Six Reasons Operation Raccoon City Fails

It is very, very difficult to prevent me from loving a “Resident Evil” title, so I must applaud Slant Six Games for pulling it off. I’m not going to say “i told you so” here, but I have been decrying this game’s existence for some time. Now that it’s out, and I’ve spent some time with it, my fears were confirmed.

Here’s some reasons this game didn’t work.

1. Crummy Writing. In the age of “Bioshock,” “Portal,” “Journey” and “Heavy Rain,” can we finally make it mandatory that a game be well-written and internally consistent with its logic? ORC makes no bloody sense, even for a RE title. Why would Umbrella hire mercenaries to gun down hundreds of United States soldiers in the hopes of saving face? Which is worse: making a bad virus that accidentally got out, or ruthlessly murdering several hundred Marines? One is a PR scandal, the other is a war crime.

On top of that, the “characters” are horribly voiced, and everything they say is some variation on a terrible cliche. And don’t you dare say “it doesn’t matter,” because it does. The hundreds of unique dialog scenes in the “Left 4 Dead” franchise were funny and made the characters relatable, which is why everyone has their personal favorite even though they all play the same (I’m a Louis man myself).

2. Numbskull A.I. If you own this game, you’d better hope and pray it gains a cult following of loyal online participants, because the teammate A.I. you’re stuck with on solo is unacceptably bad. They wander right through conspicuous booby traps, fail to heal or support you regularly, do a terrible job hitting their targets, and (my personal favorite) just stand around sometimes and think deep thoughts while chaos reigns around them.

Enemy A.I. isn’t much better. They “flush ‘im out!” with a grenade every now and then, but otherwise just sit behind boxes and patient wait to get dropped like a bag of potatoes.

3. Monotony. I dare you to play the campaign as long as you can, and see when the suffocating boredom sets in. Granted there are occasionally some decent set pieces, but they’re scattered amongst a sea of detritus. The encounters with the soldiers are particularly un-fun, since hit detection is spotty, your teammates are worthless, and they all seem to play out the same exact way.

Now the zombies are a lot more fun: you run headlong in, blast everything in sight, move to the next room. In these moments, the game clicks. But there’s far too much dead weight for this to redeem the game.

4. Teammates. The game would have you imagine that the choosing your teammates before each round is tactically significant, but it isn’t; by and large, they all behave identically. The medic heals only sporadically, I never saw the demo man demo anything, and the stealth dude’s cloak is worthless because he’s constantly alerting his enemies to his exact location. And above all else, I was doing all the work anyway, so which of these clowns tagged along didn’t matter.

5. Wasted Potential. The saddest part is, there are parts of this game that are really intriguing. The ability to gain new abilities and weapons through the campaign is cool, and many of said perks worked well and were a blast to use. Ditto for the multiplayer, which isn’t great but offers a lot more fun than the campaign. There’s a sense that these strong qualities should have been isolated and honed in on. Now they’re lost in a sea of blegh.

6. Graphics. Not to be shallow or anything, but the game is ugly, and completely lacking in atmosphere. The textures are muddy, the level design feels flat, it’s just no fun to look at or experience. The character designs for our protagonists are inspired, but by the time they’re digested through this crummy engine they look drab.

All in all, a missed opportunity and a disappointment. Let’s hope RE6 steps its game up.

_AA

they said they could do it better, i don’t really think they could