Resident Evil 5 Hands-On Preview (Xbox 360)

Capcom recently held a press event in San Francisco to offer up a fresh look at the latest installment in its hard-core survival-horror franchise, Resident Evil. From what we were shown, the title provides a lot of the thrills and chills that you’d expect, but there was also plenty of gameplay variety over what we’ve seen in previous RE releases.

As is normal for such high-profile games, Capcom limited what we were able to see of Resident Evil 5, though, to its credit, the publishing giant had plenty of displays and systems set up, so everyone could get some time playing it, as well as to see how others handled the situations into which we were all dumped.

The first thing I did was scope out a couple of people while they played co-op, not only to get familiar with the controls, but to better assess how it all flowed. This one section they were playing was tied to a timer, with the objective being to get from one side of a boat dock to the other in a couple of minutes’ time. Of course, there were myriad ghoulies fixated on trying to keep them from meeting their goals, with all forms of blades and bullet slingers—there’s no way it was just a scenario set up to see if the good guys could get across the map in the allotted time. But it was clear that the mission had multiple threats: If you don’t end up succumbing to the direct attacks of the horde, dawdling and allowing the timer to tick closer to zero…well, then you risk having the boat go boom all over you.