I’ve been a Resident Evil fan since the games first foray in survival horror way back on the first Playstation. But it’s impossible to deny that it’s a series of ups and downs. After adoring the first two games I hated some of the follow ups and spin offs and ended up missing out on the genre defining Resident Evil 4 as a result of a general apathy with the whole series.

This brings us to Operation Raccoon City, a game that ranks somewhere between diabolical and average, and threatens the adoration of the second generation of Resident Evil fans, those who started with four and five.

I was waiting for some cloning subplot to explain why all your enemies were identical, MGS style, sadly no

We’re back to Raccoon City yet again; this time following Umbrella corps Delta team as they try and acquire the G-Virus from the lab beneath the city. When the residents turn evil (see what I did there) and start eating each other and shambling around, Delta team are ordered to hang around and destroy all evidence of Umbrella Corps involvement. I can’t help but think if Umbrella Corp is so keen to keep its involvement secret it really needs to stop slapping its big red and white brand logo on every bioweapon facility it builds.

You choose a team member from a squad, each with their own special skills and weapons, then head in and start shooting bad guys and zombies and bad dogs and zombie dogs. The game, it will surprise some, is a cover shooter requiring you to bob around desks and other small obstacles trying to head shot people.

Scarred old albino Justin Bieber has an idea, lets all listen

It’s one of those games where it’s kind of hard to tell who it’s actually for. The title is a mash up off the Resident Evil universe with SOCOM. Developer Slant Six Games worked on several poorly received SOCOM titles and seem to have adapted the same game engine. The Resident Evil elements certainly don’t live up to the series either. The tension and atmosphere of previous games is almost completely absent, replaced with a mechanical run and gun experience. Almost all the shootouts are in tight spaces with often only a handful of enemies for you and your team to take out.

The average graphics and stiff control scheme strongly hint, to me at least, that at one point this game was meant to be a 3DS or PSP Vita title. If I was being really conspiratorial I’d suggest it was originally a portable game, then switched to a console title at Capcom’s insistence so it didn’t compete with own portable Resident Evil games. The title just has that feeling of a game that’s had a major transition or obstacle during its development.

Things are getting moist, and ugly

The controls and the effects are really the killer for Operation Raccoon City. Moving around in particular feels awkward, as does taking cover, especially when you have to compete with your squad mates for cover space. Their AI is extremely crap as well and you’ll easily be doing the lion’s share of the work while they hang back, dousing each other in healing spray every time someone loses a sliver of health.

A mindless shooter can get away with a total lack of depth or personality if the shooting and violence are fun. The shooting action here is just not a lot of fun, it’s more of a grind. Even as you level up your character and get new weapons and abilities it’s hard just to get any fun out of the game. The encounters feel dull, the characters, both your squad and the enemies, lack any real sense of personality and the graphics and sound effects are so plain that it gives the action no weight.

Zombie mall cops are easier to outrun that real ones when you steal candy

I’ve almost completely neglected to mention the multiplayer which is one of the major reasons to play Operation Raccoon City. Unfortunately due to the games poor reception, and the fact it’s not super fun to play, there aren’t many people putting the time in to play through a full campaign, or even five minutes of competitive multiplayer, online.

If I had to pick a word to describe the game I’d go with ‘serviceable’. It certainly does what it says on the box. The box says Resident Evil and there are zombies, lickers and big monster with eyes in odd places, all needing to be shot or killed in a convenient nearby trap scenario. But it lacks the quality of a Resident Evil title (most of their games anyway), it lacks that extra factor that earns Capcom the fan adulation and Jill Valentine cosplayers.

The lickers friendly attempt to remove jam from the mans scalp was doomed to misinterpretation

The atmosphere, the scares, the tension, it’s just not here. And the characters, somehow Resident Evil turned two dimensional boring characters like Chris Redfield into video game folk heroes. Operation Raccoon City had the opportunity to introduce us to a whole bunch of new characters on the other side of the coin, bad guys we could cheer for; instead we get a bunch of gas mask wearing ciphers, which look like extras from the club scene in the third Matrix movie. If this game didn’t have the Resident Evil logo on the front no one would have bought it, like so many other cheap looking games it would have slipped away into the penny bin to appear in a Spare Change article some time down the track. Instead it gets to hang around and remind Resident Evil fans that the Resident Evil franchise turns out some really crap games once in a while.