Resident Evil 5 is... an insult to the Resident Evil series.

[NekoSOM]

Resident Evil 4 was a better game than any of the other Resident Evil games could ever hope to be. After Resident Evil 4, I went back and played the Resident Evil Remake and I couldn't play it...it wasn't until RE4 that I realized just how archaic the previous games in the series were.

Yes, the Resident Evil games were scary...but only because you were completely crippled by the controls and the god-awful camera angles. You were scared in the same sense a paraplegic is scared of staircases. Yes, that kind of cheap scare was fine in the PS1 days...but by Resident Evil Zero it was an absolute joke.

Oh, and Zelda's puzzles are creative...Resident Evil's were stupid. My idea of fun isn't spending 10 minutes in my inventory screen angling my key just right just so I can figure out where it fits.

And mind you, this is coming from someone who was fanatically loyal to the old games, and was dead set against RE4 when I first saw it (well, the redesigned version anyway). And I know there will always be holdouts...but if they are so blind not to see the series change as a good thing, then they don't deserve to be listened to. They are so far beyond reason there is no hope for them.

The Resident Evil series now is about intensity. Being surrounded by screaming enemies and only having enough ammo to blast a hole through the ranks and run away is scary, especially now that inventory is real-time. Is it different? Of course. But a series that doesn't evolve is a series that doesn't last. RE4 could have been the last game in the series if not for the paradigm shift it introduced. If there's anything bad that can be said about RE5, it was the fear of the developers to not evolve even more. I actually agree with their decision to keep the stop and shoot mechanic. There has to be some drawback to choosing fight over flight other than ammo limits. They just seemed to recycle a little TOO much from RE4, including the enemies. But co-op is just such a rewarding experience that it is easy to forgive most of the flaws of the game.