Above: LOVE ME DAMN YOU
The brain-faced crawlers have changed a little since the PSone days, in that they can now impale you from a distance on their disgusting tongues. They’re also almost totally blind, and often won’t attack you unless you make a loud noise, get too close to them or stumble into a set-piece that calls for them to swarm you.
Above: Miraculously, Sheva doesn’t spend the rest of the game with a gaping, poisoned hole in her shoulder
Shortly after they first show up, you’ll be confronted by two glass tanks filled with the scuttling bastards. Sneak by them, as Sheva recommends, and they’ll just continue crawling up the walls and making you feel uneasy with their seeming inattention. Sort of like that one scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
When you reach the end of their section, though, you’ll encounter a steel door that, for whatever insane reason, can only be opened by both you and your partner booting it off its hinges as noisily as possible. This naturally drives the Lickers behind you into a frenzy, and if you’re smart you’ll just barely hear the glass shattering by the time you’re halfway down the adjoining hallway – which dead-ends with an elevator you have to wait for. Which means you have to fend off a squad of pissed-off Lickers for a little bit.
Above: Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap
Sure, being forced to deliberately make a loud noise sort of destroys the entire reason for sneaking, but really, it’s not the kind of thing that would surprise any self-respecting RE fan. After all, have you ever seen a window in this series that monsters could resist jumping through?
Above: C’mon, it’s not like you didn’t know this was made to shatter
We’re as shocked as you are: one of RE5’s most awesome sequences really isn’t much more than an on-rails shooting gallery. As Chris, Sheva and their disposable driver haul ass across the savannah in a Humvee, a gang of Majini gives chase on the backs of motorcycles and flatbed trucks.
What follows is some of the fastest, most violently satisfying action in the entire game, as Chris grabs a mounted assault rifle…
… and Sheva mans a chaingun…
… to mow down everything that gets too close in what must be one of the most one-sided firefights in videogame history.
Above: So awesome
Above: No seriously, it’s really one-sided
To keep the action feeling fresh and dramatic, the game throws in a few easy quicktime events to remind you that, oh yeah, you’re moving across bumpy terrain at high speeds with no seatbelts.
Best of all, the sequence ends with a nighttime battle against a bearded version of our old Resident Evil 4 friend, El Gigante. And this time, he’s filled with revolting, enormous parasites that squeeze out through his Frankensteinesque stitches every so often to draw your fire. It’s not as fun as taking down packs of bikers, obviously, but it’s a nice, explosive coda to one of the most enjoyable bits in the game.
This one’s kind of a big spoiler, but one of your recurring foes in RE5 is a new type of bioweapon called Uroboros, which looks like nothing so much as a heaving mass of gigantic black maggots. It’s gross, it’s bigger every time you meet it and it always needs to be disposed of in creative ways. The last time you encounter it, it’s so huge and menacing that there’s only one thing that can destroy it: lasers from space.
Above: Ooh, scary
Before we reveal anything further, however, we thought we’d regale you with an exhaustive history of things named “Uroboros” (or “Ouroboros,” if you’re picky):
So, right, the boss. Uroboros’ final form is a colossal mass that periodically sprouts glowing, fleshy bulbs, and if you can’t guess what those are for you probably haven’t been playing videogames for very long. Small-arms fire won’t do much to them, so after dodging the creature’s attacks while dashing through the hallways of a cargo ship, you’ll need to climb to the ship’s bridge and grab the targeting device for an orbital laser satellite, which kind of looks like a rocket launcher.
Above: See?
Once you’ve got your hands on it, the rest is just a matter of locking on to the bulbs through the targeting scope (which isn’t always easy, as they tend to move around a lot), and triggering the satellite.
And then waiting for it to recharge.
Above: Come onnnn
While you’re doing that, Uroboros will spit semi-intelligent blobs of tendrils at you, which wobble around, leap at your face and generally give your partner something to shoot at while you occupy yourself with wielding the fire of the gods.
Above: Psh
So what if nailing giant tentacle beasts with a laser satellite is the antithesis of scary? Being able to wield this much power against a fantastically huge monster is the sort of payoff most games only dream of. Now, if only you could hang onto that power for a little longer, RE5’s lengthy, frustrating endgame might have been a little less excruciating.
More than the irksome final showdown and every frustrating moment that preceded it, there’s one thing we actually, truly hate about Resident Evil 5: every time there’s a cutscene or a transition to a new area, you’ll have the pleasure of sitting through a loading screen.
Above: Ugh, again?
Granted, you’ll learn a lot about the history of Resident Evil during these snippets, but they’re just frequent and long enough to be annoying. We may be picking nits here, but these things immediately jerk you out of the action, destroying any tension the game might have built, and RE5 is packed to the gills with them. It’s worth sitting through them to get to the cool stuff, of course, but there they are nonetheless, mocking us with their disjointed anecdotes about Ozwell Spencer and the W Project.
Mar 16, 2009
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