Fnord

Three zombie games in a row!

Resident Evil

13.3 hours, 20 of 44 achievements

Resident Evil is a classic, and this remake is a big improvement on it.
For those who have never played one of the earlier Resident Evil games, these are closer to adventure games than action games. You traverse a limited space, trying to solve puzzles, that then open up new areas. These puzzles are usually solved by rubbing items against things, much like in a point & click adventure game.

But unlike (most) point & click adventure games, there's also combat. Zombies roam the hallways, and you need to somehow avoid getting eaten by them. Zombies are slow, stupid and predictable, but but in a narrow hallway they're still potentially dangerous. You're resources are limited, so you can't kill every Zombie in the game, thus you need to be a bit strategic in which zombies you chose to get rid of.

Well, that's the idea at least. I ended the game with about 80 bullets in my pistol, more healing items that I could easily count, and enough ammo in all the more powerful weapons, except for the shotgun, to kill everything in the final area several times over. Resident evil is a surprisingly forgiving game on the middle difficulty.

It's also not particularly scary. There's really only one thing that got me on edge in RE, and that was due to a perceived threat. When I actually ran into this threat, it turned out to be rather easy to deal with, but because of its slight unpredictability and how the game portrays it, it still kept me on edge, despite me knowing that it really was not something worth worrying about.

The RE remake is still a very good game, and I really liked the main manor that you're spending a lot of the game in. I really don't mind backtracking, when handled well, and I think that backtracking in RE was handled exceptionally well. It felt like I was traversing a coherent space, and not something that was just designed as a video game level.


Resident Evil 5

18.3 hours, 28 of 70 achievements

Going from Resident Evil 1 to Resident Evil 5… quite the jump, right?

RE 5 is nothing like RE 1. Where RE 1 tried to be an atmospheric adventure game with zombies, RE5 tries to be an over the top action game with big explosions. Gone are the lovingly created game world that feels like a space you could live in, and instead it's replaced by a linear set of corridors, with no backtracking, and hordes of enemies that you need to kill, rather than avoid. There's only a single point in the game where it kind of remembers that it's a horror franchise, and tries to build an atmosphere, but that's short lived.

RE5 is not bad though, it's just that if it were not for three returning character, and the name Umbrella, you would not recognize it as a Resident Evil game, if you were to go from RE 1 to this.

RE5 is a co-op game at heart, and I did try to play it once prior, in SP, and let's just say that it was not a very fun experience. In co-op it works quite well though. There's enough you can do to help each other in combat and to solve certain (very simple) puzzles, for the co-op element to feel worthwhile. The actual combat is also not all that bad, although the enemy variety does leave a bit to be desired.

The DLC is pretty good. One of the DLC parts feel like a homage to the first RE, and attempts some light horror, and the other tells the story of two characters who are part of the RE5 story, but offscreen for a bit.


Prototype

12.4 hours, no achievements

Prototype… what a mess.

Prototype is an, at this point, 10 year old open world action game, where you play as a superpowered person who runs rampage in a city. A virus has infected you, and it gives you superpoweres, but it also turns regular people into zombies (so 3 out of 3 games in this post will be about zombie games!). The army has been called in to deal with the zombies, and you, so it's a three way battle.

First of all, the port is awful. There are so many things in this port that can make it not run well, or give strange sound glitches, that you have to question if they even had anyone QA test this. There are posts from back when this game was just launched complaining about the very same issues, so this is not an issue with modern computers, it's just an awful port.

The gameplay is pretty solid. You're playing as an extremely powerful person, who can jump high, climb buildings, glide, slice humans in half with a single hit, lift up cars and throw them at people, morph into other people, and hijack tanks & helicopters. Basically you're one of the most powerful videogame protagonists ever.

The story is quite poorly told, but there's some interesting elements to it. At first glance it's your basic military coverup story. Virus gets released, army gets called in to cover things up, you want to find out the truth. But unlike in most of these stories, you're really not a good guy, you're killing hundreds of innocent people in your mad rampage, and they're just inconsequential, you don't get punished for doing so (I actually thought you would, so I tried to avoid killing civilians through the entire game, but that was just making the game harder for me…). The problem is how the story is told. You get very short cutscenes, and then the game just dumps you into the world, it's just jarring, and the short length of the cutscenes means that a lot of information gets left out, information that the main character knows, but you as the player don't. Like how did you escape the military facility where you talked to the important guy? Game won't tell you, it just plays its cutscene ending with important person dying, and then you're standing on top of a building. The first half of the story also feels incredible padded, with boring characters doing boring things to waste your time.

Gameplay is where the game shines, when it wants to cooperate. You have a huge toolbox of powers, some of which are seemingly completely overpowered, like massive AoE effects, the ability to eat enemies (and civilians) for a quick health boost, or the ability to just jump up to a helicopter and hijack it, at which point you now have a heavily armed helicopter. But the opposition is also tough, the army has plenty of tanks & helicopters, the infected as powerful "hunters" that can chase you across the rooftops and are capable of dealing huge damage. And when the game works, it's really fun. Combat feels strategic and challenging, and yet somehow also like a power fantasy. But then the game just throws 4 hunters at you and they stunlock you to death, or the game throws a cheap QTE at you that you were not ready for, and you instantly fail it because you were in the middle of attacking, and hit the wrong button, resulting in you losing half of your health. There was also one lovely boss that had an instant-kill attack combo which it did not telegraph for me (an effect was not playing…). And some of the mission design is just awful. Actually, a lot of the missions were very badly designed, particularly those in the late game. My favourite was the one where I was told that I needed to "eat" a specific person witting in a tank, but if I tried to eat the person before the game wanted me to, there was an instant game over.

Prototype is a game with some real strengths, but also massive weaknesses. Combined with the atrocious PC port, I really can't recommend this game. I get why some people remember this game fondly though.


adil

Man the first RE was still quite scary for me haha. Though you seem to have felt somewhat similar to me but at the same time you describe it in a different way I guess? (I consider being on my toes because of the tension as being scared so I got quite scared all along haha xD)
Anyway, didn’t you get annoyed by the door loading trick?

Also, I have good memories of RE5 playing in coop but it’s definitively far from a “regular” Resident Evil. It’s all about action.

Fnord

I think there are different ways of being on your toes. This was more of an “I expect to take a large amount of damage” (even if I really would not) kind of being on my toes, and not a “I expect to be scared” kind :P

Nah, I was fine with the door loading thing. The scenes were short enough.

RE5 is kind of the natural continuation of 4, and 6 seems seem to be the natural continuation of 5. I still have not played 6 though, but I intend to try and do it in co-op. I’ve heard that it’s far more fun that way.

adil

Ah yeah. Well it scared me still haha.

And RE4 was already a departure from the “regular” RE formula but I can see it being a natural continuation yeah.

Fnord

RE4 was the big departure, yeah, RE5 was just continuing down the path that RE4 started on. Personally, I think it’s a shame. I prefer the more slow paced, puzzle focused, gameplay of RE 1.