Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City Review

[-Samurai-]

Then you don't buy a game that was never marketed as a survival horror game, and expect it to be a survival horror game. Capcom doesn't owe you another RE 2.

Be disappointed all you want. They don't care. They never said this would be more survival horror.

I didn't expect really a survival horror game- but I didn't expect Killzone and I didn't expect this trainwreck either to be honest. And how did it even cross their mind to put the Resident Evil name in this title? It is so misleading for the customers! It's not about survival horror and another RE 2, this simply isn't Resident Evil. Do we even have to discuss about it that it isn't Resident Evil?

No, we don't need to have that discussion, because you should already know that a game that has a Resident Evil plot, a Resident Evil location, and Resident Evil characters is a Resident Evil game.

Oh, and there's also the fact that the company that made it called it Resident Evil. Wether or not you feel that it's spiritually a RE game doesn't matter in the slightest.

Also you are very wrong that Capcom owes me nothing. On the contrary, they owe me a lot. As a gamer yourself you should have understood me. This could have been the cynical comment of a manager, not of a gamer.

When people say "Gamers are entitled little brats.", they're referring to this situation. So you bought their previous games? That's super great. They still don't owe you shit. They made a product that they wanted to make, and you chose to buy it. They didn't ask you to buy it. You did them no favors at all, so they owe you nothing.

I'd ask you what makes you feel that they owe you, but you're just going to say "I gave them my money.", which is no way a reasonable answer.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

snip

I must've played the wrong game.

Yeah. I've no idea how that's even possible, but it's one of the few reasonable explanations I've left.

Why would I be trolling? Honestly, I saw L4D2 as a just another average shooter. You shoot things, move on to the next section, and shoot more things, in this case, zombies.

Ever heard of the Monomyth [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth]? Basically, if described vaguely enough, you can make almost every story ever told sound like it's grossly derivative of a past work.

Case in point: yes, the most basic idea of Left 4 Dead is 'Shoot zombies, move to next section, shoot more zombies.' And simultaneously, you could say that 'Citizen Kane' is a ripoff of 'Macbeth' because they're both "basically" about the protagonists starting as ambitious and well-intentioned men before turning into massive assholes and dying.

Not to say it was a bad game. But, well, you just shoot zombies. I was under the impression it was loved for its purity - no gimmicks, etc.

If you discount the well-defined characters, varied environments, the much-touted AI director, and the unique 'elite' zombies...then yes, I suppose it didn't have any 'gimmicks.'

But I didn't see anything revolutionary or poetic about it. So it's better balanced? But that doesn't mean to say Project Racoon is unplayable, does it? Just a little more average.

I was condensing the things that made L4D infinitely better than Raccoon City into that single example, but no, there are significantly more reasons why L4D is an excellent game and Raccoon City is nothing of the sort.

Ever fired a gun before? Because even something as small as a pistol has this feeling behind each shot that makes it seem like so much more than a chemical reaction propelling a piece of metal through a tube. L4D is a game that actually made gunfire feel close to gunfire. Raccoon City, inversely, had an arsenal of toys that sounded like particularly loud bubble wrap and handled like fire hoses.

Plot? L4D was never really big on plot, but it did an amazing job of showing and not telling. You can read graffiti on the walls of the safehouses, see the overrun outposts of the FEMA-analogue, and even the models of the zombies that compose the horde tell you about the people who they used to be. Raccoon City...well, it's a Resident Evil game. The villains are cartoonishly stupid, and the whole plot rides on the stupid premise that adding a non-canon optional ending makes the whole thing better than the other games that dealt with this period of RE history.

Gameplay? L4D is a Valve game. That means they tested it to hell and back, and it shows. It's smooth, responsive, and generally fun. Raccoon City? Rife with bugs and glitches, and a general lack of polish.

AI? Don't make me laugh. The OSS and US Special Forces act as if they were deployed from the shortbus. Comparing them to the AI Director of L4D is a waste of time.

 

[Mindless1]

Ah Capcom, when will you stop injecting this franchise with the T-Virus and let the Racoon City incident just die? How many games do we need about this same event?

If you wanted to keep going back to Umbrella so much you shouldn't have killed them off with a text crawl in the first 5 minutes of Resi 4.

The times I actually WANT a reboot/reimagining don't come along too often but I think in this case Capcom need to step back and take a serious look at what's happened to their franchise.

