Resident Evil 5 Co-Op: No Horror Included

During the past week my colleague and I have been playing through Capcom's latest installment in its horror survival series, Resident Evil. We have already posted a few impressions we gathered during our sessions, making the whole aspect of the game quite clear for our readers.

Now, I want to tackle a very sensitive subject, one that gained Resident Evil 5 a lot of bad reviews, the horror. Resident Evil, since its creation, was all about the eerie atmosphere, the mind games that your opponents played on you and the fact that you needed to think every action a few times over in order to see if you had missed anything.

In Resident Evil 5 however, you can pretty much throw caution into the wind and rampage through the environments of the fictional nation of Kijuju. The game's producer, Jun Takeuchi, has revealed that getting the franchise out of the night and into the daytime was a tricky endeavor, as horror can't be easily created when you can see all of your surroundings.

He is quite right, as most of the times during the game the scares were relatively cheap, being limited to the zombie dogs and some bosses. But if there was one segment that was borderline scary, it was the mine one, when one of us needed to hold a light and the other to do the shooting. It was here that, due to scarce ammo and the fact that we couldn't cooperate very good, it got us a bit scared.

But during the other parts of the game, the thrills were very few and far in between. That is why a lot of analysts have been quite sad to see that Resident Evil is no longer a benchmark for slow and scary action but for just slow and fragmented action, as, although the firefights are quite interesting, the fact that you need to run from place to place in order to combine ammo with the weapons or make strategies is a bit annoying.

Another important factor that diminishes the horrific nature of the game is that you always have someone by your side, either virtually, in the form of Sheva, or in real life, in the form of a buddy with whom you are playing co-op. Let's count the number of times you got scared while playing in a dark room all by yourself and compare them with when you were playing with a friend or two. The odds aren't good, that's for sure.

As we are approaching the final segments of the game, we still hold some hope that it will scare us, but, seeing how the action unfolds, things aren't looking very good, or scary in this case.