catch your interest?