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Wandering the gently rocking ship’s labyrinthine hallways, creaking doors opening to musty staterooms, communications decks, and even a casino, feels like coming home again, or at least haunted home. For Revelations, Capcom returned to a world of opulence contrasted with monstrous decay, and once again it works. What parts of the game take place on the Queen Zenobia, a doomed cruise liner that makes for a great stand-in for a creepy mansion, are as dark, mysterious, and downright creepy as fans could hope after an entry spent in the sunlight. (Andrew Vandersteen)įor those who wanted Resident Evil to go back to its scary roots after RE5, this game is for you. It’s not the worst in the Resident Evil series, not by a long shot, but it’s so forgettable against the better games that it just gets tossed by the wayside, sort of where it belongs. It’s a game completely confused about what it wants to be, trying so hard to be an action shooter while also trying to be survival horror, and failing miserably to do either one very well. The entire experience is further soured by the god-awful partner AI in the single-player campaign, the somehow worse than RE4 AI in all the enemies, and cumbersome controls that no longer feed into the horror but instead hold back from the action.
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For every genuinely interesting moment or exciting combat encounter, there’s two or three boring or annoying fights and some of the banalest bosses in the entire series.
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For every step forward Resident Evil 5 makes, it seems to take a leap backward and it ends up feeling like a checklist of ideas copy-pasted from RE4 without ever feeling like something new and fresh. There are great moments, but they’re few, and the space between them is filled with terrible things. Resident Evil 5 is a really hard game to love and an even harder one to recommend.
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