Be Afraid

January is a pretty dead time for new releases. This is good, because it gives me a chance to catch up on the games I didn't play over the holidays. Or, you know, sink 50 more hours of my life into a game I played and beat last year. But, whatever, January is also the time for demos. Grabbed two off of Live today: FEAR 2 and Resident Evil 5. Both sequels to two of my favorite games from a few years ago, needless to say I was pretty excited for both. That'll learn me.

FEAR is one of the best first person shooters I have ever played. While the interior office environments did get repetitive after a while, the awesome game play and pretty intense storyline made me forget all about it. FEAR 2 (a game with a long litany of legal issues) picks up right after the first left off, but unfortunately seems to have taken a step backwards. The real draw of FEAR was the ability to slow down combat, resulting in visceral and bloody firefights that also looked fucking awesome, as well as the outstanding AI. The sequel uses the same mechanic, but not nearly to the same effect. Now, this is just a demo, so maybe things will get tightened up in the final release, but the firefights simply don't have the same resonance. While the graphics are top notch for the environments, guns, and atmosphere, the enemies look almost fake, and the blood may as well be Welch's grape jelly. The up close and personal combat of FEAR has been made, drumroll please, completely generic in the sequel! Just what we need, another pretty looking shooter that does nothing new (hope Gamestop has my Killzone 2 preorder...). So, yeah, pretty disappointed, though I guess my hopes weren't all that high.

I can't say the same for Resident Evil 5. One of the biggest games of 09, RE5 is a spiritual sequel to RE4, which is arguably the best game of the last generation of consoles. I played that bad boy for 25 hours and loved every minute. The combat was great, the mood was perfect, and I even got scared a few times. RE5 seems to want to keep the action game vibe, and gives us crazed African villagers instead of crazed Spanish villagers. Oh, and it also gives us a control scheme seemingly devised by those villagers. Two buttons to even be able to shoot (one of which is also used to locate your partner), two to run, a button to open your inventory, the d-pad to browse the inventory, another button to select your weapon/item, "quick time" events (used to great effect in RE4) that disappear after being on screen for about a second...and so on. What the fuck, Capcom? I don't even know if the game is any good, because I spent all my time trying to figure out how to reload my pistol. Another problem is the game's perspective. While the "over the shoulder" view from RE4 remains intact, your character takes up almost half the screen, making seeing anything pretty difficult. While the graphics are gorgeous, the slowwwwwww gameplay and degree of difficulty to do even simple things are really harshing my buzz for this game. What was once a solid "buy" might not even get rented. This might be a long year...