Despite not being very good at ‘shooters’, I picked up a second hand copy of Resident Evil 5 for the PS3.  I’m playing it on the easiest level it has and it’s fun, certainly engaging.  I was frustrated by the first ‘boss’ encounter which seemed to auto-kill me every time I tried until I worked out I had to get out of the room, but after that it’s been entertaining.

The only major downside is probably because I’m playing it on easy, which means my inventory gets full quickly because I don’t chew through healing stuff (don’t get me wrong, I suck enough that I die and I still need to use the healing things, but I’m not using them so quickly that they don’t sit in my inventory for ages).  Also, I know I’m not making effective use of grenades, which is why I usually end up selling them by the bucket load.

One thing I do like a lot, even though it’s not entirely visible to me, is that the game adapts the difficulty even withing the set difficulty levels, based on how well you’re doing.  So if you die a lot, the enemies get a little easier and if you’re doing really well and not getting hit, they get a little tougher.

There are enough checkpoints to avoid too much frustration of re-doing stages, and there’s a checkpoint before any moment which can lead to sudden death.  There’s also a good range of different styles of game play.  A lot of it is moving around carefully and killing the bad guys, there’s some out-right grenade your way out of a mess, some cut scenes which rely on you hitting the right buttons when prompted to avoid deadly danger, different kinds of boss fights and some nice tactical elements.  My favourite moment so far, was entering an area filled with zombie-soliders in tactical gear, and watching them come into the room in single file like you see SWAT / military types in movies do.  You have to hide behind crates and pop around while they reload to take them out, moving your way through the room.  It was such a different style to the early crazy-zombie encounters and very refreshing.  I really enjoyed that.

I also like the way you can stop at any point, restart the game, but keep your gear.  For someone as inept as me, this gives me the chance to build up some decent weapons (by upgrading them), and then trying the game on a harder setting (like, normal) without getting immediately wasted.

All-in-all, I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying it, I was looking for something with a more roleplaying element, and when the shop didn’t have anything I sort of picked up RE5 expecting to be frustrated.  But it’s proven to be engaging, entertaining and fun.