Resident Evil 5 DLC: Lost In Nightmares/Desperate Escape

Despite the fact that it doesn’t hold a candle to Resident Evil 4, I quite liked Resi 5.  Sure, it was marginally less scary than the average Twilight movie but it was still a top-notch action game with echoes of the series’ former glory.  Of course, Capcom shouldn’t feel too bad, after all Resi 4 still hasn’t been topped.

Arriving almost a year after the original retail release, the Gold Edition of Resi 5 has just hit the shelves and it includes the very recent DLC episodes ‘Lost In Nightmares’ and ‘Desperate Escape’.  Given that the Gold Edition just gives you unlock codes on the Xbox 360 (the PS3 has them on the disc), you’d be better off shelling out the 400M$P per episode.   So should you bother?  Well let’s find out in what kids are already calling PEOWW’s sort-of-review of said DLC.

Lost In Nightmares – 400 M$P

Lost In Nightmares is, excitingly for those of us who were there at the beginning of the series, set in a mansion.  It’s not the mansion from Raccoon City but it’s pretty very similar with stairs ahead of you, a dining room to the left and similar corridors to the right.

As soon as the episode starts, the tension is racked up.  Simply being in there makes you nervous and the emblem/crank puzzles make you constantly look out for that first zombie that you interrupted mid-snack in the first game.  Windowed hallways make you expect bats, lickers and undead dogs and the goreshadowing ammo pick-ups reinforce your paranoia.

Sadly the whole thing is an illusion.  After half an hour of walking on eggshells and solving basic puzzles, you drop down underneath into a dingy cell block where you are greeted by the occasional zombie or beefed up mutant guy.  Fight or flight is an option as you can simply run past them until the next area where you inexplicably lose all your guns and have to trap said mutant guys under big spike traps.

Follow that up with a fairly tedious boss battle and you’re left feeling pretty unsatisfied by the whole caboodle.  The obviously tacked-on search for stars to shoot (for an achievement, naturally) doesn’t help you shake the feeling that Capcom have played you with promises of a nice mansion and all you’ve got in romp in dirty basement.

Ramping it up to Professional difficulty and doing the whole thing in co-op does make for a more satisfying journey through this episode (although the final battle ends up being something of a chore) but with the whole thing clocking in at under an hour on your first playthrough, even the 400M$P seems a little steep.

Put simply, if this was already in the game it’d be your least favourite part of it.

Score:  4/10

Desperate Escape – 400 M$P

Desperate Escape, like the previous episode, fills in the gap between two chapters in the main game.  This time it follows Jill Valentine and Josh Stone (a soldier not a shit soul singer with a transatlantic accent) as they bid to escape the majini and acquire the helicopter which shows up in the final chapter of the main game.

Instead of the old-school feel of Lost In Nightmares, this episode is pretty much the same sort of thing we saw in the main game.  Tons of well-armed majini stand between you and freedom and you’ve got to blast your way through them.  As with LIN, the whole thing clocks less than an hour’s worth of content but multiple playthroughs are required for getting the achievements and with so many baddies to blast through (and no bullshit ‘oh I’ve lost all my guns’ moments) you won’t mind a second and third go at it.

The episode is roughly split into three sections – a standard shoot out through a military camp, a rocket-showered larger area that requires you to take over missile turrets in order to blast through security gates and finally a timed survival siege on a small rooftop.

On Professional difficulty all these parts are difficult but the final siege is absolutely balls-hard in an uncompromisingly savage kind of way.

Again, this episode doesn’t offer much in the way of new stuff but it’s a nice challenge, reasonably priced and, given that it has been released a year after the main game, it doesn’t feel like a rip off.  In some ways, this is the model for how DLC should be.  Unfortunately, it’s a little too unremarkable to really get anyone too excited but it offers a meaty challenge and an excuse to dust off one of the better games of last year.

Score:  7/10