Emily Balistrieri
December 23, 2008 
If you’re into hot “caterpillar-scorpion-bat” action, then Resident Evil 5 fits your niche. I got some hands-on time with a couple of new levels last week at a Capcom press event in San Francisco.
The first thing I can say is that the survival horror style movement is intact, so if a limited camera freaks you out, well, the game is doing its job. The right stick will only tilt the viewpoint a tiny bit, so it’s not very useful. Most of the time to see what’s around you, you have to just turn your whole body in the classic tank style. This, however, is familiar to fans of the series-that and popping infected villager’s heads. Yee hoo! What is quite fresh, however, is the co-opping between beefy protagonist Chris Redfield (red with BLOOD?) and Sheva Alomar, his pretty lady sidekick.
You can only achieve certain amounts of co-op success in a party environment. Between the fact that I was playing with someone I had never met, the fact that we had to try to shout to each other over the music and other people, and the fact that I’m not sure either of us had ever played the game before, Sheva died an awful lot. The co-op levels were ones we had seen before, and in fact, the cinematic was at least partially featured in that debut trailer that got everyone talking race issues. Playing as Chris, I boosted Sheva up to broken ladders, or vaulted her across chasms-but of course then we had no idea how I was supposed to get near enough to her to be able to kick the attacking zombies away, so I ‘sploded some brains from afar and watched as nasty Little Shop of Horrors-esque petals blossomed out of the necks as the monsters died. Sheva eventually went down in a haze of red, but it’s nice that they alert you-and even flash briefly to her perspective-as she is taking critical and soon-to-be-fatal hits.
The new levels we played alone on infinite ammo, which made it a bit easier. At the end of Chapter 1 on the tail of some Irving fellow who has “answers” (or so our heroes hope) I sniped some loitering zomboids from a window, earning the “exploding heads” achievement. Then it was out to the dusty cliffs where we suddenly came upon that ugly monster I mentioned early. The camera pulled into something like a documentary-style, news helicopter view as the creature crawled out of the back of a truck and leapt into the air. Its segmented backside was the weakest point, but apparently there is a trick beyond just the “f-kton of bullets” technique. Of course it’s also swooping out of the sky at you, spitting sticky liquids, and being generally disgusting until you take it out and knock it off the cliff.
The next scene was something completely different: my mind was suddenly flooded with a thousand YouTube parody opportunities as zombies gave chase on motorcycles, and it was obvious that we were going to be machine gunning them from the back of our own vehicle – that is, until the demoist skipped us ahead to an oil refinery area where bag-headed chainsaw zombies eventually cut off Sheva’s head. Not the best way to end the night, but it got us looking forward to the time when we’ll be able to keep her alive a little longer.
