It should come as no surprise to anyone that Resident Evil 5 is shaping up well, with a scant few weeks before its Japanese release and in other territories a week later. At Capcom’s media event we got to get our hands on the game’s much touted co-operative mode, trekking through a boggy oil field with a buddy while keeping enemies off of each other’s backs. What we found is that the game essentially handles like the fourth game in the series, but with a few new enhancements to make it a fresh entry into the venerable series.

Starting off we had to fend off enemies in a high speed boat chase, shooting zombies taking up positions on other boats before they could throw flaming objects at us. Controlling your character can either be set to a pair of styles similar to Resident Evil 4’s control scheme, but also to two other schemes that make the game handle more closely to modern third person shooters. The d-pad is used to hot swap between four weapons or items, which in our experience was set to the pistol, shotgun, SMG, and health spray. This makes it all the more easy to swap weapons around in the thick of combat, especially when looking at how accessing your inventory no longer pauses the game like it has in other games of the series.

Though both players always work together, in some sections they may get somewhat separated in order to accomplish a goal. In one such instance each of us had to flip one of a pair of identical switches located on opposite sides of a gate in the waterway, opening the gate so our boat could continue onward. Making these situations easier to manage is the inclusion of the partner orb on the HUD, which similar to your own orb shows such information as your partner’s health, currently equipped weapon, as well as status messages such as if they are ready to pull one of the switches found in a pair or something similar that requires both player’s interaction. You can also hold the interact button when not near anything you can interact with to have the camera snap towards your partner, letting you see what their situation is and whether or not you need to put some bullets into some advancing brainpans to help them out.

Gold is the currency of the land, and while it can only be picked up once, it gives the full total of what is picked up to both players. Some sort of merchant system to allow players to purchase and upgrade weapons was said to be in the full game, but was something that was not present in the relatively limited area that we got to tool around in. Items and ammo however are not duplicated between the two players, making the careful conservation of them just as important as it always has been.