Resident Evil 5 Final Build Hands-On Preview

The producer of Ready to Rumble Revolution on bringing the fight to Atari.

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Before the knee-jerk reactionary defence force comes flying out of the woodwork, let me state categorically that this has little do (thus far, at least) with simple choice of setting, or the bare fact that most of the Majini are black Africans. A game in which you, a white American special forces agent, shoot down hostile mutants who happen to be non-white peasants is not racist per se, though it certainly needs to be handled with care, and to claim otherwise betrays a paralysing degree of political correctness. Alarm bells start ringing, however, when Capcom deliberately uses loaded discriminatory imagery for dramatic effect.

At one point you and Sheva glimpse a woman struggling with a group of Majini on a balcony overlooking a street. She's a white westerner - prominently, unmistakeably so, with waist-length platinum blonde hair, idealised Anglo-Saxon facial features and a skimpy black lace night dress. She screams for aid, but is overpowered and dragged back into the building. When you eventually reach her, she has been impregnated with the Los Plagos virus and must be destroyed. As our chums at Eurogamer have pointed out, the scene dovetails smoothly with that classic racist trope of the brutal black male 'corrupting' the white man's womenfolk. There's zero justification for the woman's appearance in the plot - the scene exists, as far as I can see, purely to outrage and titillate players whose cultural background is saturated with such unwholesome ideas.

Fingers have been pointed at other aspects of the Resident Evil 5 preview build - including some material from the third chapter which Capcom has asked us not to divulge - but this sequence is the most worthy of censure. Hopefully nothing in the final code will best it, because Resident Evil 5 deserves to be remembered for more than the unpleasantly black-and-white Africa it occasionally paints.

Lost for months - despite its pedigree - in the mushroom cloud that is Guerrilla's PS3 debut, the game emerges into the daylight on a comfortable upward curve. Much of the community response thus far tends, unfairly, to focus on what it inherits from its venerable predecessor. Our time with Resident Evil 5 suggests that while Capcom is on familiar ground, the presence of co-op could prove transformative, dredging additional depth and detail out of ostensibly out-moded components. Stop back in a few weeks for the final judgement.

Resident Evil 5 is out on 5th March in Japan and 13th March in North America and Europe. A PC version is also slated for Q2 2009. See our recent Resident Evil 5 interview with Capcom's Jun Takeuchi and Masachika Kawata here.

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