My Thoughts On The Resident Evil 5 Demo

Ah RE5, weighed down by racist allegations and connotations, and not just from over-zealous sensationalist media outlets, but also by sensible and rational journalists.

The demo was released on Xbox Live in the UK today, so brimming with curiousity, I downloaded it and gave it a try.

Now, don't worry, the first-person narration will be kept to a minimum, I'm not entertaining some delusion that I'm the next Hunter S Thompson or anything, I just wanted to set the scene.

First impressions were good. Given the tiny file size, not even 500 Mb, the game looks great and there are two levels on offer, but this is Capcom and they seem to do demos pretty well. Right from the offset though, I got a sense that we were covering very familiar ground. The opening cutscene instantly made me think of RE4 and the gameplay is virtually copy/pasted in. I wasn't expecting much different, but I was surprised at how deep the similarities ran.

Once you delve further into the game, the whole thing starts to fall apart. My biggest complaint is that RE5 is a very clumsy game to control. Just like Resident Evil 4, you can't shoot or use your curiously ineffective machete unless you are stood completely still, which admittedly does increase the tension, but only by being immensely frustrating. There's a part of me that wonders if this is a ham-fisted effort on Capcom's part to evoke fear while playing, but I think that might be giving them too much credit. The camera colludes with the controls as, following behind you just a little too closely and making it hard to see when you're being surrounded. Games like Silent Hill could get away with ropey combat controls, because they enhance the atmosphere and the sense that you are a just a regular person against unspeakable horror, but the characters in RE5 are trained marksmen so you can't make that excuse, and to make an action game with bad combat controls is almost unforgivable.

There's a load of ancillary things, nitpicks really, that are causes for irritation as well. Your sidekick, while at least able to shoot this time, seems reluctant to use any weapon other than her pistol, despite being equipped with a rifle in one level and a sub-machine gun in the other. The levels themselves are nigh-labyrinthine warrens that leave you constantly open to being surrounded, which, when combined with the camera and control issues I mentioned before, means that you'll be restarting a lot. Even little things, like the bright sunlight making your laser sight difficult to see contribute to the overall feeling of frustration.

I couldn't comment on the game though, without at least touching on the accusations of racism. On paper, setting a Resident Evil game in Africa makes total sense, and while I don't think that the game is intentionally racist, as N'gai Croal rightly pointed out, the imagery has a history. A strapping white man goes into to the 'primitive' African village and starts killing? I'd be amazed how anyone could play and not feel a little uneasy about it. I think Capcom have tried to assuage people by varying how black your foes actually are, but if anything that makes it worse, turning the game into some weird ethnic shooting gallery.

Or course, some overly sensitive people(read: Capcom fanboys) will point out that the aforementioned strapping white man has an black, African sidekick, which is true, but if the demo is anything to go by, she's more of a liability than a help. I don't mean in terms of gameplay, where she's quite useful but in the 'Resident Evil 5 isn't racist' discussion, she's not much help. Firstly, she's about as white as you can be and still be considered black, as if the developers couldn't quite bring themselves to make her 'properly' black, she's only missing a red, yellow and green Africa-shaped necklace to complete her collection of sub-Saharan jewelry, and she has the most appalling psuedo-South African accent I've ever heard, which might have something to do with the fact she is voiced by a burlesque dancer from Brooklyn.

*sigh*

It's like Capcom knew that there were possible issues with racism, but in trying to fix them, hit all the wrong notes.