Resident Evil 5

This game looks like it was designed by a marketing department and not by an actual designer, which makes it a very disappointing and not fun experience. Let me elaborate on that.

The story has holes big enough to pass a truck through them. For example, Sheva welcomes Chris and refer to the zombies as "her people", but didn't she notice any strange behavior before the game started? Right at the beginning of the game there is group of strange looking men beating to death what seems to be an animal in a sack. There are animals slaughtered on the streets and its internal organs spread all over the place.

The enemies in that game are also illogical and monologue way too much. Why, Wesker, if you can fight like Neo from the Matrix, why don't you just put a bullet in the head of Chris?

The same that happens with Mario and Zelda happens here. When those two Nintendo games were released they were awesome because nobody had seen anything like that before. The same with Resident Evil. When it was released 3D graphics was new and the CD was a new medium that enabled a better storytelling. But technology progresses and that's where Nintendo does it right and Capcom doesn't. Even if it is possible to depict elaborate cutscenes with human-like CG animations, Nintendo continues depicting its characters (Mario, Link, etc) and its stories in a cartoonish way because it fits better the Mario and Zelda universes. It wouldn't make sense to have an overweight plumber jumping on giant turtle's heads.

The Resident Evil story is not only a tangled mess because of all the games and spin-offs, but also it doesn't work if you started taking it too seriously. In the Playstation 1 time it was more than enough to create an excellent atmosphere and experience, but today it is not good enough. The tone of the Resident Evil 5 is more movie-like, but the story is not on par with the visuals and seriousness of the characters.

But the worst part are the controls. Even if you are a Resident Evil fan and expects the exact same thing as its predecessors you will be disappointed. By some marketing reason they decided to include more "action" (probably because the marketing department decided that "Westerners like action"). That's enough to ruin the game's atmosphere and make the controls that would otherwise work in a "survival horror" setting look like crap. Some enlightened marketeer must have thought that a cover system would be good, but the problem is that is so poorly implemented that it hurts. You can only duck in certain spots and even then you can't move after you are behind something. So if some zombie equipped with an AK-47 or a rocket launcher (yes, you read it right, zombies are like soldiers now) is shooting you from a certain angle they can still hit you and you can't move.

And then there is the Hammer of Dawn... Wait a minute! What game are we talking about? Yes, Resident Evil 5 is a shameless rip-off of Gears of War, but done in a not fun way and with crappier controls. Even the Hammer of Dawn is there.

Any Gears rip-off wouldn't be a good one if it didn't include coop with Dom-like dumb AI partner. And Resident Evil 5 brings the miserable experience of playing with a dumb AI to new levels. Sheva is useless in battles, spend all the ammunition you give her and can't figure out where to shoot (some characters have armor and despite the fact that the shots don't hurt them, she keeps shooting). At least in Gears or in Killzone 2 your dumb partner serves the purpose of distracting the enemies for awhile, but not here. Sheva follows you wherever you go.

For example, Capcom thought it would be nice to include enemies that are completely protected by armor in the front side of their bodies (legs, chest and even the mutant head that occasionally shows up). So you need to aim carefully for some other part of their bodies or shoot them from behind. Well, you can't shoot them from behind in the single player campaign because Sheva is as dumb as fuck! Result is you die. And then you start again, taking the weapons from Sheva so she can't cause the zombie's head to explode and some mutant comes out of it for you to die again.

I can imagine the development process of this piece of crap. The marketing department wanted to appeal to "Westerners" and decided to rip Gears of War off. Then the developers just changed the existing engine for Resident Evil 4, gave it a HD make-up and slapped the "Resident Evil" brand on top of it.

We could create an equation for defining games like Resident Evil 5:

Gears rip-off + HD make-up + <put some recognizable brand here> = $$ profit $$

Capcom, if you want to do an action game then do it! Stop milking your known franchises. That's it, Capcom, you lost a consumer. If there's a Resident Evil 6 I won't buy it because I know you are trying to fool me.