For the second time, I’m going to have to amend my opinion of Resident Evil 5. I previously said once I was finished the plot, I’d probably be done with game for good.

Well, after we went back and did the game on co-op, completing the rock-punching silliness of the last boss, it unlocked Mercenaries mode. And Mercenaries is a lot of fun, maybe even more fun than the main game.

The Mercenaries mode is largely the same as in Resident Evil 4. You drop in to an arena and mash as many zombies as you can before time runs. You can pick up point bonuses and time extensions, and you get a vital bonus from destroying zombies in rapid succession, and enormous super zombies will try to keep you from doing just that.

The big difference, of course, is that you can play it co-op.

With a neverending stream of infected and a time limit, Resident Evil 5 becomes something else entirely. It’s an intriguing mix of skill and strategy, with the two players working out which pickups to get first and how best to keep the combos going.

As my roommate Dom pointed out, in Mercenaries, the game actually becomes scary. Where the story mode felt like a slog with an inventory management headache thrown in, the overwhelming odds that the optional mode pits you against makes things constantly tense, and also leads to plenty of “Oh no. OH NO!” moments.

If I have any complaints, it’s that maybe it’s a little too hard. We’ve had plenty of runs where we did well and racked up big combos, only to come up a few thousand points short of the score needed to unlock new characters.

It actually kind of makes me wonder if the Versus multiplayer is worth it. Anyone out there tried it?

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