Our adventure through Plagas infested Africa continues as Shamus and I venture back into Resident Evil 5. We had performed some experiments and confirmed that the theory of the game dropping the other player’s ammunition types was largely correct. It seems like a rather misguided method of encouraging cooperation between players, or perhaps is weighted too heavily towards providing ammo of the wrong type. This almost always guarantees that, as the player’s resources dwindle throughout a fight, they’ll have to rely on their partner staying close and navigating the inventory in order to make the trade. Not only do the game’s encounters encourage the players to split up, but the fights are often intense enough that opening the inventory will leave you vulnerable.

Obviously this system can be managed, as I have played the game multiple times with multiple different friends throughout the years. It’s more a matter of an implementation that is not quite ideal, as it often makes cooperating more difficult. Simultaneously, there’s the trouble of playing the game solo with only the artificial intelligence as your companion. After a strange disconnection, Shamus was forced to watch the stream as A.I. Sheva made strange decisions and wasted all of his pistol ammunition. My own experience recollects instances of Sheva wasting shotgun ammunition trying to shoot an enemy at a rifle’s distance, or that was intended to be shot with turrets planted in the environment. The A.I. was incapable of manning said turrets on their own, instead needing to be instructed by the player. It taught me that the A.I. will waste ammo on their own, and that constantly instructing them was only costing me time and leaving me vulnerable, so better to leave it with the pistol and let it run out of the most common ammunition, turning the remainder of the fight into a single-player experience.

I feel that the inventory’s three-by-three design was in part chosen as an easy way to map item shortcuts to the D-Pad, but in 2007 Dead Space would not only allow the player to simply set those shortcuts up themselves, but healing and stasis energy would always be mapped to two separate buttons. Perhaps it would have been worth adding an additional three slots to Resident Evil 5’s inventory and adopting the Dead Space model instead – especially if you were going to force armor to take up a slot.

Juggling inventory between two players certainly forces teamwork, but the question is whether it’s fun and enjoyable or if you’ve managed to frustrate not one, but two players with this constant chore.

It’s a shame because so much of the game is clearly a well-designed experience. Forcing one player to hold the lamp light is kind of a drag for one player, but it also allows players to swap back and forth to ensure no one is losing more ammunition. The large environments that encourage the players to split up or guard different points allow for quick, tactical thinking, flanking opportunities, and multiple other sorts of scenarios. It really is a good cooperative third-person shooter.

Yet it’s not only a confusing mess of a Resident Evil entry, it’s a confusing game based on how often it interferes with itself, and usually with little things like the inventory. When Shamus disconnected, there was no way for him to just drop back in. Granted, drop-in and drop-out wasn’t really as common then as it is now, but that would then demand more frequent checkpoints. Sadly, if I had gone forward just a little further I think I would have hit a checkpoint. We also thought we retained everything we had lost and could farm the game, but it turned out the game did not save it to our character accounts.

The rail-shooter section on the Jeep is definitely one of the game’s darker spots as well. The sudden quick-time events, dynamite and molotov tossing bikers, and overheating machine guns do nothing to encourage cooperative play. If anything, it leaves you hurt and busted up enough that, by time you reach the giants, you’ll be cursed to repeat until you’ve perfected the fight or rail shooters. For as much fun as the game can be, it takes what ought to be a nice, pace-changing sequence into an exercise in aggravation and anger.

The more I watch us play, the more certain I am that I want to make a video about Resident Evil 5. Until then, you can also read Shamus’ thoughts regarding the inventory on his original blog post.

Hopefully I’ll figure out how to fix the audio at some point in this series.