Destroy the Secret Raccoon Civilization! Oh wait..

On Tuesday, during my lunch break I jetted over to Best Buy to pick up my reserved copy of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (the special edition) which I will, from here on, refer to as RE:ORC because its short and orcs are awesome. Anyway, I did my best not to check out any reviews of the game, but I did inadvertently skim the beginning of the joystiq review while scrolling down their post line up. Sorry. That was my bad. I've quarantined myself from the Internet so I can play the game and give my unadulterated opinion on the long-awaited return to Raccoon City.

Clearly, every Resident Evil game should include hidden taxidermied raccoons from here on out.

After three days of killing and being killed in RE:ORC, I can say that I'm enjoying the game. This game won't pull the foul-mouthed children from their Halos or CoDs (which is a good thing in my opinion) and therefore RE:ORC won't explode in the world of online multiplayer. The problem though, is that there's not enough campaign meat to justify the weak multiplayer effort.

The campaign is lackluster fan service to say the least. I've only played up until the beginning of the 5th mission, which is where you watch Leon and Claire crash their police car into a wall. Then you watch the trucker zombie run over their crash with his semi. "Command" immediately says to kill that cop. And now I'm chasing Leon through a series of parking garages. But the journey to this point was good; it wasn't bad. As far as shooters go, the missions are straight forward with plenty of flesh bags (infected and regular) to kill. The humans that get in U.S.S.'s way won't be getting awards for their smarts, but they make up for this lack of intelligence with hit points. They are stupidly hard, like three-shotgun-blasts-to-the-face-and-still-kicking hard. The zombies and monsters, on the other hand, scale in difficulty: zombies are the easiest and hunters are the hardest, which holds true to the classic Resident Evil style. Plus, it feels good shotgun zombies, lickers, and hunters all in one game. RE:ORC feels like a Resident Evil game, in that respect.

Who leaves incendiary grenades on a fire truck? That's just wrong.

Unfortunately though, most of the game doesn't feel like a Resident Evil game. There's ammo and health sprays everywhere. It's like the currency of Raccoon City was ammunition and you get to take every zombie's wallet after you kill it. Random attache cases and ammo boxes also pop up, so every U.S.S. team member has infinite ammo. The amount of health, sprays and herbs, is significantly less than the amount ammo, but to a Resident Evil veteran, RE:ORC has a veritable forest of green herbs. The game never frightens, let alone horrifies, (although there are parasites that look speciously like face-huggers and face-huggers are effing terrifying) and survival doesn't seem difficult. So, I can't in good judgement, call this game a survival-horror game.

I also have some reservations calling this game a squad-based shooter. Yes, there are three computer-controlled teammates, but there is very little squad control. If you've unlocked all the different abilities and weapons, you can equip your squad with goodies, but that's it. The good news is that your three squad mates are significantly less stupid than the gun-toting humans who get in your way. Imagine a competent Sheva divided equally into three people, well that's your squad. They're dumb, but not completely useless. You can sit back and let your squad do everything, but it's more fun to kill stuff yourself and it's much faster (besides you get more xp, yay). The U.S.S. squad will deal damage, but they can't clear an entire room. And they die, either by a tyrant playing patty-cake their skulls or by turning into a zombie themselves (then you get to kill them). As soon as they're dead, you can run up, hold a button, and BAMF! They're back.

So, infinite ammo, near infinite health, and infinite lives for your party. This doesn't sound like Resident Evil at all. And it's not. But for that brief moment, when I'm unloading shotgun rounds into an un-phased tyrant while he lifts his fists to smash me into the floor, I hold the controller just a little tighter, and remember the good times.