2.5/5 ★ – MechaniChris's review of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City.

Resident evil by way of Gears of War? SOUNDS like a great idea, and conceptually it is! There are moments where I thought “oh is this one of the hidden gems of this franchise?” Only to slam back to reality when I realized how poorly executed it is. I’m not hard to please. I genuinely had a lot of fun blasting through waves of zombies with my team. When the game sings, it’s beautiful. Unfortunately it stops being fun once you have all these human soldiers to deal with and the crimson heads start swarming endlessly, meaning that certain levels can only be beaten by avoiding the fight altogether and just rushing to the objective. The combat as well doesn’t feel as satisfying as it should. Every enemy is a bullet sponge and it takes a second to realize when they’ve died, or just staggered. The cover system is also abysmal, often providing no protection or preventing you from shooting back. And by the way, why are human soldiers even in this? I get it for the first mission, but they keep showing up and it’s so annoying every time. They’re not fun to fight, and they are always positioned high up so it’s a chore to shoot them. Similarly, the Hunters that eventually show up are ridiculous. They take so many bullets and they do not stagger. You have to basically empty your ammo cache to kill one and boy are there always way more than one. I’m not opposed to hard games, but this isn’t that. The game actually is pretty easy if you know your objective. The issue is that going through the motions to defeat these waves of enemies stops being fun and just becomes tedious. That’s really this games problem, tedium. I’d lament that it was also short, but it honestly overstays its welcome. Would be better as few bonus missions thrown onto a more robust mainline title.