When I bought Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, I left the receipt for it in the box. It seems I bought it a few days after it came out in March of last year. I just finished it earlier today. Bear in mind, I was not continuously playing it over this time frame – I had left it for well over a year. I finally gave it more of a chance, took a little more time, was a little more forgiving, and by the end of it, I was enjoying it. It’s not that it was a hard game to grasp, or was overly difficult, it just didn’t immediately click with me. Which is odd, considering it’s one of those third-person-shooter-hold-the-left-trigger-to-fine-aim games, which I am so familiar with nowadays. Which game introduced this mechanic, anyway? I can’t help but feel I missed out on the originator, as their arrival took me by surprise, and all of a sudden every second or third game was a third-person-shooter-hold-the-left-trigger-to-fine-aim game.
The one major bad point is that the original retail release felt like half a game compared to what I was playing in the end. It really is a shitty situation when DLC can almost double the content of a game. I picked up the two DLC packs in a random sale, and they both add three extra missions, adding to the original 7, making 13 in total. I know that the unique selling point is that you are the bad guys, the Umbrella special forces, but it would’ve been even better if people bought the game knowing that they could also play as the good guys. To be fair, both sides could be re-skins of the other. No matter who you choose, you always end up dodging shambling zombies, stamping on Lickers heads, flanking Tyrants, and getting into shoot-outs with generic looking military types – if you chose to be bad you shoot at Government soldiers, if you go good then you shoot at Umbrella soldiers. Work for Umbrella and you press A to burn evidence whereas Government agents press A to examine it. The gameplay is fundamentally identical no matter who you choose.
Classes are identical on both sides, and experience earned for the good medic also counts for the bad medic – you level the class rather than the character. Visually, the two sides are pretty different, as you can see from the pictures I have put up here. The Umbrella Security Services “Wolfpack” are suited in black, faces hidden behind masks, quite intimidating and very professional-looking. The Government Spec Ops “Echo Six” are almost casual in their appearance, dressing like civilians with knee-pads and utility vests hastily put on over their normal clothes. In a two-fingered salute to gender stereotyping, each class has a male and female version. If the agent specialising in Recon is male on one side, then they’re female on the other. The most delightful example is the Medic: Umbrella’s healing expert is head to toe latex with a thick German accent – Echo Six rely on an overweight biker for their heals.
While it is the same experience no matter who you choose, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I recently wrote about Transformers: Fall Of Cybertron, where a similar concept of playing both sides really got on my nerves. I think it’s ok in this game as you’re given the choice of faction before you even choose the mission – and you play out the entire mission on one side. You never suddenly find yourself shooting at the character you were five minutes ago, as happened in Transformers. In fact, you never meet your opposing squad at all in-game, which would of course cause no end of spacial anomalies.
It’s got me in the mood to pay Resident Evil 6 though – which I’ve had since about two days after it came out… I really should stop buying games that I won’t play for a year or so…
