Resident Evil 5

The Weird Legacy: An 86 Metacritic Game That Still Feels Like a Fight

Resident Evil 5 is one of those games where the score tells you it worked, but your hands tell you why people still argue about it. Metacritic has it sitting at 86, Steam is at 87% Very Positive from 46,026 reviews, IGDB’s media average is 78.4, and OpenCritic is way cooler on it at 71.8 with a 63.6% recommendation rate. That spread makes sense. This is a slick, expensive Capcom action game from 2009, but it’s also the moment Resident Evil basically stops pretending it’s mainly about being scared.

And honestly, that’s the whole deal. If Resident Evil 4 was the lonely road trip through dread, Resident Evil 5 is the buddy-cop version with parasites, heavy firepower, and a lot more sunlight. Jun Takeuchi’s team didn’t just bolt co-op onto a normal campaign. The whole thing is built around Chris and Sheva as a pair. You’re passing ammo, covering angles, saving each other from bad grabs, and doing that frantic inventory dance with the real-time 9-slot grid while everything is still out to get you.

The catch is, the old stop-and-shoot controls are still here, and by 2009, that already felt stiff next to other shooters. So yeah, the action is bigger, louder, and more confident, but it’s not smooth in the modern sense. It’s chunky. It’s deliberate. Sometimes that tension works. Sometimes it just feels like Chris forgot how legs work.

Buy It For A Co-Op Partner, Not For A Lonely Nightmare

Here’s the blunt version: if you’ve got a regular co-op partner, Resident Evil 5 is still a really fun time. If you don’t, the game drops a full letter grade. With a human Sheva, the campaign has this great back-and-forth rhythm. You’re yelling for ammo, dragging each other out of trouble, splitting weapons, and turning messy encounters into these little action movie saves. That kind of full-campaign, big-budget co-op design is still rarer than it should be.

But solo? That’s where the shine comes off. AI Sheva can be slow, awkward, and weirdly helpless at the exact moment you need her to be useful. And because the game is built for two people, playing alone doesn’t feel like a pure solo Resident Evil experience. It feels like you’re babysitting the missing second player. Hardcore fans who want that isolated, miserable, “I am absolutely not safe here” feeling are probably going to bounce off this one harder than they expect.

The other thing the game never fully outruns is the Kijuju setting. Since the 2007 E3 reveal, Resident Evil 5 has carried criticism around its racial portrayal, and that criticism didn’t vanish just because the game sold like crazy. Capcom got a massive commercial hit here, one of its long-running sales flagships at about 16.5 million copies, but the setting is still part of the conversation. You can enjoy the co-op chaos and still admit the game has baggage.

Gold Edition Is The Version That Makes The Most Sense Now

If you’re buying Resident Evil 5 today, don’t overthink it: get the Gold Edition content through the Untold Stories Bundle on Steam. The Steam page is very clear that the base PC release is a port of the old Games for Windows - Live version from 2009, and buying the Untold Stories Bundle is the same as upgrading to Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition. That’s the cleaner pick because it gives you the fuller version of the game instead of just the old campaign shell.

The extra episodes matter, too. Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape fill in Jill and Wesker material, and that’s important because Resident Evil 5 is also trying to close the Wesker arc from the original games. The volcano showdown is ridiculous, sure, but it’s also the big punctuation mark on that founding storyline. This is not the scariest Resident Evil, but it is a major bridge between old series mythology and the action-heavy direction Capcom was chasing at the time.

And don’t skip The Mercenaries if the combat clicks for you. It comes back with 8 stages and 8 characters, and chasing combos can easily outlive the credits. That’s why my overall number lands at 8.0 out of 10. Not because it’s the best survival horror game. It isn’t. Because as a two-player action Resident Evil, it knows exactly what it wants to be, and when you bring the right partner, it still hits.