To continue from my last post on everyone’s favorite zombie fighting series, I can confirm that Resident Evil 5 WAS, in fact, a bit of a step down from Resident Evil 4.  It’s not really an entirely fair comparison, of course, since the RE4 I played was the recent remake while RE5 was the Switch port of the original from 2009 which hasn’t gotten any quality of life updates and also LOOKS like an Xbox 360 game from 2009.

Well, not exactly.  The Switch port runs at 1080P and thanks to an unlocked frame rate hits a smooth 60fps on the Switch 2.  So it’s probably considerably better looking than the Xbox 360 version, but still…

While being a step down from RE4, it’s still a pretty fun game.  I am more of a Leon fan than a Chris fan, but I enjoyed the banter between Chris and Sheva and the frequently over-the-top set pieces.  I also found myself really enjoying the gyro aim that the Switch port brought to the table.  I’m going to have problems adjusting to RE games without that in future.

I understand Sheva hasn’t shown up in the series since RE5, and that’s a bit of a shame.  Hopefully the series makes another trip to Africa, it’s a really underutilized setting in games.

Downsides:  It’s awfully brown.  It’s really really brown.  The sheer number of vaguely brown levels where you just shoot parasite-infested Africans got to me after a while, though the “suddenly, Tomb Raider!” levels helped make up for those.

Also, after the joy of playing suitcase Tetris in RE4, going back to a game with a drastically limited inventory was a bit of a shock, and needing to manage inventory for both Chris and Sheva was a considerable drag.

I followed RE5 up with… well, not RE6.  Actually, I took a detour to 3DS land and gave Resident Evil : Revelations a go, and made it about four hours before I decided to do something else with my life.  It’s not a bad game but the sheer amount of backtracking and the terribly dark and monotonous environments ship hallways just broke me after a while.  I also stumbled across a thread talking about how the last boss was either a nightmare (if you couldn’t dodge) or easy (if you had mastered the dodge mechanic) and pondered the number of successful dodges I’d managed (like, three?) and that was also a contributing factor to dropping it.

Really impressive what they managed to cram into a 3DS game, though.

But after THAT I did move on to RE6.  And it’s not brown.  Like, well, there are brown levels but overall it does not FEEL brown in the same way that RE5 just felt brown.  The game has some tragically low-resolution textures, but even with those it is so much prettier than its immediate predecessor.

Some of the levels made very limited sense, though.  Like the whole medieval catacombs under a random American town thing.  Very cool!  But also very weird.

It’s also got Leon in it. AND Chris.  Something for everyone!  I even enjoyed the Jake campaign and of course more Ada is always welcome.  Getting to play her campaign at the tail end of the other three was a great way to see all of the different stories tied together.

As an aside, I am certain that all of the crawling through ducts you do in the Ada campaign is vitally important to the plot and not just some guy at Capcom’s personal fetish in action.

It’s definitely the “Aliens” of the series, being much more action-horror than survival-horror, but I am putting it high in my personal rankings.

Normally I post screenshots of the various computers seen in these games and speculate what they were meant to represent, but neither RE5 nor RE6 had anything particularly interesting going on in that regard.  Rather I will post a screenshot of some guy’s extremely nice winning mahjong hand.  I’m sure that about five minutes after this guy laid these tiles down he was either (a) turned into a zombie or (b) eaten by zombies, but for those five minutes I bet he was awfully happy.

I think I’ll probably skip Revelations 2, so I’m left with only 7 and 8.  At this point I will drop my entirely non-scientific ranking of the games I’ve played so far:

1. Resident Evil 4 (Remake)
2. Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
3. Resident Evil 6
4. Resident Evil 3 (Remake)
5. Resident Evil 5
6. Resident Evil (Remake)
7. Resident Evil: Revelations
8. Resident Evil 0
9. Resident Evil: Code Veronica