Review: Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City

In 1996 Japanese publisher and developer Capcom, known for their history with such beloved franchises as Mega Man and Street Fighter, released a game for a genre that, up until this point, they’d never truly delved into on an international scale: survival horror.  Resident Evil was the name that the world came to know that franchise by.  The rest, as they say, is history as the series went on to be one of the most powerful voices in survival horror.  Fifteen years on however the series has gone from scaring players to simply engaging them in an action style game.  While the core entries in the series follow a specific track and method of play though Capcom likes to experiment with lesser titles, hence the game we have before us today.

Wanting to see just what could be done with the series, Capcom hired out developer Slant Six Games, known for their work on the SOCOM franchise, to explore new lines of possibility with Resident Evil, an action that has yielded Operation Raccoon City.  Does this experiment open a new avenue to such a storied saga of games?

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Revisiting the Outbreak

In September of 1998 Raccoon City, a Midwestern town of seemingly little importance was wiped off the map in a hail of fire and death after a viral outbreak turned its inhabitants into flesh eating monsters.  This would eventually lead to the downfall of the Umbrella Corporation, the developer of the viruses that destroyed the population.  Every Resident Evil fan knows about the days of horror that plagued that ill-fated city but this new title answers an often asked question: what if Umbrella got away with it?  Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City attempts to find out in the first non-canon entry in the series in over a decade.

You play as a member of a six man elite Wolfpack squad of the Umbrella Security Service.  Dropped into Raccoon City just prior to the events of Resident Evil 2, you are assigned to help obtain samples of the G-virus developed by Dr. William Birkin whom intends to sell them to the US government.  Entering the lab far beneath the streets of the city you aid alpha team leader HUNK as he fights his way to Birkin’s lair.  The rest, as anyone who has played the early entries in the series can contend, is history: a dying Birkin injects himself with his creation, turning into a hulking giant of death and subsequently releases the G-virus, leading to the infection of the entire city.  Team Wolfpack barely manages to escape the facility but, as punishment for their part in the infection of Raccoon City they are ordered to stay until all signs of Umbrella’s involvement are destroyed.  Evidence, be it paper, digital or human is to be eliminated and you and your team aren’t getting out of this hellish nightmare until you’ve done just that.

Operation Raccoon City (ORC) has a lot of potential as a non-canonical entry into the Resident Evil series.  Without having to conform to the restrictions of the core series, Slant Six had the opportunity to allow us to explore Raccoon City in ways that couldn’t have been done before.  This was further aided by the fact that the game functions as a third person, squad-based shooter, a first for the series.  ORC could have been a great game, emphasis on could.

What has been released to the public however is a badly constructed and poorly thought out narrative that injects itself into the world of Resident Evil 2 with little regard to anything going on around it save for the chaos that fills the streets.  Much of the game has you running around performing errands for Umbrella before they inevitably decide to betray you after you fail to complete a certain objective.  Even the primary marketing point for ORC, the hunting down of survivors, only appears in the last third of the game and, even then, is ultimately disappointing.  This, coupled with characters that are neither likeable nor memorable and paper-thin narrative growth, produces a singleplayer/cooperative campaign that is easily the most unsatisfactory story in the series’ sixteen year history.

Probably the most frustrating part of the game’s story is the laundry list of things that could have been.  So much could have come from Operation Raccoon City from a narrative perspective that wasn’t previously attempted in the previous Resident Evil titles.  Exploring the city as the outbreak engulfs it, killing surviving witnesses and even encountering the soldiers that appear in the opening cinematic for the game could have been undertaken.  What we have been given however is a story that doesn’t even try to do anything new plotwise, only stopping to highlight a few key series characters and locations before abandoning them to focus almost entirely on gameplay.

In short, don’t come looking for an enthralling tale here, folks.  Turn around and don’t look back.

A Tale of Two Viruses

As previously stated, Operation Raccoon City is a four player cooperative third person shooter that pits you against both the hordes of infected as well as the government forces attempting to curb the outbreak.  Playing as one of six different characters whom conform to a unique class, you battle through the streets of the destroyed city while trying your best to stay alive.  This is a task easier said than done, and it’s not because of the game’s setting.

Put simply, this latest entry in the series is, by far, the most unbalanced and frustrating entry to date.  While most games that feature zombies tend to put less emphasis on the term ‘horde,’ ORC amps the tension up significantly by throwing wave upon wave of infected at you with little regard for your ammo count or health situation.  Despite the logical conclusion that headshots kill zombies every time, more often than not the result is an enemy that keeps stumbling after you even after two or even three rounds enter their skulls.  Even the most coordinated team of gamers will find themselves unable to stand ground against a wave of zombies, even when taking into account grenades and melee attacks.

