Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City Review
The Resident Evil series is not generally known for its spin-offs, and with good reason. Promising concepts like Outbreak (eight-player co-op in an infested city!) end up as lukewarm compromises, and even the Wii’s on-rails shooters topped out at decent. With Operation Raccoon City, a co-op run-and-gunner set during the events of Resident Evil 2 and 3, the time has surely come for something better. Keep on dreaming. Operation Raccoon City is an under-designed and under-produced nightmare, a game that delivers the bare minimum in every category and stops right there. Its campaign is played in teams of four online (AIs fill gaps, but never revive players and rarely kill stuff) and, over seven missions, takes this forgettable clean-up crew of spec ops soldiers on a whistle-stop tour of Raccoon City ‘highlights’. Both of the original games this setting draws from, Resident Evil 2 in particular, show how spectacular Capcom’s early 3D environmental design was. In Resi 2, almost every room has a story implied by its details. Operation Raccoon City handles this kind of example with careless hands; even the environments it recreates directly are shorn of the little touches that brought them alive. Read more…
