Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City

At this years Comic Con, the Capcom booth (which I think had the best booth) had the new Resident Evil on demo. Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City is a four player shooter where you deal with the horrors of Raccoon City during an outbreak which takes place during the second and third games within the series, that means zombies. I know we’ve all seen four player zombie survival shooters before (Left 4 Dead, Dead Island and in a lesser case Resident Evil 5) but this game walks up to the Left 4 Dead series kicks it on the floor and gives it a Cleveland Steamer.

RE:ORC  (regarding orc?) plays like a blend between Resident Evil 4&5 with a twist of SOCOM. There are a few character classes and each does something extremely beneficial to the team from demolition to healing. There are customizable weapon load outs for you play style as well. The Comic Con playable level had the Umbrella troops tracking down Leon during outbreak of Resident Evil 2 during that reveal I think everyone was cheering at the chance to kill Leon. The scale of the city is pretty impressive you’ll feel as if you are actually in Raccoon City. The sheer amount of zombies on screen is just nuts. There will be multiple battles being fought at once as you’ll encounter other teams such as the Special Forces during your mission. However if you take too long, Umbrella will deem you expendable and drop in some biological weapons that were staples in the previous games. I don’t know if this was a part of the demo or a permanent feature in the game, I can only hope. I’d much rather fight hunters, lickers and Tyrants any day over the ‘super infected’ of L4D. The thing that sold the game for me is the fact that you can actually get infected. I haven’t seen that in a multiplayer zombie game since Resident Evil Outbreak and Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green. When you get infected you, you eventually turn and lose control of your character and start attacking everyone around you until you’re killed by your teammates or something else. There are a ton of the small things that made this game stand out to me, one of them being that if you’re bleeding zombies will actively hunt you down or you can use that same mechanic to create diversions in large areas of zombies.

As much as I am gushing over this game, there were some issues that I did notice. The first being is the characters handled kinda stiff. I should be used to this due to the fact I play the Monster Hunter series and all the characters handle like dump trucks. The turning and reaction times felt a bit sluggish, hopefully in the final build you can adjust sensitivity or they loosen up the characters. Another thing that guns don’t feel very accurate, the target bloom is way too wide. Even with burst shots aiming down sights and firing from the hip yield the same accuracy. Graphically the game is just super dark. While the models looked impressive it was just too dark to see anything sometimes. Come on Capcom lighten up.

Overall this game looks to be a very good zombie shooter, probably the best and I’ll be giving my money to Capcom, yet again.