Resident Evil, as a series, has been my Holy Grail. It’s lore, gameplay and all-over fright factor is something not to fuck with. RE4 was possibly one of the best games ever; I still play it to this day. So I was very excited to see what RE5 had in store for me...man, am I pissed off! Instead of building on what they established in RE4, Capcom delivered the ultimate videogame versions of Chinese Democracy ever...overly produced crap.

First off, the story line takes place in Africa with some rebels and some disease-type thing running amuck. You start off the game as a tried-and-true Resident Evil mainstay, Chris Redfield, and with your partner, Sheva Alomar. You get weapons and immediately are thrown into action. And the action sucks. It plays like a lame corridor shooter. The world isn’t so open and you feel confined, and not in a scary sort of way...it’s more of a frustration type of thing because the controls suck so bad. On top of that, there is no "suitcase" in this game, so your weapons cache is rather limiting, having to choose from the inventory at the start of each mission. Sure, you upgrade your weapons, but it’s not really all that rewarding when you can’t aim for shit in this game.

Your partner Sheva serves no purpose but to be a walking backpack that can carry another 4-6 items for you. She is dumb as fuck and besides getting her to flip a switch here or there, she is pretty useless. Sure she will shoot the random baddy but nothing too extreme. Most of the time, I felt her to be a liability. You pretty much wind up saving her ass 50% of the time. What kind of partner is that? A really stupid and shitty one.

Resident Evil games - no matter how good or bad they were in the past - always delivered one thing: fright...and this one falls so flat in that department. You really don’t have a sense of fear or anticipation of what’s next; it's all pretty routine after the first gory encounter you have. And with the game being so easy, you can really just run through levels and kill enemies pretty quickly even with the bad controls. This made it boring for me after the second chapter. But I still wanted to finish the game, hoping for some huge Resident Evil lore revelation...guess what happened?...nothing - that’s what happened. No big revelation except that maybe you killed Wesker this time and that he likes tight, shiny leather.

Was I a bit harsh here? Damn straight...this is a Resident Evil game, so the standards are pretty high. And since this was the game they were selling the PS3 on 3-4 years ago, this game pissed me the fuck off. If this was some no-name game, I probably would have been a little nicer, but not by very much. Do yourself a favor: rent it, play it once and then burn it...because after all, it deserves the same fate as Chinese Democracy.