RE5 XBL demo out today.

It\'s currently only available to Gold LIVE subscribers, but the bit of text said that it should be available for Silver LIVE members \"in a few days\", so by the end of the week I should imagine.

Anyway, the demo. As widely predicted, it is the two levels that have been shown a lot in video demonstrations- \'Public Assembly\', and \'Shanty Town\'. It plays near enough exactly like RE4, just with some enhanced gameplay mechanics between you and your partner Sheva. There\'s no intro or anything, you just get to choose from either of those two stages to play. There are a few cut-scenes within the levels.

Public Assembly is just a little timed skirmish level. Think of it as playing Mercenaries on RE4, and you\'re pretty much spot-on. You\'re basically in a brawl in an enclosed space with re-spawning zombies, and a seemingly invincible axe-wielding nutter (named \'Executioner\', apparently). I\'m sure this guy is probably like Dr. Salvador from RE4 (the bag-headed chainsaw freak from that game), in that he can in fact be killed, he\'s just got a lot of health, to the point where he would seem invincible to small arms fire. I\'m going to try and kill this hulking axe man in the demo at some point.

If you survive for the undisclosed time-limit, you\'re treated to a cut-scene of Kirk (your helicopter support guy) blowing the door with an RPG, letting you out of the \'pen\'. That\'s the end of the stage. Shanty Town is less of a skirmish, and allows you to explore a bit (and I do mean a bit!). There\'s a few different areas, giant moths attack, and the stage culminates in a boss fight with that thin gangly bag-head chainsaw bastard from the trailers. Explosive barrels and electricity boxes come into play in this stage, and you get to use a sniper rifle.

One of the set-pieces in this stage is that bit from one of the trailers where Chris and Sheva do a special co-op QTE move, which boosts Sheva over the otherwise un-jumpable gap towards the next building. She then gets lynched by marauding zombies, and you help her out by sniping across the way at them. I know I\'ve seen this bit in one of the trailers. Anyway, it\'s in Shanty Town on the demo. The stage (and demo) ends soon after killing the chainsaw guy, and using his key on the locked door. You go into a little alley, find a treasure chest with a bunch of useless jewels, and then go through a big door to end the demo.

All in all, I\'m really impressed. It plays exactly the same as RE4, near enough. What they\'ve really gone to town on, gameplay-wise, is the partner mechanic. They\'ve brought back some of the inventory-sharing stuff from RE0. but thankfully, they\'ve brought none of the suckage that was in RE0. Which brings me on to the inventory. For the first time in the series, you interact with your inventory in real-time. Rather than another screen coming up and the gameplay/world pausing for you to mix your herbs and whatnot, pressing Y brings up your inventory on a little transparent overlay, and nothing pauses.

This injects some real tension into using the inventory in certain moments, fumbling around with your ammo and herbs during the big skirmishes and boss fights, etc. So it\'s a good change. The controls are very good. Not that different from RE4, at all. It\'s pretty much RE4 controls mapped out on the 360 pad, with a couple slight changes. In the same vein as Oblivion/Fallout 3, you can hotkey four inventory items to the up, down, left, and right of the D-pad.

The graphics are absolutely incredible, and you can tell Capcom know it. All of the cut-scenes in the demo are done in the in-game engine. I did have to remind myself a few times that I wasn\'t playing Far Cry 2. The style of the visuals in both games is very, very similar. Other than the two stages, the demo also allows you to play them in split-screen or Xbox LIVE multiplayer co-op (where one player assumes the role of Sheva). This is an unusual amount of functionality for a demo. All other demos I\'ve gotten have had all multiplayer disabled, let alone XBL multiplayer.

Anyway, highly impressed with the demo, and will probably be getting this game when it comes out. To the few PS3 gamers here, you guys get this demo at some point after this week. MS have some \'exclusive demo deal\' bullshit with Capcom or something, but apparently it\'s only for this week. If you\'re lucky, you\'ll get this demo next Monday. If you\'re not, then it should be along soon enough. I\'ve mostly only played offline single-player so far. Anyone want to do some XBL co-op on the RE5 demo with me? My Gamertag is in my sig.

( Edited 26.01.2009 21:13 by Martin_ )

Awesome. Can't wait until it's available to lowly silver members such as myself.

