A common gripe with Resident Evil is its controls. With modern games like Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas reinventing the wheel with cover controls, it seems like Resident Evil’s you-must-be-standing-still-to-shoot mechanism just doesn’t cut the butter…or something like that, I can’t remember the phrase…wait, was it ‘just doesn’t cut the-’, nah I can’t remember.

However, thing could be set to- MUSTARD! That’s it. Doesn’t cut the mustard! Suck on that, colloquial phrase!

Anyway, as I was saying, things could be set to change with Resi 5’s producer, Jun Takeuchi, hinting at, and I quote, “Gears-like” controls, saying:

“Don’t be surprised if at the Tokyo Game Show, the controls are different… I’m not confirming or denying anything, but we like to surprise people.”

Well  Jun if you like surprises, then you should like this…

Ok, on with business.

As you know in Resident Evil 4 you cannot shoot and move at the same time, so firing from the hip as you run through a group of zombies is a no no. Though it may have caused frustration for some, it did serve to build up tension while forcing you to make split second decisions between running and fighting. Of course it also helped to build up a tactical element. You’d position yourself in a location, such that you can see and shoot many enemies at a time, without them being able to get too near and suck out your delicious brains.

On the Gears side of things, pressing ‘A’ will nab you a one way ticket to Covertown where, upon arrival, you can purchase a wide variety of drinks and snacks, as well as being able to pull ‘RT’ and fill the Locust Horde with lead. Of course you can advance forwards while shooting from the hip, or slowly from an ‘over the shoulder’ perspective.

And that is where the similarities lie: both games feature an ‘over the shoulder’ view when shooting, and maybe, just maybe, this is why Takeuchi feels Resi 5 would be a good fit for the Gears of War control scheme.

That said, a new control scheme is a double edged sword: you get rid of the strategic elements and tension, but introduce a much more modern and organic control scheme. It’s a bit like an olive really. You get rid of the pip, but loose some of that strategy and er…tension… Ok, it’s not like an olive, but at least I had a go at crafting an ingenious simile. It’s not the winning, but the taking part that counts, or at least that’s what my psychiatrist tells me.

Getting back to the point, what would a Gears-esque control scheme mean for Resident Evil? Well for starters the gameplay would be significantly sped up, with Kotaku reporting that the new controls “will bring run-and-gun style play to Resident Evil”. The question is: would run-and-gun gameplay really be able to maintain the game’s creepy atmosphere? What is there to be scared of if you’re just jogging down corridors and past enemies, guns ablaze? How will Capcom maintain that constant feel of foreboding around every corner?

Hopefully, like Gears, shooting from the hip will be useless, forcing you to use the over the shoulder viewpoint and move much slower. A new cover system certainly wouldn’t go amiss, but there’s still this constant worry in the back of my mind that Resi 5 would become a shooter. You might well say “that’s not too bad, it was a shooter anyway”, but Resident Evil really isn’t. It’s just as much about exploration, atmosphere and tension as it is kicking zombie’s undead asses. I’m all for new controls, as long as Capcom can maintain the fear and don’t make a mediocre run-and-gun zombie killer, although that would also be awesome.

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Source: Kotaku

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