A lot worse than I thought it was going to be. I'm not opposed to Operation Raccoon City on a conceptual level, both a Resident Evil cover shooter and a non-canon "what if" scenario where you play as the villains threaten to be exciting but fail in practice. ORC plays terribly in almost every sense of the word. Cover, something pretty important for a cover shooter, hardly even functions, and one has to wonder if Slant Six had ever played one. Often, cover is usually not enough to stop the player from taking damage, while simultaneously obstructing your weaponry from firing. It is not uncommon to find cover where the only bullets it can block are your own. The base shooting mechanics aren't terrible, but the balancing on veteran difficulty is insanely skewed, with your weapons feeling like peashooters and human enemies tearing through you within seconds. Although I would have liked to play with friends in co-op multiplayer, Games For Windows Live has long stopped functioning, so I had to deal with ORC's terribly programmed AI companions. They hardly help you, frequently getting stuck on walls and failing to avoid deadly environmental hazards such as a burning fire. They also frequently run straight into enemy fire and require constant reviving, but of course, if the player dies it's straight to game over. The game also loves to pile annoying, stunlocking enemies into tight corridors and constrained areas, with Crimson Heads and Hunters being the biggest offenders. Hunters in particular are the worst they've ever been in the entire franchise, taking loads of bullets to put down and having rubber banding so blatant they will redirect mid-air if you dodge. ORC has to be one of the worst playing games I've played in a while, and it's even more baffling coming off of the backs of RE4 and RE5.
Part of ORC's marketing campaign was focused on the non-canon nature of the game, allowing you to radically alter the Resident Evil timeline by killing off major characters. Unfortunately, this isn't utilized as it should, and most of the game's writing is dumb fanservice with little to no point. Characters like Nicholai and Ada show up simply to remind you that "Hey, this is Resident Evil!" but serve little purpose other than that. The only one who makes any real impact on the plot is Leon S. Kennedy, who can potentially be the final boss depending on your choices, but he shows up so late in the narrative for it to flow to any satisfaction. I hate pretty much all of the protagonists, who have hardly any character and whose backstories are overly edgy and dramatic. Vector in particular suffers from "original the character" syndrome, as him being trained by HUNK on Rockford Island comes off, again, as pointless fanservice. ORC makes you appreciate games like Left 4 Dead, where the writers put effort into giving characters interesting dynamics and entertaining quirks, as opposed to yet another stoic, masked Umbrella sociopath.
ORC is also quite ugly, even for the early 2010s. Even when cranked to the highest possible settings, texture and shadow quality are still pitifully low, often appearing extremely pixellated and jarring. The game genuinely looks absolutely awful in the majority of indoor levels, with sparse environmental detail and uninspired art direction, which isn't helped by the sub-par at best asset quality, some of which may have been passable in an Xbox 360 launch title but not so close to the end of the system's life. Character models are often highly detailed, but the moment a human face is placed on them, they look like skinwalkers made of potatoes and plastic. Crimson Heads of all things look oddly like sanitized plastic Happy Meal toys instead of corpses in advanced decomposition. Although I'm a defender of bloom in video games, ORC slathers it on so excessively that at points character faces are impossible to make out. It doesn't help that the PC port is fairly bad too, with limited graphics customization, controller button prompts even when playing with a keyboard and mouse, a locked FOV, 30 FPS cutscene animations regardless of the game's actual framerate, and poor optimization which causes significant frame drops on modern hardware. It doesn't help that there's no native anisotropic filtering support, which makes textures look terribly blurry at a distance, and while this is easy to solve with your GPU drivers, by 2012 it isn't a problem that should need solving.
