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I’ve found one of my favorite games of all time in the Resident Evil series, and yet, it’s also one of the franchises I’ve most hated over the years. It’s with that in mind, that I hesitantly picked up the latest installment, Resident Evil 5, last week.

Never being a big fan of the Playstation, I actually didn’t play the first two games in the series until they had been out for several years, but I was always interested in them. As we all know, the inevitable zombie apocalypse is only one lab accident away, so I’m always eager to get some practice in ahead of time.

On paper, the games seemed so awesome, constantly running and gunning with zombies and other nasty creatures on your tail, but the tank-like controls of those first two games felt dated in 1996, and by the time I was playing them in 2000, it felt like I was playing an Atari 2600 game using only a pencil duct taped to a brick as a controller. Needless to say, I tossed those first two games aside pretty quickly. I never even bothered with part three.

But when the fourth game came out in 2005, the hype train started kicking into high gear that everything had changed and this game was the real deal. Shooting zombie-esque creatures with controls that actually work and plenty of ammo? I am so there! And the game wasn’t just good, it completely blew me away between the constant atmosphere of dread, the unique enemies and the best graphics the Gamecube ever saw.

I must have played more than a hundred games from the Playstation 2, Gamecube and Xbox era, and RE4 still stands out as my favorite, so my expectations for Resident Evil 5 were sky high. I actually downloaded the demo a few weeks before the game hit... and absolutely hated it. The new co-op system felt wrong, the enemies seemed too hard, and I don’t know what happened to the controls in the transition from the Gamecube pad to the 360 controller, but everything just felt wrong. I thought that Resident Evil had returned to its failed past roots.

But still hopeful that the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time wasn’t all bad, and armed with an abundant refund from Uncle Sam, I decided to take a risk and pick up RE5 when I found the collector’s edition for $20 off.

After plowing through the first two chapters of the game, I’m pleased to report that it’s much better than the demo. The problem with the demo is that you’re thrown into some pretty tough parts of the early game with little understanding of how to use the slightly different new controls. Once you get through some slower paced areas at the start of the game, that’s much less of an issue. Boss fights, however, are still an ordeal.

I’ve only played the game solo so far, since co-op games on Xbox Live often seemed to be ruined by an assortment of drunks, stoners, squeaky-voiced 12-year-olds, or worse, drunk and stoned squeaky-voiced tweeners, but Capcom also deserves props for somehow programming an AI-buddy that dosn’t get in the way and get you killed.

The zombie-like residents of the fictional African country of Kijuju are suitably terrifying, and the environments realistic. Cinematics in-between gameplay are top notch. Capcom actually hired a Hollywood director for the scenes and filmed them with live actors before animating. This feels like a summer blockbuster.

But the main problem I have with Resident Evil 5, is that aside from one awesome section on the back of a truck, shooting at possessed villagers on motorcycles, this feels like only a minor step up from the fourth game. Yes, the graphics are better, and now the person with you is actually helpful (in part four, you just escorted the president’s helpless daughter around a few areas), but it’s basically the same thing over and over again where you put your back to a wall and shoot at the enemies who slowly lurch toward you. Get a head shot, and maybe a parasite pops out-exactly like the last game. Even the tougher enemies, the chainsaw guys and giants, are the exact same enemies from RE4.

If this were quickie sequel Capcom turned around in a year or 18 months, I would expect that, and heck, in 2006, I would have loved that, but the developers had four years to work on this game and make another true evolution in the Resident Evil franchise. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an enjoyable game, it’s just that after all this time, I expected more than Resident Evil 4 with better graphics and co-op.