Ebony and ivory... killing zombies.

IT was almost two years before Resident Evil 5’s release that concerned parties had already protested outrage over racial issues in the title, a video game that puts you in the shoes of white protagonist Chris Redfield, running and gunning through an infected population somewhere in Africa. For a game that reads as a simulated racial cleansing, anger was inevitable. Upon release, the survival horror’s racial motifs panned out to be no more than a few questionable tribal levels. But in lieu of suggesting a tradition of white supremacy, the zombie shooter suffers by stubbornly clinging to gameplay traditions that frustrate and inhibit what could have been the next development in the genre – complete with a hint of race war.

The survival horror genre has seen a lot of inspired variation in the past few years – Dead Space proved you can shoot while moving and check your inventory without asking monsters to kindly pause, and Left 4 Dead finally gave the living dead a gait more pressing than a feeble limp. While the Evil franchise played an important role in the development of the genre, other attempts at bringing survival horror back to life have recently stirred fresh dirt.

But RE5 seems to have a fickle relationship with this recent history. Sure, its developers adopted an inventory system similar to Dead Space’s; however, they still insist that as overly masculine as Chris is, he can’t walk while shooting or knifing zombies. And though RE5 plays much more like an action game than horror – real-life Africa surely more tense than any moment in the game – defending yourself boils down to pouring bullets into an awkwardly animated enemy and rushing in for an ungainly quick-time melee move. But these are hardly seamless, so thwarting the undead horde is frustrating and brainless. Scenarios present you with big boss fights and motorcycle chases à la an action game, but foist upon the player limited mobility and scarce ammunition.

And the game’s most touted novelty and selling point – cooperative gameplay – does little to smooth complications. Making your partner Sheva a light-skinned local probably had something to do with the expected cries of racism, but nonetheless the co-op experience only manages to further siphon the tension found in other Resident Evil titles. Its most beneficial quality is that it gives the player some shoulder to lean on after the umpteenth time a zombie dog chews your face faster than you can jam on the controller, or in suffering through the banal plotline. The story is understandably campy and irrelevant; I would have used narrative parts of the game as a bathroom break were it not for the inane inclusion of quick-time button presses during most cutscenes. Still, the flippant mood of the game brought on by the co-op and weak story further contributes to the feeling that RE5 just doesn’t know what kind of game it wants to be, neither in its context as a Resident Evil game nor that of the survival horror genre in general.

The game’s most egregious insult is that it come off as a stubborn refusal to evolve. While other games in the genre have demonstrated new ways to reinvent the boomstick, RE5 clings to its tradition with great austerity. Players can’t move while shooting or crouch? Blame it on tradition. I walked away from my experience with RE5 wondering if the developers had any idea that Resident Evil 4 exists, a game which managed not to only adhere to Evil tradition but retrofit its gameplay to a newer style of survivor horror. Video game tradition is a powerful force – after all, Sega continues to create absolutely awful Sonic games with years since the last decent release. But RE5 in its best moments is a poor carbon copy of RE4 with little to show for the several years between their releases – not alive, not undead, but merely lifeless in its refusal to push the genre.