Got to play it a few months ago when the Japanese demo came out. Lotsa people burned it from the Japanese marketplace to play it xD

Just downloaded it but don't really feel like playing it now. I'd rather play it in CoOp than solo too

Played through both levels and wasn\'t that impressed.

Obviously the graphics are gorgeous so I had no problem with that, it was the controls.

Even though they\'re pretty much the same as RE4, I just found them clumsy, but that could be because I\'m not yet used to them on the 360 pad so will give them time.

I hate playing as Sheva since you control her on the right side of the screen. Is there any way to change it to the Chris view when playing as her?

Speaking of Sheva, I hate her. Whenever she runs out of ammo, she just stands there and does nothing making this game one that must be played on co-op or face loads of game overs due to her dying.

( Edited 26.01.2009 21:37 by wAyNe - sTaRT )

I don't get why everyone thinks the controls are bad, I personally think there pretty good, it's just a matter of getting the hang of them. I had no problem with them but I do find the game to be slightly slower then re4.

Overall all though I'd say an awesome demo and looking forward for the proper version

Falcon Armour X said:
I don't get why everyone thinks the controls are bad, I personally think there pretty good, it's just a matter of getting the hang of them. I had no problem with them but I do find the game to be slightly slower then re4.

Overall all though I'd say an awesome demo and looking forward for the proper version

I thought there was an option to change it to re4 style controls?

I hated how Sheeva was on the right too...

Anyway, seems awesome to me. Controls are a little more user friendly than RE4. Other than that, it's basically RE4 with nicer graphics. A good thing. The RE4 controls are weird, for some reason they used X for shooting, but I don't see why anyone would use them anyway, lawl.

It was pretty darn cool from what I played, I didn't like how the splitscreen was displayed though or has that been fixed?

This and Banjo are the reasons I bought a 360.

Hmm. It's... hmm.

RE4 got me back into gaming after a few years hiatus. This feels exactly the same. Which is good because RE4 is top 5 material. But still...

Don't worry lads, I'll get round to forming a cogent opinion in a sec.

Gaming has made some massive strides in the intervening 4 years since RE4, and while this feels solid, other companies have caught up in terms of quality. Lots of others. I never liked how the old REs created tension by retarding your movement and control - it's a cheap, nasty, frustrating and lazy trick. RE4 was a stellar leap, and it felt like a worthy compromise at the time. Now it feels like it's holding me back. If I want clunky chunky controls I'll play Gears.

The restricted field of view; the real-time inventory; the gimpy sidekick buzzing round needing instant resource management - just one of these things to create some tension might be fine. But they're compounding to frustrate me. It just wasn't very much fun.

It's just a demo. I almost didn't play it, as I'll be getting this whatever. I hope the game slaps me about for doubting it. But right now there's another zombie-blaster demo I've played which kicked the crap out of this one, and it didn't sacrifice ergonomics in order to provoke or entertain or scare the living shit out of me.

Played RE5 online this evening, it's pretty awesome. It's like a slower, more reserved Left 4 Dead. The special team melee moves are excellent, too!

wAyNe - sTaRT said:
I hate playing as Sheva since you control her on the right side of the screen. Is there any way to change it to the Chris view when playing as her?

It took me a while to get used to her 'over the left shoulder' viewpoint, as well. I don't think you can change it. I actually think it might be like that for a functional reason. If, for example, players decide to stake out by an entrance, Sheva can easily look into the left side of the room, whilst Chris can easily look into the right side. And a few other things. If they both had the same viewpoint, perhaps the angles might not be so good, or they might look a bit odd standing shoulder to shoulder shooting zombies. I dunno, though. I'm used to it now, so I don't mind.

wAyNe - sTaRT said:
Speaking of Sheva, I hate her. Whenever she runs out of ammo, she just stands there and does nothing making this game one that must be played on co-op or face loads of game overs due to her dying.

Did you know that you can set her to 'Attack' and 'Cover', among other things? There are several ways of controlling the Sheva AI's behaviour. Due to the new real-time inventory, I didn't really mind making sure she had ammo and what have you. Maybe if it was still like the old inventory, where everything stopped and you got taken away to another screen etc, I probably would have found it annoying, then.

Just going on the demo, I do think that she seems to be quite a shit 'character', though. She just seemed like some token black merc girl because the game is set in Africa. Perhaps the full-game's back story and opening will make her seem a little less one-dimensional. I do, after all, play Resident Evil for it's shitty storyline, it has to be said.

