Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City Review

Capcom decided it was time for a small trek off the beaten path with Resident Evil, letting SOCOM developers Slant Six Games loose within the franchise, spawning a squad based third person shooter filled with action and shooty things.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City takes certain liberties and an alternative time line in order to follow through with some of the in-game actions. Akin to The Force Unleashed, you’re able to eliminate key Resident Evil characters during the course of your playtime as part of the USS (Umbrella Secret Service); a group of battle hardened mercenaries tasked with the most delicate operations to ensure the corporation’s experiments remain undetected.

You start off with the seemingly easy task of retrieving the G-Virus from the one and only William Birkin, however things don’t go to plan which means only one thing: the excrement hits the fan. This failed mission is blamed squarely on the shoulders of the Wolfpack, your unit, and from here in you’re treated as expendable assets doing the dirty work in an attempt to cover-up the Raccoon City incident; easier said than done as you can quite imagine.

Timeline wise this is set between the events of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, therefore we get to greet Tyrants, Lickers, Hunters and even Nemesis himself as your squad moves through the various missions. Unfortunately your squad seem to be as braindead as the zombie populace you’re shooting through. I have not experienced such painfully crap AI since trying to take hostages from the house in Italy playing Counter Strike 1.3 as I have with this game. You may as well just play this single player and forget you even have computer controlled team mates. To call them AI would assume they have a form of intelligence, sadly they do not, as countless times they would remain still at points in the map and not move, repeatedly get stuck in patches of fire and consequently die, nor do they have any helpful or redeeming features at all.

In order to get the best experience then you have to play co-operatively with either your friends or random people, the fact that we have to do this in order to get through the game without spooning your brains out from sheer frustration indicates that at the most base level this game has already fallen at the first hurdle. The campaign does not last that long either, six missions with about 30-45 mins per mission will mean you can comfortably finish this in a lazy afternoon. Granted you can replay any mission to try and improve your grade, earn more XP for weapon unlocks but aside of those shallow fillers the campaign has little substance to it.

There is an additional DLC campaign focusing the attention on the other faction in this battle, the Spec Ops. These are your obligatory “Good Guys”, telling the whole Operation Raccoon City story from an alternative angle. Unfortunately this is typical DLC trash as only your first Spec Ops mission is free meaning every subsequent mission will mean a purchase from your pocket. Something that seems to be putting Capcom in a lot of hot water with the fan base as of late (Street Fighter X Tekken, we’re looking at you!).

Moving onto the multiplayer portion of the game and things look up, but only slightly. We have a number of modes available right out the box, from bog standard Team Deathmatch, a spin on capture the flag with the flag being replaced by the G-Virus and Survivors mode, where you fight off zombie hordes until the evac helicopter arrives. Unfortunately there isn’t enough room on the chopper for everyone which puts a novel spin on this kind of mode.

Heroes mode is again Team Deathmatch but you select an existing character from the Resident Evil universe with the objective of eliminating the opposing ‘Heroes’; if you die in this mode you respawn as one of the Wolfpack or Spec Ops team in this game, the mode ends when all heroes on one team dies. Then we have Nemesis mode, which is again purchasable DLC so it’s likely this mode will never be played outside of a handful of die hard Resident Evil fans.

Prepare to turn up the in game gamma in order to see anything as this game is darker than dark. Even indoors with the lights on, it’s bloody dark, which is a shame as the game doesn’t look bad at all. The main characters look varied and suitably animated for this kind of game and the zombies have a decent range of styles, from the slow shambling bullet fodder to the panic inducing ‘V-Act’ style which turn red and sprint at you ‘ala’ 28 Days Later.

There just seems to be too much to annoy you while playing Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City in order to justify the purchase price, even if it were half price we would struggle recommending this one to potential buyers. The horrible AI, clunky controls, the bundles of DLC that is already present and upcoming for the game, it all adds up to leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

This is a real shame as we were hoping for something rather special as the idea seems solid enough on paper. The premise of Umbrella vs Spec Ops while zombies add another threat to your team sounds good, also the fact you can make someone on the opposing team bleed in order to attract a horde of zombies can make for some hairy moments, especially in multiplayer. Alas the practice falls short of the theory, leaving you to experience a rather drab and uninspired game filled with pain and frustration which, in all honesty, should be avoided like the T-Virus itself.