Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (PS3)
With the breakout success of Resident Evil 4, Capcom managed to reinvigorate the Resident Evil series with a splendid mix of survival horror, camp, and engaging action elements, but their path moving forward from it was a bit unsure. Resident Evil 5 would further push things towards an action focus, but the series would truly embrace its shooting as the core tenet of its gameplay with Operation Raccoon City. While not a complete departure from its horror roots thanks to the presence of jump scares, monstrous bioweapons, and probably more gore than any previous iteration, it’s clear that this game is much more focused on the series’s third-person shooting mechanics than those elements.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Operation Raccoon City is definitively a spinoff, released at the same time as Resident Evil Revelations which more fully embraced the series’s horror elements. The thing is, while Revelations charted a new path with a unique plot and new monsters and settings, Operation Raccoon City mostly scrounges up old elements and seems afraid to come up with anything too new that might jeopardize the series’s convoluted canon, even though the game already has to be outside of the Resident Evil plotline due to story’s course.
The plot of this title is positioned as taking place concurrently with the events of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and that’s a fact the game won’t let you forget as you constantly intersect with moments from those titles, sometimes looking in on them to sneak voyeuristic peeks at out of context moments from those games’ plots. Your story, independent of the moments of sloppy intersection, is that you are hired by the Umbrella Corporation after their experiments on virus production have gone awry. Bioweapons and zombies have been unleashed on the town of Raccoon City, and your objective is to suppress the information of the incident, take out anyone who could leak information on it, and try to control the rampaging experiments. This game clearly has you playing as the bad guys trying to help an evil corporation keep the lid on a disaster of their own creation, and the game never really pulls too far back from that. Many games where you can take on the role of a bad guy lead to the villain realizing the error of their ways and shifting into a good guy, but Operation Raccoon City will allow you to commit to a villainous role despite giving you an out and having your characters sometimes opine on how wrong things are and whether or not they should help Umbrella hide its dangerous secrets. There are DLC missions where you can play as some clear-cut good guys, but it is nice to see a game having the confidence to not force a moral shift in a game billing itself as playing as part of the villain’s forces.
Despite hitting that nail pretty well on the head, Operation: Raccoon City goes on to miss the rest of them in making its narrative interesting. Although packed to the brim with fanservice for people who played Resident Evils 2 and 3, it doesn’t really have the much in the way of original ideas. The level layouts are good for the shooting but are still just familiar locations from those games, but more egregious is the integration of boss monsters and characters. You get to see familiar bioweapons, such as the the twisted scientist-turned-monstrosity William Birkin and the nearly unstoppable supersoldier Nemesis, but you don’t get any definitive end in your conflict with them, the characters escaping to face the protagonists of another story. Plot threads like the one involving the turncoat Nicholai just disappear from the plot unceremoniously, and there are scenes you only eavesdrop in on like when Hunk confronts Birkin in a scene you aren’t allowed to witness because this game’s characters weren’t present to join it in the original titles. However, there are a few scenes that do spiral off from the original storylines, including an ending that can be wholly incompatible with the series, so such careful maneuvering seems silly and unnecessary in retrospect and just denies the player of both a more fulfilling and involving experience. It can be said that the player is being positioned as a side character deliberately to give that odd feeling of playing a bit part in a bigger story, but it still cheats the player out of more interesting battles and narratives to do so.
The game’s storyline certainly feels hollow, but thankfully the shooting is fairly solid despite the constraints put on it by being denied big bosses and meaningful confrontations. All modes of the game have a focus on making a squad, whether it be with AI partners in the single-player or cooperatively playing the story or versus mode online. The character you pick is thankfully not too constraining, as the weapons you unlock are available across every character class regardless of their specialization. What does shift between characters are passive and activated abilities, and these are a mixed bag but one still full of useful skills. For example, Spectre has a useful passive skill that makes it easier to find ammunition, items, and collectibles in the environment, and Vector’s activated ability that allows him to take on the form of a human enemy briefly allows him to slip in between Spec Ops in single player and disorient other players in multiplayer. Some aren’t so hot, almost every special vision mode having unusually short range so that you can’t properly spot heat signatures or infected enemies like you would expect to, but the skills are interesting enough that you’ll likely find a favorite to use. There are faint glimmers of personality in the members of Umbrella’s Wolfpack, but since the game has six characters to choose from and only four slots, there’s no room for guaranteed development during the plot. What there is room for though is a fairly well designed experience system, and by playing story missions or playing online, you can easily accrue experience that almost always guarantees new unlockables and upgrades. Unlocking new weapons for your starting loadouts and experimenting with the skills helps make the Operation Raccoon City shooting mechanics have a lot more moving parts and depth, although they certainly have their limitations as well. You are always going to have one main weapon and a pistol, discouraging some of that experimentation as you do not wish to get stuck with a gun that seems ineffective or too situational, and unless you’re playing with human players who can accommodate you, sticking to something like a sniper rifle will hit both of those marks all too easily.
