01/27/2025 - Resident Evil 5 Review

Hello! Today I am writing down my thoughts on Resident Evil 5, which I played with PeterStillman (you can find his account here on spacehey: https://spacehey.com/profile?id=2911584).

Side note before we begin, I think I'm going to start dropping the word review from my writing on these things, primarily because a review suggests that I am judging the piece of media in response or relation to public opinion/ others thoughts. We will see. still writing review for today. 

Silent hill 5 is, naturally, the 5th installment in the silent hill franchise, it is also not at ALL what I expected silent hill to be like. I have interacted with very little silent hill content, maybe a clip here and there, some conversation on the first game. Coming off of silent hill 3, I expected resident evil to be similar! A horror experience with inventory and resource management, working your way through confined levels and fighting choice enemies.

What I got instead was a shoot em up brawler action game with horror adjacent components and "scary" enemies (really only the split head dogs were scary I'd say).

Truthfully this makes sense looking at the context surrounding the game. The game came out in 2009, which is following what I like to call: "the era of the middle east and the piss filter". Seemingly every game coming out around 2008-2010 was set somewhere in a "terrorist" organization (mexico, Africa, Middle east) as a heroic white American liberated the area with his awesome patriotism. often set in a gritty setting with either a dark or piss yellow filter set over it. We can see such examples as MW2, MGS4, GoW , etc. Action shooters were all the rage, and so RE5 was an action shooter. Actually, thinking on it, I'm pretty sure l4d2 came out that year too, and this game was quite similar to that in many regards.

How do I feel about this? well, its... certainly less creative than the vivid nightmarish zones of silent hill. I personally likely would not have finished this game if I were not playing with a friend, but then again, maybe it is good to play a game so emblematic of its time. Will talk more about specifics in spoiler section.


SPOILER SECTION!

GAMEPLAY

This game? Kind of not great. For a lot of reasons. But lets start with the absolute CORE gameplay. Moving in this game is fine, they keep this weird jump system where you can only jump at certain specific locations marked with yellow paint, which I think is fine personally but when mixed with this high intensity shoot em up combat, it can feel limiting and can lead you to get cornered easily. The shooting and killing of the basic zombies feels fine if not just incredibly bland, you're pretty much just firing rounds into them and then clicking the punch button when prompted. This is fine at first when the enemies are relatively low health... but later... well we shall get there. 

Combat moving later into the game is a fucking hellish slog, do you remember when I said there was little resource management? well they tried to keep it in by having "scarce" materials like bullets, suggesting that like (I assume) previous iterations you could run past enemies not worth fighting to conserve ammo. NOT. HERE. the enemies will absolutely mog you, they will surround you, if you ignore them they will almost certainly kill you, and with how rare healing items are you do NOT want to have to worry about that. This problem would be lessened if you could purchase ammo between missions, but you cant. This becomes a real fucking issue when the enemies start getting tanky, and they will, quickly. Several times throughout this game me and my buddy were completely out of ammo, the only saving grace being this damn stun rod you can buy about half way through the game. Stun rod my damn beloved. infinite hits, 1 taps most unarmored zombies, stuns any it doesn't so you can punch and then stomp them to death.

For basic enemies there was only a few times I felt them near unbearable, and nearly all of them were when the zombies got guns. See, for some reason, the zombies in this game are god damn snipers. They wont miss you, and every bullet takes a sizable chunk out of your health, meaning the game becomes a slow chug of taking cover and firing as you inch across the field, again, expending ammo. Worse, these zombies are paired with RPG zombies which will insta kill you if they hit you. this became so absurd we had to stop to take breaks a couple of times. The last time that felt actually despicable is this section with crawlers where one person has to push a box and the other has to shoot crawlers off a wall so they dont get to your teammate, except there are like 3 or 4 crawlers that come out at once per wave, meaning you have about 1 second per crawler, meaning realistically you will be dealing with 12 to 13 crawlers that each take 4 to 5 entire pistol mags to kill. 

For all the combats flaws however, there were a select few times things felt appropriately tense. One section has you running away from a hoard of zombies as an instakill chainsaw zombie lumbers at you in a very condensed corridor, you have to just barely escape as your teammate hacks the door. Additionally, the punches are so over the damn top absurd that they end up being epically funny. There is also a dedicated "come here Button" of which I certainly used.

While we are discussing combat, lets talk bosses. If you thought the enemies were tanky in this game, holy fuck the bosses. These guys take for-ever FOREVER. There was one boss, this worm.. human.... hybrid? that took 30 minutes, and I Mean that, 30 minutes of straight bullet sponging to kill. That's the best way to describe these bosses, bullet sponges..... 

