Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City

I played through Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City by myself recently and this game is pretty forgettable.

I played this on my PS3.

I'm not really sure where to start with this game because there wasn't much about it that stood out to me. I suppose I'll begin by saying the visuals are pretty decent. It's not the most interesting looking game, but it's a higher-fidelity take on the streets of Raccoon City than we'd previously gotten and its characters and enemies all look solid enough. Performance, too, was pretty good. Compared to some of the other PS3 games I've played recently it was a relief to play something that actually felt stable.

The elevator pitch for this game is that you play as a squad trying to cover up Umbrella's involvement in the Raccoon City disaster. It has you visiting locations from RE2 and 3 and even interacting with characters from those games, though the focus is put on your new team of Umbrella operatives. HUNK shows up at the beginning but he vanishes pretty quickly and instead you follow a group of HUNK-likes. The plot is a pretty basic "Umbrella is evil and wants to cover their tracks" sort of thing, though it does take a fun turn at the very end.

The combat is, well, the combat's a pretty standard third-person shooter. You've got a few distinct classes to choose between but most of the game is your typical left-trigger/right-trigger shoot-em-up. There's a basic cover system that works well enough and some special abilities that are only slightly awkward to deal with. None of the guns feel particularly great unfortunately. Most of the gunplay is pretty stiff but there's a pistol quickdraw/auto-aim mechanic that's genuinely really fun to use. You've got a relatively diverse selection of enemies ranging from zombies, Hunters, other B.O.W.s, and a lot of government soldiers with guns. You can dismember enemies by shooting their limbs, and while this doesn't effect gameplay too much it's a nice cosmetic touch at least.

I said the game wasn't bad, but later missions in the game had me reconsidering this opinion. There's some pretty terrible level/encounter design coupled with awful AI, and it made for some very frustrating and tedious situations in the later few missions of the campaign (and most of the DLC campaign). Most of the game is fine, but there are wide swathes where it just stops being fun.

This turret sequence SUCKED.

This game is presumably best enjoyed online but I played it solo for a couple of reasons. One, I had already purchased the DLC for my PS3 copy and none of my friends have a PS3 easily accessible. Two, getting a PC copy to work online is a pain in the neck that requires you to muck about with Games for Windows Live and I just didn't have it in me to try to figure out how to get all that to work. As a solo endeavor it was a pretty standard third-person shooter, as I mentioned earlier, but AI companions were terrible at staying alive and I often ignored them while I went around the level doing my own thing. Coordinating abilities and healing each other seems like it would be fun, in theory, and the idea of a somewhat tactical Resident Evil game isn't inherently bad. I suppose I'll never know though.

I alluded to this earlier, but there's also a second campaign that follows some Echo Six government soldiers (the military guys you were fighting during the original campaign) which was largely more of the same. It takes you through the same (or at least similar) environments and also has you running into characters from RE2/3.

I played through the entire game as BERTHA (and the DLC as Harley) because I thought a medic would make the most sense for a solo playthrough. Rather than include all fourteen or so mission complete images, I've included my records screen as of the end of the second campaign below.

Maybe my bar is just low thanks to some of the other stuff I've played, but I wouldn't consider this game "bad," well, excluding some of the later campaign missions at least. It's unremarkable in almost every way, but it's competently put together and it both looks decent and runs well. There's nothing about it that feels outright broken or unsalvageable, but there's also not really anything about it that demands your attention. As far as Resident Evil spinoffs go it's far from the best but I've also played worse. The novelty of seeing Raccoon City and the RPD station yet again is admittedly pretty tired at this point but for a completionist like me I don't regret playing it. It was fine.

 

 

As you can tell from the fact I ran into both of these machines, we're still no closer to figuring out where exactly Raccoon City is supposed to be.