Operation Raccoon City’s third-person shooting is responsive, easy to use, and while some enemies eat bullets like they were breakfast cereal, things are mechanically sound… for the most part. This game’s cover system is poorly implemented, the player needing to slam their stick to press against a wall or cover and some objects seem arbitrarily exempt from the mechanic. You can usually hide from fire well enough without it though, although there’s a few other oddities like how you pick items up with X but running and trying to pick up ammo or health on the way will lead to your character instead diving into a prone position. The shooting itself is exempt from such worries, with a crosshair that turns red to indicate when a shot has hit to help with more inaccurate weapons like the machine guns. When starting a mission, you get to pick between one standard weapon type and a pistol, the standard weapons consisting of a wide variety of unlockable automatics, shotguns, and sniper rifles. Speed, ammo, effectiveness, and other small traits make the unlockables feel different, although there is a fairly obvious power ladder that you’ll climb that raises a few questions about the fairness of multiplayer. In single-player though, you’ll be mowing down zombies and trading fire with Spec Ops, and the game can put up a bit of a fight. Ammo is hardly a concern thanks to the game accommodating four players, many infinite refill boxes found in levels that make it hardly a concern unless you’re using a specialized weapon like the grenade launcher whose downside is high power but low reserves. Your enemies mostly pose a threat when in high numbers, with zombies swarming you if you aren’t careful and the soldiers with guns able to mow you down if you are too far in the open. Some enemies can even infect a player, a debilitating state that will eventually turn you into a zombie if you aren’t treated. Your AI partners provide distractions for enemies mostly and you can revive them if they go down, but they are never too essential or effective outside that role save for being good storage for extra first aid and antivirus sprays.
Operation Raccoon City does very little to break away from the simple goal of blasting your way through simple enemies on your way to the end of a level. Some missions involve moving around a hub to do simple tasks like flipping switches or burning evidence, and there are boss monsters that crop up that mostly involve surviving and shooting them enough to move on, but this does make things at least a small step above standard. It’s still fairly unimaginative, but combined with some setting variety it keeps things from being too bland.
Where there is a bit more imagination though is the online multiplayer. Although you have some fairly typical modes like a team deathmatch to score the most points and a Resident Evil splash of paint on capture-the-flag, these modes aren’t just teams of four trying to claim objectives and kill each other a bunch. Every multiplayer mode has its levels filled with zombies and monsters who will attack both sides, and killing them even grants points, although far less then taking down an actual player. It adds an extra layer to some fairly simple competitive modes, but there is one new one that is unique to this title: Survivor. A helicopter is landing after a set amount of time, the players needing to get on to win, but even though you’re on a team of four, you only need to ensure your own escape to earn a victory. The helicopter does only leave once four players are aboard, but it doesn’t care what combination climbs aboard, leading to a somewhat interesting dynamic where a player can be selfish and just hop on the moment they get the chance or they can try and safely get their allies aboard by holding off monsters and the enemy team. All the modes probably need a bit more refinement and fleshing out to reach their full potential, but having alternate means of earning points and having a moral choice built into one mode makes them worth a dabble.
THE VERDICT: Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City misses the mark on creating an interesting or engaging narrative by essentially being a Greatest Hits compilation of Resident Evil 2 and 3’s best moments but presenting them out of context, without engagement, and loosely stringed along by a basic plot about faceless characters. Thankfully, while being denied a few good potential boss fights, Operation Raccoon City still gives you some fairly good venues for mowing down monsters and enemy soldiers in, and the multiplayer adds a bit of spice by having AI controlled enemies hanging around the gunfights to make them more interesting. It’s an experience that hinges mostly on mechanical strength and callbacks, but the limitations imposed on those prevent the game from being all it could have been if it had been more daring and less focused on its squad elements.
And so, I give Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City for the PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. A lackluster and overly cautious plot could have doomed Operation Raccoon City if the game hadn’t put you in a few good areas for its shooting to shine. Holding back hordes of zombies, trading fire with some decent Spec Ops opposition, and emptying clips into the sturdier enemy monsters keeps things challenge and varied even if they never push the game over the edge. If it had more fully embraced its non-canon nature or at least gave Wolfpack some previously unseen creatures or enemies to overcome, Operation Raccoon City would feel a lot less like an expansion to previous games and more like a title that could stand on its own two legs. That and a few minor touch ups to things like the cover system could ensure that you have both the ability and the motivation to engage with this otherwise middle of the road third-person shooter that is slightly buoyed by its franchise’s elements.
Operation Raccoon City truly is action focused to the detriment of its other elements. While containing the elements of Resident Evil, it is, at most, a playground for its shooting mechanics.