Resident Evil 5 - PS3

What We Already Know:

Resident Evil 5 has been available for well over a year now. At this point, either you enjoyed Capcom's co-op take on the franchise or (like me) passed on it after giving it a few stages to work itself out. Capcom is hoping to breath new life into Resident Evil 5 with the arrival of PlayStation Move in September, however, by adding support for the controller via a free title update. Resident Evil 5's controls were only part of that game's problem, though.

What We're Seeing Now:

Thankfully for gamers, Capcom isn't charging you anything for Move support in Resident Evil 5, as it didn't work very well when I played it here at E3 2010. Sure, it technically maps over just fine but it's the smaller movement details that emerge that proved furstrating. For example, when you pull out your gun, it takes little effort to start popping zombies in the face, but if you want to aim at something off-screen, pointing Move in that direction won't do anything. You need to physically move the perspective where you'd like it to go, then reallign Move's recticle and if the enemies shift around, you have to do it all over again.

There are other issues. To reload, you shake Move, which means you're no longer aiming at an enemy. Not all the creatures in Resident Evil 5 are slow and shambling, so the fraction of a second lost by wiggling Move and popping in another clip can men life and death when faced with a chainsaw-wielding freak. To change weapons, you must awkwardly shift your thumb from the analog stick the d-pad, which feels about as awkward as it is to hit the d-pad on a Wiimote.

The reason the motion controls don't work in Resident Evil 5 are not Move's fault. Move does its job just fine. The reason the motion controls don't work in Resident Evil 5 aren't Resident Evil 5's fault, either. This is a simple case of slapped on controls that work in the most technical sense, but when placed into practice, you're going to be moving back to a traditional controller quickly.