
	Platform Xbox 360 Genre Shooter Publisher Capcom Developer Slant 6 Games ESRB M (Mature) Released March 20, 2012

- An interesting premise - Multiplayer versus

- Cover system feels horrible - The multiplayer versus is a missed opportunity

Review: Resident Evil 5 (360) Review: Dead Rising 2: Off the Record (360) Review: Left 4 Dead 2 (PC) Review: Gears of War 3 (360)
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Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City

Score: 4.5 / 10

There was a really good idea at the core of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City but something must have happened along the way to throw it way off track or it was simply a victim of "do it on time, do it on budget, so we fulfill our contract." There's nothing wrong with that from the developer's point of view but for the player that just plunked down $60 on a game that almost completely fails at

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- Xbox 360 Game Reviews
- Shooter Game Reviews
- Games Published by Capcom

everything it sets out to do? That's not so great.

It's hyperbole to say Operation Raccoon City fails at everything, but I like dabbling in the stuff.

The best part of the game is the versus modes that makes for a good zombie sandwich: two sides fighting it out with zombies/infected in the middle, a threat to both sides. As with hyperbole, I also like

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dabbling in unrealistic "What if...?" scenarios.

What if the whole game was based on this premise? What if there were overt ways to make use of the zombie horde as a weapon against the other side? What if the versus multiplayer mode was separated from the campaign and available as a $10 download title?

It feels like the versus mode had so much more potential than the hackneyed campaign.

And that campaign... though it adds its own layer of lore on the overall Resident Evil "mythology" I had a tough time running through game. Enemies take a ridiculous amount of bullets to drop them, particularly the boss-types. And even under very coordinated fire from other human-controlled members of Wolf Pack, it's difficult. (The computer-controlled helpers are not very good.) But the real culprit though, when it comes to the kind of controller-breaking frustration usually reserved for the likes of Dark Souls, is that the cover system is horrific. In a bad way. A button-press is the standard for entering cover but Operation Raccoon City is made of magnets: your character just automatically sticks to things you otherwise might avoid. In my mind it's excusable. The game's a 3rd person shooter with cover mechanics that are as mangled as my keyboard and mouse right before I gave up Counter-Strike.

If you've read this far, you'll be able to predict what I'm about to write.

Save your money; don't bother with Operation Raccoon City.

- Asma Malik

(April 12, 2012)