Resident Evil 5 Demo Impressions from an RE Newbie

By hexogen January 27, 2009 25 Comments

I've never played any of the Resident Evil games before (or many survival horror games), but I was totally stoked for this because RE4 got so much acclaim and RE5 was supposed to be more of the same. But after playing the demo, I was decidedly less stoked. My biggest gripe with the game is the control scheme. Chris controls like a tank, and not being able to move while aiming sucks a lot more than I thought it would, mostly because he aims so slow. In addition to the janky controls, the inventory system is really clunky and unintuitive. You press Y to bring it up, and it appears in the middle of your screen. You then have to navigate to the item you want, press A, and then select an option such as equip or use from a menu. That's a lot of button presses just to bring out a simple item. And during all of this the action is still going on in the background. Granted, you can assign up 4 of your items to the D-pad to switch between without pulling up the inventory screen, but I still think it could have been more streamlined.

Some people try to justify the controls and inventory system by saying that it creates suspense during the game and makes it scarier, but that's just it: the game (or, at least, the demo) isn't scary to begin with, so the controls wind up hurting the game rather than helping it (not to mention I think there are better ways to create suspense than implementing a substandard control scheme). The only time I actually found myself fearing for my Chris's life was when the chainsaw wielding dude with the potato sack over his head started charging at me. Most of the other enemies were just annoyances or distractions to me, rather than real threats.

If the demo is any indication of the what full game is going to be like, Resident Evil 5 is not going to be a very good horror game. And unless they drastically change the controls, it doesn't look like it's going to be a very good action game either. As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, I don't have much experience with survival horror, so maybe this is just what all games in the genre are like, and they're just not for me. Maybe I would appreciate it more if I had played previous RE games. I don't know. But as the game stands now, it does nothing for me.

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