Me and my friend finally beat RE5 today; here are my closing thoughts.
1) Sheva is, most likely, the hottest female video game character of the past decade. As an AI partner? Not very much. As I've said before, much like the L4D bots, she interprets the rules of the game completely rigidly. You can't tell her to take that balcony where you take this, etc. Which leads to...
2) It could be that fully narrated co-op play is still coming into is own, or perhaps I'm just new to dedicated-coop sequels to previously single-player games, but, at times, I felt like RE5 should be a single-player game. Like, it wanted to. I'm not quite sure how to fully explain this feeling.
3) Some of the monster designs are way over the craziness ceiling established by RE4. The ginormous bat-thing, in particular, managed to freaked me out, since it freaking flew. I am not used to flying monsters of this size in my Reisdent Evil. Which leads to...
4) This game isn't scary in the tradition sense. Very, very tense is a better descriptor. To use the L4D comparison again, teamwork is perhaps even more important in RE5. See, contrary to what you've heard, you can split up in L4D and run ahead of your team to let them die since the Director won't spawn any zombies in your way fast enough. In RE5, if you don't keep your [dukar] together, both of your lives will be relegated to desperately running before getting cornered and mercilessly beaten to death. No corner melee spam for you.
On a related note, remember that super-hard beginning village in RE4 that left you with almost no ammo and had hundreds of ganados swarming at you? Yeah, 5's got one too, and it's harder.
5) The final boss was, much like the case in RE4, laughably easy. Although the inevitable rocket launcher drop gave me a nerdy adrenaline rush, as always.
6) Mercenaries mode is hella-fun.
7) If RE6 can implement three-player survival gameplay, that will be super awesome.
