As I posted earlier, I had some first impressions of RE5. Now I've played about 3 other RE games in the series, Resident Evil Zero on GC, Resident Evil Code Veronica on DC, and Resident Evil 4 on Wii/GC.

In the past, my wife had never been interested in Resident Evil because primarily it looked too gory and scary. Well this past month I had downloaded the RE5 Demo and I got her to join one night. She liked it once we figured out how to play together (stay close by each other and don't wonder off, like one of us being a tank).

Anyway, it took my wife and I a total playtime of about 15 hours (shown in stats) to go through the game on Normal. This is the first time that I've been able to get my wife to play an entire console game through the end in less than 2 days.

First thought - if you don't have $50+ bucks to drop, just rent the game. You can beat it easily in the short time even Blockbuster lets a game out before over charging late fees.

In my first post, I said there was an annoying line displayed in the movie playback, well it only exists in the first video, and numerous postings confirm it's a glitch. All other graphical issues, I didn't seem to find any.

Now to the juicy stuff. At first we didn't realize until after level 4 that we could use the d pad to change weapons if we loaded our guns at organize time in the upper, lower, left and right. That would have helped but at least we figured it out before the end of the game, as you will need to switch guns quickly for a series of zombies/monsters later in the game.

Overall, the graphics are just stunning. I mean there are certain levels the sun shines in your eyes and it feels like you are actually outside looking toward the sun. Totally blinding. There is another area where your partner must pick up a lantern and shine through a cave, again pretty awesome lighting effects. Without it, it's nearly impossible to find your way through (we tried). The vehicle stage was kind of a clone of Half Life 2 from what I can tell, and was mixed with hunt for x item like in Tomb Raider. I guess they are kind of trying to refresh the series but they should make a better attempt of coming up with something original than copying some popular games.

The fast pace of the game never lets off, I mean the in your face wave after wave of enemies goes and goes until you complete the area and the music turns off. Then you get a little breather. Classic RE style. Glad they kept that in. The levels are pretty laid out, a couple seemed gimmicy - basically trying to emulate other games like Tomb Raider for instance. But those puzzle / mazes were fun to go through for a change and you had to focus your attention on other details, like how cool the layout and graphics really are.

Some of the level stages I felt didn't give enough ammo but that's also because we were wasting it in areas that we did not know how to play through. It is essential that you always have a plan before going around a corner. You never know what's going to come out at you. That's one of the great things about this game. A LOT of variety of bad ass zombies, and their choice of attack/weapons. On veteran, we were almost always out of ammo, even with strategy (when we tried playing after completing the game). I just wish a couple of the weapons the game lets you purchase later, you could just simply pick up once a zombie had it and decomposes. One good tip I can suggest, is that don't buy a lot of weapons, instead focus on upgrading what you have. You will find that there is not enough money to buy a lot of things and upgrade your gun to maximum capacity if you play through the whole game. This becomes important later on.

During the levels, we primarily focused on just surviving. Some places we just kept dying because we didn't bring the right inventory with us. This RE makes you really use everything you can get, especially grenades and proximity mines. One boss in particular, if you load up on the mines, it's easily defeated. Otherwise think of spending a lot of ammo and time to kill the thing.

After the first day, we wanted to see how the AI acted, so we both played just a little bit through a stage with the AI. I gotta say, the AI is pretty good for the game, but you got to remember to give the AI some good weapons, or it's useless and will just stand and do nothing. And remember to share bullets with the AI. I also found giving all the health to the AI instead of myself keeping it, kept me alive a lot longer. Just some helpful tips. The AI is great at healing.

Just a tip, you cannot survive this game though, if you wonder away from your partner. There are places that the zombies will just swarm you and all of a sudden, a boss comes out and then bitch slaps you dead. Remember if you are going to find a partner to play with, pick someone who will listen and cooperate. It's all about strategy in this game.

When you finish the game, you get an extra mode that is probably fun playing online to get more playability out of the game, but I found it to get boring fast.

The reviews are pretty good for this game, ratings around 5 out of 5 stars, 90% and stuff like that. Well I can say that we really liked this game, but for longevity, it might not last. We have already found 15 emblems going back and playing veteran mode. We're not sure about much more we can do, besides just looking and finding every achievement. But even that won't last too long.

Just to sum it up, I definitely think the new pace of the zombies have added a new dimension the game. After this, I'm not even sure if I want to go back and play the other games. Mostly, now I can see how good RE could have been if it was ported to a graphical powerhouse console And we both had a hell of a good time playing the game. So far, my best play through experience for 2009. But then, it's one of the only games I've bought that has come out in 2009.