Would You consider Resident Evil 1 remake for the Cube a Reboot? I litterally is the same game with just a few tweaks. Same horrible VA, same mansion, same story that we loved and feared but with a major graphic overhaul. If you never picked it up I highly recoment :3

 

[Char-Nobyl]

That was pretty funny, but inaccurate. The game rewards you if you DON'T pray n' spray. Pistol head shots to zombies generally pop the heads right open for me (professional Difficulty). When fighting SPEC-OPS, if you hit them in the body-armour, then yes you are in for a long fight. Start shooting them (and hitting them) in the face and watch how quickly they will drop. When I first started playing the game I said the same things as you, but I took my time and got better.

What WILL piss you off is how scripted encounters with certain individuals in the story, and how hard their pistol hits you.

That might be true, but that raises two other issues, one directly related to gameplay and one a bit more meta.

First off, while pistol headshots might be handy, it's a bit moot when you've got a screaming horde of zombies rushing you. The game might reward headshots, but it doesn't give you nearly enough scenarios where it'd be useful, nor the sort of zombies it'd be useful against. Dead Rising's zombies seemed closer to the sort that it might pay off against, but these zombies (discounting the special ones) seem almost universally able to jog, if not flat-out run towards you from any distance.

As for the latter (the meta one), why do they equip you with weapons like SAWs and fully-automatic assault rifles if they want to encourage fire discipline? I know Umbrella is supposed to be stupid, but that's like wearing a tuxedo for your trip to the beach.

 

[Towels]

Well, damn that's too bad. I was looking forward to the concept of being an evil Umbrella Wet-work team. But the sceenes being shown look pretty boring as the reviewer suggest. What a shame, just like Outbreak. I guess there's never going to be a good, fully fledged multiplayer Resident Evil game. The Mercenaries mini games look better than this.

Nice Escapist, you got my favorite cheep pizza joint as a captcha.

 

[Spookimitsu]

Sorry for the late reply, I've been on a BF3 binge. Loving the private servers.

But Crimson Head zombies (were they the special ones you were referring to?) will run at you, and headshots are hard to get on them. Full auto MG fire is good for a rushing horde, automatic shotguns work well too.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

But Crimson Head zombies (were they the special ones you were referring to?) will run at you, and headshots are hard to get on them.

I meant more like the Lickers and such, but Crimson Heads qualify, too. Though their ability to run is a bit diminished by the fact that most zombies in the game are capable of at least a light jog once they know you're there.

Full auto MG fire is good for a rushing horde, automatic shotguns work well too.

But it shouldn't be. Whatever happened to "You gotta shoot 'em in the head"? Why weigh your soldier down with a SAW (which I can say first-hand is heavy as hell, even unloaded) and hundreds of rounds of ammo when you could give them a carbine or rifle with a handful of extra magazines? Real militaries rarely use automatic fire for anything other than suppressing an enemy position, and even then, automatic fire burns through most magazines in three or four seconds.

For me, the primary advantage of an automatic shotgun isn't that I can squeeze the trigger and fire until it clicks empty. I like knowing that I can fire a shot and another shot is ready without my intervention. Unless the magazine is empty, each squeeze of the trigger fires a new round/shell/whatever.

If I was getting dropped into Raccoon City, I'd want an AK-74 with an underslung GP-30. The former is an updated version of one of the most reliable assault rifles in history, and I don't want to worry about weapon maintenance in the middle of a zombie-infested city. The latter is a grenade launcher because...well, if I'm working for Umbrella, I know that there's more than just normal zombies in Raccoon City, and I want to be able to blast a man into bite-sized chunks the moment he injects himself with some sort of supermonster virus.

Probably a sidearm with that, but nothing terribly heavy. You don't need a very big caliber to reliably punch through a skull, and it's a sidearm. I have to pull it out, it's because I'm in deep shit and don't have time to reload the AK. And keeping with the trend of using Russian weapons, the Saiga-12 is the shotgun of choice. Semi-auto and reliable like no other, which is can be a huge problem for shotguns.

Don't get me wrong: I like the guns that are presented in the game (or at least their real-world equivalents). But I don't like them enough to lug them along when they're clearly the wrong tools for the job at hand. I like using nailguns, but I don't adamantly cling to them when a situation arises when a simple hammer would be better.

 

[smokeyninjas]

They made a product that they wanted to make, and you chose to buy it. They didn't ask you to buy it.

So what the fuck do you think the point of marketing is if its not about trying to convince people to buy your shit?

 

[-Samurai-]

They made a product that they wanted to make, and you chose to buy it. They didn't ask you to buy it.

So what the fuck do you think the point of marketing is if its not about trying to convince people to buy your shit?

You quoted a month old post to ask a stupid question(that you then answered yourself) with a hostile attitude. Brilliant.

Apparently you don't know the difference between asking someone to do something for you, and attempting to sell them a luxury item.