Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I played Resident Evil 4 for the first time about a year after its release in January 2005. And in early 2006, I was still utterly floored by how damn good it was. That year couldn’t diminish the impact of the immaculate presentation, exhilarating combat, extensive weapon system, or lengthy quest. Admittedly, I never cared much for survival horror as a genre, so I was eager to see Resident Evil stray from its roots and delve deeper into no-holds-barred gunplay. A few facets of the previous games remained, and movement still felt constrained for an action game. But compared to the Resident Evil of old, it was easy to give the controls a pass and embrace them as a step in the right direction.

I’m not quite so late to the Resident Evil party, this time around — it’s only been a couple months since Resident Evil 5 made its global debut. Around that same time I wrote a post about how much I love co-op in videogames. And after devoting most of the past week to Resident Evil 5, I’m pretty darn sad to realize that just about every aspect of the game falls short of the lofty bar its predecessor set 4 years ago, in part due to the focus on cooperative gameplay. I’ve even spent 99% of my play time with another human being backing me up — relying on the AI would’ve made things much worse.

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