Frame Skip – Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City

I love a good trailer, more so when I’m not 100% sure about how the game will play or how the story is set up. With that in mind I’ve decided to start dissecting trailers so I can talk about what I like and potentially make some wild and unfounded prediction about what’s going on. First up is the Triple Impact Trailer for Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City.

Let me fill you in a little on Operation Raccoon City, it’s a 3rd person squad based shooter set in the world of Resident Evil during the events of Resident Evil 2 & 3, the titular threats of the trailer are the Umbrella Security Squad (USS), whom you will play as in the campaign, the opposing US Special Operations (Spec Ops) and the Zombie/T-Virus based monsters. Let’s see what else the trailer has for us.

Setting the scene, we’re in Raccoon City. It’s pretty fucked up. I don’t think this is implying that the fair caused all this mess rather it lets us know that once upon a time Raccoon City was a pretty normal city that had fairs and other non-zombie based events. Moving on from this we see a team of badasses, and one of them sticks a syringe in a Zombie’s face. There is a cut at this point that threw me for while, you probably worked it out right away.

The first group of people we see are the US Spec Ops but at the face syringing we switch to the USS, with one of that squad also ‘taking a sample’. I think we can take from this that the syringing parties are the team scientists. I was going to say they were likely to be medics but that big bald guy is clearly sporting a medic’s armband. I love playing as a medic, it forgives my poor KDR online so I call dibs on baldy.

Things start to get real pretty quick and everyone starts running, someone stabs a beautifully rendered Licker, the Spec Ops seem to think some civilians are in danger and the USS are chasing down a couple of guys. Civilians? Not quite, it’s Raccoon City’s finest, the RPD! What can we deduce from what happens here? My guess would be that the RPD will play the role of zombie/bullet fodder.

We get a good look at the USS now, I’m loving their glowing masks. This next section with the zombies in the underground car park actually happened to me once. In the game I mean, when I played the game at an event and the trailer does a very good job of recreating that section of the game, except one of my co-op buddies was running late and didn’t arrive till we’d killed everything – convenient. Having now seen this trailer I can only assume that he was off syringing something.

Sure enough the USS and the Spec Ops run into each other and Spec Ops pretty boy foolishly underestimates the group of people sporting way cooler looking gear than he has. Pretty boy gets punked and USS waste the remaining cop.

Bullets start flying and we can start speculating on the remaining squad member’s classes. I spotted demolition, sniper, CQC, shouting Australian girl and stink-bomber. We close out the trailer with some more fighting, science girl’s B.O.W tracking watch and a Tyrant throwing a car in pretty boy’s face. Awesome, I can’t wait to play more!

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is due to be released in the UK on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on March 23rd with a PC version following shortly after.