Almost every single creature featured in the Resident Evil universe’s first three games make an appearance in Operation Raccoon City save for the giant spiders and the more obscure mutations like giant frogs.  This would have been a nice contribution to the game’s focus on fanservice but the end result only frustrates the player more than helps them.  Every single enemy is far more difficult to kill than in any other title released to date as each and every one of them are bullet sponges, absorbing more damage than seemingly seems possible for the creature.  For reference, a Hunter in takes several shotgun blasts to die in most games in the series.  In ORC however you can unload well upwards of thirty shells into a Hunter before they keel over.  Couple this with less than frequent ammo drops and never facing anything less than two or three enemies of such strength and you know you have a problem.

Playing alone in Operation Raccoon City is an exercise in building tolerance, one that few people can every hope to achieve in the game’s current form.  Enemy AI across the board is almost unacceptably dumb, so much so that it’s fair to say that you don’t have much hope of beating the game without seeing the ‘You Are Dead’ screen dozens of times without playing with human compatriots.  Enemies will regularly switch between not even knowing you are there to being the deadliest things ever to exist.  Your AI teammates are not programmed to pick you up if you go down and regularly charge into incoming fire unaware that they won’t get two feet closer without going down.  There is no mercy to be had in ORC even on the game’s normal difficulty.

Apart from having a five to six hour long main campaign, Operation Raccoon City features a multiplayer suite that actually fares better than the story mode.  Players can choose from four competitive modes including the standard Deathmatch mode.  Heroes mode, one of the few bright spots of the game, allows you to play as series staple characters such as Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Ada Wong and HUNK among others in a 4v4 bout.  Biohazard has you collecting G virus samples for points and it can be relatively fun.  The clear highlight of the multiplayer has to be the Survivors mode which has two teams facing off against wave after wave of zombies and BOWs while you wait for a rescue chopper to arrive.  The catch with this mode however is that there are a limited number of seats on the helicopter so you have to battle the other team as well in order to insure getting out alive.  The multiplayer isn’t exactly one you’ll be coming back to after the first week but it definitely offsets the deplorable main campaign.

With absolute certainty, the most egregious part of the game is not the game itself but rather Capcom’s plans for downloadable content for the game.  Normally I do not make mention of DLC plans in a review of a game as I want to focus on the product at hand but Capcom’s strategy is one of the worst post-launch support plans in recent memory.  The game launched with day one paid DLC which included a whole multiplayer mode featuring Nemesis, one of the most notorious enemies in series history.  This alone is bad enough but the game, despite word to the contrary, will only feature content and missions from Resident Evil 3 only as DLC (albeit free) later on.  This is also the only way you get to play as the US government forces in any story capacity, negating any chance of actually playing as protagonists in the core product at launch.  Capcom is also offering downloadable packs of weapons and alternate costumes at exceptionally high prices, going so far as to rival that of the work Namco Bandai has done this generation.  Some of this content is even already on the disc!  For shame, Capcom, you should know better than this by now.

By the Light of the Dying Car Fire

One of the few things Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City stands a chance of getting right is the game’s graphical content.  Texture work in the environment really hits home just what has happened to this once populous town and feels about right for a town in 1998.  Character models vary at times as do the particle effects (explosions and fires can be quite bad) but the best item in the graphics department’s favor is the gore factor.  Limbs and body parts explode in a gorefest to rival games like Dead Island and, in some ways, surpass them.  Melee attacks against zombies and human enemies can be especially brutal.  Character animations could use some reworking and proximity interactions, say when you are knocked over by an enemy, do need some work though.

The game’s sound design fares far less favorably.  Voice work is shoddy at best and leaves no lasting impression other than boredom and indifference.  Sound effect issues such as getting stuck in a loop or disappearing altogether is a frequent problem in ORC and the game’s 5.1 surround sound mix is underwhelming.  In comparison to the game’s other flaws however these items are but minor issues.

For any title like this one however one of the largest driving forces for sales is the fanservice factor and, in some ways, it does succeed.  Several locations in the game feel very authentic to their original counterparts, particularly the Raccoon City police station.  Dialog in the cinematics for the game (at least the ones not altered by this non-canon insertion) actually remain true to its original design.  ORC doesn’t succeed however in matching the time period with exact authenticity though.  Many of the character designs seem taken directly from previous entries in the series, the Hunters most notably looking exactly like their 2002 Resident Evil remake counterparts instead of the Beta or Gamma Hunters that actually appeared in RE2 and 3.  Weapons specific to the Raccoon City games are present in the game but, given the game’s severe lack of balance in the favor of everything else but you and your squadmates, you don’t really get an ample demonstration of their historic power.

Better Off Dead

The Resident Evil series is beloved by millions of fans around the world and while the franchise has had its share of lesser titles no entry to date has been more disappointing than Operation Raccoon City.  What should be a nice jaunt down memory lane turns out to be a broken, frustrating mess of unbalanced gameplay mechanics, a story whose brevity is more than welcome and a multiplayer component that will only hold your interest for a short while.  ORC had quite a bit going for it and was surprisingly fun to play at E3 2011 but somewhere in the nine months between then and now something happened that turned this into a shambling pile of wasted effort.  Even with ongoing DLC and bug fixes this game simply cannot be saved.  Thank goodness that this is not a canon entry because, if it were, Resident Evil might truly have lost its way in the eyes of countless fans.