Mario_0 said:
It was pretty darn cool from what I played, I didn't like how the splitscreen was displayed though or has that been fixed?

If you mean how neither half takes up the full width of the screen, then no- that hasn't been fixed. To be honest, that's just like that in order to preserve performance. If you look, they also dropped the lovely blur effect from the single-player/XBL mode. I wouldn't criticise it, personally. It's still looks great, and is perfectly playable. It runs at a good clip, and that's all you can really ask for. I never even once thought that RE5 might have a split-screen option.

Just finished a decent session with it - and I feel quite iffy about it. It had the usual Resident Evil appeal and I think the transition to day has worked quite well, but honestly I just hate being forced to constantly work with an AI character. I didn\'t mind it in RE4 because it wasn\'t for too many chunks, but it certainly appears here that Sheva is with you pretty constantly. Obviously over Xbox Live or with a friend, it\'s a different matter, but sometimes (most of the time, actually) I will want to work through it at my own pace, which means persevering with her...

I also think the RE4 system that they\'re basically still employing here is starting to look kind of dated. I think the whole over-the-shoulder thing worked well in Resident Evil 4 because it was mostly in darkness and it played to the game\'s strength of never really knowing what\'s around the corner. In day time, where there\'s obviously quite a few views to be taken in - and you get the vibe of a more open world, it just feels constrictive to me. I also HATE having to stand still to aim, that, in my opinion, has to change.

Chain-wielding maniac in close proximity + man who can only fire gun when stationary = Stupid.

( Edited 27.01.2009 15:48 by TheStratMan )

can someone go on xbox live with me
my gamertag is spursboy94

( Edited 27.01.2009 18:34 by spursboy94 )

spursboy94 said:
some 1 go on xbl wiv plz names in sig

Chain-wielding maniac in close proximity + man who can only fire gun when stationary = Stupid.

Yeah but they desighned the areas and enimies too your advantage, you can easily run past him and he won't hurt you, it's only when he strikes down with it you gotta be carful.

I figured it out pretty quickly that all you needed to do was:
If you had the rifle get a good distance away from him aim for the face, he goes down run up and punch then run away and repeat basically.
It's the same with the hand gun or machine gun except you need to pop him with a few more bullets.

It isn't ment to be Gears of War imagine how much tension would be taken out of it if you could just strafe and circle him pumping bullets into him :/

Not to mention that while ammo isn't as scarce as older Resident Evil games it's stil not just lying around like in an heavy shooter game and i'm pretty sure most of the time your going to be missing while running and gunning.

I hope that it comes out this Friday, because my membership ran out. I can't see why they had to bring it out for gold members to begin with. I can't wait till the full version comes out. The best thing ablout the demo is that it is online co-op. That is the first demo to have that feature.

The reason Gold membership exists is so that people without it feel the need to have it, if you know what I mean.

Some demos don\'t go Silver for a good while, like Force Unleashed\'s demo, which wasn\'t that great in the end anyway.

( Edited 28.01.2009 13:19 by SuperLink )

I downloaded/played it.

"Meh" - my impressions.

Graphics are VERY nice though.

I thought it was fun. Also, the equipment setup really reminded me of Gears... XD I thought the controls were a bit stiff as well. I didn't like how you could use the left analog stick to turn while you were walking, but not while you were running. -_- The inventory I don't really have a problem with, as long as ammo can stack pretty high. Other than that, game is awesome, and I can't wait 'till March 13.I loved punching/uppercutting/somersaulting/punching/kicking/stabbing/stomping everybody.

Playing with a friend will always be more fun than playing alone. Can't fault the game for that.

Resident Evil is the only series I can honestly say I've beaten every game in. Well, every game that's not an on-rails shooter or shitty online experience.

It's on Playstation store. Yay!

Might actually download it on my bro's ps3 just to compare it with the 360 version. Will get the 360 version though for sure

Downloaded it last Thursday. Awsome demo, but could have had one more level. The fact that it is a bit slower than number 4 is good because you have to work with your partner.

I checked the playstation store, its not up yet
why wont it show up on mine

i played the japanese one a few months ago (or whenever it was released)

not really too hyped for it, seems like RE 4.5 to me.

I still can\'t understand why people are complaining about the controls, considering there\'s 4 options to change it just seems a bit odd

( Edited 02.02.2009 15:42 by Falcon Armour X )