superfluousmoniker's Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360) review


I'm pretty disappointed with Resident Evil 5 overall, but by far my biggest complaint is the inventory system. Nine slots per character is not nearly enough. Carrying two weapons, with ammo, is already using up almost half your space. Pick up some grenades and  healing items, and you wind up running out of room constantly. Therefore you wind up leaving stuff in your magic, traveling inventory space, which you access by... Restarting the game from your last checkpoint? It destroys the flow of the game and feels incomplete, and a bit like cheating. I ended up with stockpiles of first aid sprays by the end of the game, because I figured I'd save them for later since I had no room, the end of the game came pretty fast and the inventory expansions I assumed were coming (because there's no way they'll expect me to play the entire game like this, right?!) never showed up. When a first aid spray is not a hot commodity you have balance problems.

So this one issue basically ruined the game for me. I wound up with 20+ of every type of grenade because I would just dump them in inventory and Sheva sure as hell wasn't using them. I almost never used the grenade launcher or the magnum, and there was little need to, unlike RE4. I would find myself lugging around the sniper rifle, deciding that a slot for the gun and another slot for its ammo was too much and sticking it in inventory, only to need to reload a checkpoint to pull it out of inventory when I would need it.

Beyond that the story is super-generic (and super-predictible) and the game is SHORT. It has its moments but compared to its predeccesor, this game just doesn't hold up.

Edited by SuperfluousMoniker

More stream of consciousness review type stuff!

Quicktime events, while thankfully not as frequent as RE4's, are still present and still annoying.

You can replay levels to very easily get first aid sprays, ammo, and obtain duplicate copies of guns for Sheva.

The mechanic of getting revived by your partner means you are essentially invincible if Sheva is right next to you; you can go into the 'near death' sequence over half a dozen times before you actually die if you are rescued right away. This feels a little broken but was probably done to reduce frustration with trying to heal from the real time inventory system, which I've covered. Of course, this doesn't apply to the couple enemies that can instakill you even if you have full health, which is never fun.

For some reason, when Sheva dies you have to watch this extra unskippable cutscene where a bunch of zombies beat her down, which adds time onto the 'game over' sequence. Otherwise loading times are pleasantly fast.

There is no full map screen, only the minimap in the corner, and you can't pause the game to look at the map.

The way zombies can now jump up onto platforms ninja style instead of using ladders looks really stupid. They shamble up to a wall, suddenly leap fifteen feet into the air to land on the roof of the building you're on, then continue shambling toward you. You can still knock down ladders. There is absolutely no reason ever to do so because zombies can leap tall buildings in a single bound now.

You start with a full health bar, which is nice but gives you less motivation to really explore the environments. And you wouldn't need to bother anyway because you can just replay 1-1 for easy first aid sprays.

There's a cool new flying type of Plaga which only shows up in one level for some reason. Most other enemies are recycled from RE4. The only other new enemy I can think of are giant ants which can instakill you. The extra large spear zombies with five times as much health don't count as new enemies. Ditto for giant axe zombie, he's just a zombie with a giant axe.

A lot of the guns are straight out of RE4.

Instakills suck. I HAD FULL HEALTH!

Remember how in RE4 sometimes there'd be a snake in the barrels you broke? It still happens. I think it must be very rare though because I only saw it once. Why the hell would a snake be in a wooden box on a shelf? (Is Snakes & Barrels from Metalocalypse an RE4 reference? Nah, probably Guns & Roses.)

Sometimes while playing I wished there was a command to make Sheva hide in a dumpster. Then I'd whistle and she'd come running, and I would jump down to a ledge below her and point the camera up until she called me a pervert.

There's a boss towards the end which involves lots and lots of button mashing with no indication that you are making progress since you don't directly damage this particular boss, leading me to believe I would never win if I wasn't able to mash fast enough.

I think the sequence where you have to push a cart out of the way whilst being attacked by upwards of ten Lickers is one of the most egregious instances of the 'Impassable waist-high barrier' in recent history. Just climb over the damn thing!

Zombies don't throw stuff at you like in RE4. Deflecting axes with bullets was cool.

Uh, so yeah. If you like great graphics, play RE5. If you like great games, pick up RE4 in a bargin bin instead. It is WAY better than this.

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