RE5: Desperate Escape DLC

As you might expect if you've been reading my silly blog this week, today is indeed another Resident Evil 5 update. Today I'll be talking about the second of the two extra DLC episodes: Desperate Escape. If Lost in Nightmares was a throwback to the creepy atmosphere of the first few games in the series, Desperate Escape is one hundred percent cut from the same mold as RE5: all action, all the time. Spoilers ahead, as usual.

Toward the end of RE5, Chris and Sheva manage to free Jill Valentine from the mind control device that Wesker is using to control her actions (Shocker! Jill is still alive? Of course she is, and if you didn't call that the mysterious masked woman introduced in the opening cutscene was Jill, welcome to Planet Earth! It will be a place of mystery and intrigue for you, especially its television sitcoms). But there's no time for Chris and Jill to reconnect, because Wesker is getting away and plans to infect the entire world with Uroboros! So Chris and Sheva follow after him, hot on his trail, and... leave Jill in the mansion where they found her?

Yep. Later on Jill calls them up on a radio and gives them the information they need to defeat Wesker, but other than that she doesn't show up again until the end of the game, where she and Josh Stone fly in on a helicopter to save the day. How did she get from the mansion to the helicopter?

In the $5 DLC episode Desperate Escape!

It turns out that Jill's escape from the mansion to the helicopter was extremely, extremely difficult, probably the most difficult stretch of any part of RE5. I started on Veteran, since I figured getting through the rest of the game and Lost in Nightmares readied me for anything I would face here. Not true. This chapter is *tough*. Tons of cannon fodder, executioners, chainsaw guys, actual cannons, guys with gatling guns, and very little in the way of ammunition.

It's a pretty tough slog through a heavily fortified base to get to the Communications Tower (where Jill calls up Chris on that radio and we see the other half of that cutscene from the original campaign -- why she didn't just give him this information in the mansion I'm not entirely sure) and the promise of extraction by helicopter from the roof.

About that roof. Here you have a five minute countdown timer until Josh's pilot Doug arrives with the rescue helicopter, and this is where my Veteran playthrough came to a sad, sad end. You get a single checkpoint for this part, so the odds of bulling your way through are pretty slim, considering what you're up against: countless waves of enemies and a lot of sub bosses. After dealing with a gatling gun sub boss and two chainsaw guys and then running out of resources and attempting to kite the remaining enemies around the roof, the timer was down to less than a minute. Doug calls us up and says that he's had to take a detour because there are too many airborne B.O.W.s in the area. The timer resets itself to two and a half minutes remaining!

Hilarious, but mean. I was quickly overwhelmed and my Veteran playthrough came to an end. I'm just not good enough at RE5 to get through the Left 4 Dead 'No Mercy' style finale of Desperate Escape. I started it over on Normal and it was still tough enough to be exciting there at the end, but I managed to get through it. It's an entertaining enough chapter, but I'll only be playing it between 5-3 and 6-1 of my RE5 playthrough (where it fits), if that playthrough is on the Normal difficulty or less.