Resident Evil 5

Okay, look, it’s half ten on a Wednesday morning and we’ve been up since ten to six. That’s not the time we usually wake up, but then it’s not usual that we wake up really frightened, distressed and feeling a little sick because we just had a nightmare about horrible worms with massive pincers growing out of our legs.

This is not some hyperbolic ‘we were so scared we totally crapped our pants’ bullshit – this actually happened. Twice. Thankfully we can’t remember what happened in the first nightmare, just that we woke up shaking because there was something horrible chasing us – don’t know what it was and, frankly, we’d like to leave it that way.

But two nightmares within a day of each other both with Resident Evil overtones while we were playing Resi 5 for review; it’s too much to be mere coincidence. It clearly isn’t and it’s obvious that Resident Evil 5 has affected us more than most games. Sure, we’ve had game-related dreams before. There was a memorable one back in 1997 brought on by too much Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, but that wasn’t scary and was actually quite good fun. These nightmares were something else.

The weird thing is Resident Evil 5 isn’t that scary. There aren’t any sudden shocks like in 1 and 2 when zombie dogs came bursting through the windows, or corridors filled with crows that peck your eyes out. But what 5 has over those is tension. It’s incredibly stressful; there are hordes of (for want of a better word) zombies attacking you. And they’re like the ones in 28 Days Later in that they run really fast and show signs of intelligence, heck, there are even some that can ride motorbikes.

They use weapons, they get right up in your face and, unless you’re good at shooting or running away, then they’re going to kill you. And if those ones don’t get you then the dogs will, or the chainsaw guys, or the hefty blokes with massive axes or the big bare-knuckle brawling zombies. Some even come armed with crossbows that fire flaming bolts and snipe you from a distance while you’re dealing with more immediate threats such as the nasty spider/crab things that like to attach themselves to your face and stab you in the throat. And later on there are crossbow zombies that fire explosive bolts – basically, there’s a hell of a lot going on and most of it is hellish.

That’s hellish in a good way. One night we had to stop playing it. We were so full of adrenaline we were getting all jittery. But there was a massive smile on our faces, and when that wasn’t there our mouths were open in a sort of shocked state because Resident Evil 5 is just so damn good.

You’ve probably played the demo; actually, there’s no probably about it, you’ve played the demo and, like most of the internet (and us initially), have whinged about the controls and that it’s not scary and how come the series hasn’t evolved much from 4 and so on. But you’re missing the bigger picture. You’ve only played two small sections of an incredibly grand game. Those two sections are separated by around an hour of gameplay, and it’s much better in the finished game because they make much more sense as these sections lead into each other and by this time you’re already caught up in the story.

… continued