Running and Shooting

There has been a lot of negative talk about the Resident Evil 5 demo lately and more specifically its control scheme. I’m curious about this because as far as I can tell the controls are identical to the masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4. My memory is a little shoddy since I haven’t touched RE4 in over three years, but nothing seems to have changed. For some reason though, I’m in the same boat as everyone else. The controls feel clumsy and slow. What has changed? We all loved RE4 and showered it with game of the year praise in 2005 despite it coming out in January. The following are a few thoughts I’ve read and concocted that seem plausible.


One idea is the demos choice of level design. Everywhere in the short demo was a small shantytown style area cramped with small alleys. That coupled with the fact that there are now two players (I played co-op though the other character is still there AI controlled if you don’t) only added to the cramped feel. This amplified the control problems for several reasons. In RE4 there was almost always a place to retreat too. Since you cannot shoot and move at the same time it was crucial for you to get away and give yourself time to peck away at the slow moving zombies. Now the zombies aren’t nearly as slow, they take several bullets to go down, headshots seem harder to pull off than in RE4, and the ammo is back to being as scarce as it was in all RE’s prior to four. All of this combine with the annoyance of moving around a small crowded environment became quite frustrating very quickly.

Another interesting idea I heard is that the game is fighting with itself. It wants to be an action game in the realm of Dead Space, but its control scheme is still tied back to the series original roots. The entire horror genre has more or less become more scary action title and less get under your skin survival over the last few years, so this is an understandable theory. The problem is RE4 started that entire movement, in large part by changing its control scheme to the same setup RE5 now uses.

The more I think about it the more I think the controls are just not as tight as they were in RE4. Setting up a zombie to do a melee move is a lot more difficult. Before a quick slice of your knife stunned them followed by a tap of A. It’s the same in five, but every zombie I tried it on stepped back as they got sliced making the melee prompt flash for only a split second. When I tried to run forward to get back into range usually the zombie would have already recovered. Aiming your gun also seems a lot slower, even with the speed turned up to the max. Headshots, as mentioned earlier, are also much harder to pull off because of this and the zombies increased speed and agility. Overall, the controls just feel a lot more sluggish than I remember from RE4.

Who knows though, maybe gamers as a whole have just gotten used to different control schemes over the last four years, and what worked in 2005 simply doesn’t in 2009. I might have to dig RE4 out of my parents’ house and give it another go to find out. Or maybe the level design idea plays a huge role and won’t matter as much in the full game. It’s entirely possible Capcom just picked a bad level to showcase their game. I’m still going to give the game a try, but the demo has definitely seemed to have only lowered opinion of an immensely anticipated game.