So if combat isnt great, and movement is fine, why the fuck play this game? I'll tell you why. The plot.

PLOT:

Because I haven't played any of the other RE games, I have no idea if they are usually this absurd, however, this games plot is just fucking ridiculous. 

First I'll try to give a brief like.. lore dump as I understand it previous to the start of the game. (from the in game writings, I only read some lol)

first there was raccoon city and umbrella corp, which lead to a mass death, this was the first game(?) then tricell was formed of the major pharmaceutical companies to .. defend the world from biological threats? I'm not exactly sure. Anyway, somewhere along the way they find a flower in africa, this flower makes you Super strong and mega cool but also, if you dont have superior DNA thennnn you die and become a zombie, or maybe they developed the parasite from the flower? I'm not sure. Anyway, leading into the start of the game, someone has developed a parasite that makes obedient zombie slaves but sometimes they become violent. Chris redfield (the peak of masculinity) and shava (his sidekick) are sent by tricell to investigate. Chris has the sidequest of trying to find jill, his previous partner thought to have been killed while taking out Wesker. We will get to Wesker.

In the game itself, its just comically violent - - Chris literally punches heads off zombies, random backflips galore, its kinda awe inspiring. We find ourselves moving from some african villiage (modern) to a... Primeval African Village? or at least its supposed to be. Except they did absolutely no research on what premodern Africa actually looks like, which makes the African zombies involved look like racist caricature spear chucker's, its almost impressive how many stereotypes they fit into a single character design, it could only be worse if they had bones through their noses or maybe spoke in monkey noises or something. Because they did no research, the villages artifacts/ iconography look south American in nature meaning the visual language of the game suffered as well. I dont really think it would be an issue to do pre-modern zombies, but I think if a remake were to happen they should for SURE look up iconography / culture references and actually follow them.
Anyway, from there we get off a boat at an old tricell lab, so I guess Tricell is.. fighting itself here???? umbrella corp stuff is there for some fucking reason, and then we enter what seems to be an UNDERGROUND MAYAN TEMPLE filled with the same zombies as before. This place has "puzzles" (god the puzzles in this game suck) and fucking sun lasers its bonkers. Its here, by the way, in this damn temple we meet Wesker once more, aka the coolest mf in this entire game, he will get his own section. Jill is there, turned into a mind controlled thing, we save her and chase wesker.

This leads us into the Umbrella corp lab, this is where we learn that wesker is actually heading this whole zombie project and is developing a virus called project uroboros. He plans to drop it on the world and release it so that only those with superior DNA will survive and create a new world.
Finally we fight our way through a port yard and onto the ship where we fight wesker again, then he gets onto a god damn stealth bomber with us in tow. We crash in a VOLCANO, and fight Wesker one last time, containing a legendary boulder related cutscene (see below) and drop Wesker into a volcano, killing him and saving the day.


Maybe from afar this plot doesn't seem insane, but trust me, playing it you often forget how you even got to a section because its so damn nonsensical.

CHARACTERS: 

Chris Redfield is quite literally the most comically protag character I have ever seen, he is an ultra buff, 6'5 fearless handsome badass with knowledge on how to use every weapon in mankind's arsenal. 

Sheva is really just the "badass pretty sidekick" again these main people are so personality less, they always do the right thing, they have no flaws physically or mentally, they are always badass's, and they always win in the end.

So Wesker. Wesker Wesker Wesker. I should talk about other characters more too but to be honest, Chris and Sheva are so damn typical protag coded its hard to talk about them. Everyone else in the game is a zombie or just a side character to Wesker, so lets talk about Wesker.

This guy is so fucking cool it has mind controlled the populous into thinking this was a good game, and I can prove it. Go to any video about wesker on youtube and look in the comments. you will find people glazing the hell out of this game. He is a sunglasses indoor wearing, leather donning, superpowered villain with cool voice lines, not to mention an awesome theme song.

Wesker was so fun to watch on screen that often I felt sad when he went away, you cant really hit him as he supersonic dodges every punch you throw, not even Chris can land a hit, and when he does it does more damage to you than him. He will throw fighter jet missiles bare handed at you, he will tank bullets, and he does it all slinging one-liners that would make hero shooters jealous. I've linked some of his lines below for your pleasure...

Finally, lets talk about that music

AND THATS IT, there would be a music section but tbh I don't really have strong feelings about the music, other than winds of madness (check out its capcom vs marvel rendition) which was awesome. Other than that the music was appropriate, yet unremarkable.

THANK YOU FOR READING! a long one this time but I pushed myself to really think about my thoughts haha.