Well, as you are all no doubt ecstatic to hear, I have now played Resident Evil 5 (in SP).
And what, you might ask, are my thoughts on Resident Evil 5?
Well, the first one I had upon completion was: "What the fuck did I just play?"
The second was: "Wow what a pile of steaming hot trash".
To get the co-op argument out of the way: Yes, I can totally see that the game would be better with a good friend by your side, but you know what else is? Terminal cancer.
The nicest thing I can see about my experience with RE5 is that it made me look back on RE4 with strong affection.
I'm not going to do much of a deep-dive on this because I hated this game so fucking much, but here are some quick bullet points.
-Wesker has always been a shitty character and a shittier villain, but ohmygawd is he taken to the Nth degree of garbage here. Fucking anime super-powered trash.
-Sheva. Hah... hahhhh.... ohgodkillmenow.
-Worst depiction of Africa I've ever seen in a game. I lived for several years in West Africa, for a couple in Nairobi, and have visited both SA and Egypt, and man this game just looks fuckall like it takes place on that continent. Somewhere early on in development there was a meeting of the art leads and they decided that the best way to evoke Africa was to just make everything gray. Really fucking gray. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure that when you look closely most of the zombies are very clearly of East Asian or Indian ancestry.
-The inventory. Some genius decided that the one thing that should be retained from the franchise's roots is shitty nonsensical inventory management. It's fine at the beginning, but once you're working with a mostly full inventory it becomes a Goddammned nightmare. Without exaggeration the most difficulty I encountered in this game was trying to figure out how to get Sheva to stop unnecessarily splitting her ammo stacks so that she would have a free slot to just pick up another type of ammo and load it into an empty weapon in her inventory. What sort of stupid motherfucker thinks this is good design?
-Encountered a game-breaking bug in Chapter 6-1 that has apparently existed since launch 13 years ago, but I had to slum around Steam forums to find a fanpatch for it anyways. Thanks Crapcom!
This is all to say: Resident Evil 5 is irredeemable garbage. I was planning on playing RE0 next, but after this shitfest I need a palate-cleanser from the franchise, even though RE0 is supposedly an actual proper RE game. I hope you all check back in a year from now when I inevitably decide to play the copy of RE6 that's sitting in my Steam inventory. Surely it can't be that bad, right?
...Right?