If there's any bright spot in this otherwise mess of a game, it's the soundtrack composed by Resident Evil veteran Shusaku Uchiyama. While hardly his best work, it breathes life into the game's sequences in a way that compliments both the atmosphere and action and is ultimately more successful than even Revelations's soundtrack. Although I'd argue that Operation Raccoon City doesn't give the player many opportunities to become immersed in the atmosphere, it's at no fault of the music but rather the game's breakneck pace. I appreciated the leitmotifs and musical callbacks to RE2, such as the tyrants' theme and the iconic three piano notes in the RPD. I didn't gel with every musical choice; I thought the use of organs for Nemesis's theme was a bit strange, for example. Particular favorites were "Escape" which plays during a mad dash out of a burning hospital, with exotic-sounding bongos and vocals immediately reminding me of RE5, and "Atrocity" which has the appropriate scale and musical heft fitting of a final encounter. It's fairly effective stuff overall, and the lone bright spot in this game.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is an awful third-person shooter that suffers from borderline broken game design, suicidal friendly AI, writing that exists only for fanservice, and a visual presentation that looked dated and piss-poor even for the time. It's a shame because the premise of the game has a lot of potential. Perhaps it is more fun with friends, but I cannot imagine significantly so.
Part of ORC's marketing campaign was focused on the non-canon nature of the game, allowing you to radically alter the Resident Evil timeline by killing off major characters. Unfortunately, this isn't utilized as it should, and most of the game's writing is dumb fanservice with little to no point. Characters like Nicholai and Ada show up simply to remind you that "Hey, this is Resident Evil!" but serve little purpose other than that. The only one who makes any real impact on the plot is Leon S. Kennedy, who can potentially be the final boss depending on your choices, but he shows up so late in the narrative for it to flow to any satisfaction. I hate pretty much all of the protagonists, who have hardly any character and whose backstories are overly edgy and dramatic. Vector in particular suffers from "original the character" syndrome, as him being trained by HUNK on Rockford Island comes off, again, as pointless fanservice. ORC makes you appreciate games like Left 4 Dead, where the writers put effort into giving characters interesting dynamics and entertaining quirks, as opposed to yet another stoic, masked Umbrella sociopath.
ORC is also quite ugly, even for the early 2010s. Even when cranked to the highest possible settings, texture and shadow quality are still pitifully low, often appearing extremely pixellated and jarring. The game genuinely looks absolutely awful in the majority of indoor levels, with sparse environmental detail and uninspired art direction, which isn't helped by the sub-par at best asset quality, some of which may have been passable in an Xbox 360 launch title but not so close to the end of the system's life. Character models are often highly detailed, but the moment a human face is placed on them, they look like skinwalkers made of potatoes and plastic. Crimson Heads of all things look oddly like sanitized plastic Happy Meal toys instead of corpses in advanced decomposition. Although I'm a defender of bloom in video games, ORC slathers it on so excessively that at points character faces are impossible to make out. It doesn't help that the PC port is fairly bad too, with limited graphics customization, controller button prompts even when playing with a keyboard and mouse, a locked FOV, 30 FPS cutscene animations regardless of the game's actual framerate, and poor optimization which causes significant frame drops on modern hardware. It doesn't help that there's no native anisotropic filtering support, which makes textures look terribly blurry at a distance, and while this is easy to solve with your GPU drivers, by 2012 it isn't a problem that should need solving.
If there's any bright spot in this otherwise mess of a game, it's the soundtrack composed by Resident Evil veteran Shusaku Uchiyama. While hardly his best work, it breathes life into the game's sequences in a way that compliments both the atmosphere and action and is ultimately more successful than even Revelations's soundtrack. Although I'd argue that Operation Raccoon City doesn't give the player many opportunities to become immersed in the atmosphere, it's at no fault of the music but rather the game's breakneck pace. I appreciated the leitmotifs and musical callbacks to RE2, such as the tyrants' theme and the iconic three piano notes in the RPD. I didn't gel with every musical choice; I thought the use of organs for Nemesis's theme was a bit strange, for example. Particular favorites were "Escape" which plays during a mad dash out of a burning hospital, with exotic-sounding bongos and vocals immediately reminding me of RE5, and "Atrocity" which has the appropriate scale and musical heft fitting of a final encounter. It's fairly effective stuff overall, and the lone bright spot in this game.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is an awful third-person shooter that suffers from borderline broken game design, suicidal friendly AI, writing that exists only for fanservice, and a visual presentation that looked dated and piss-poor even for the time. It's a shame because the premise of the game has a lot of potential. Perhaps it is more fun with friends, but I cannot imagine significantly so.