Operation Raccoon City: a total mess that's amazingly fun

Playing Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City isn't so much like revisiting Resident Evil 2 as standing there, petrified, while bits of Resident Evil 2 are fired at you out of a belt-fed mounted machine gun. It's a homage in the same way Dead Space 2's executions are homages to surgery - chaotic, bustling with gore, chronically lacking in finesse... but somehow, rather entertaining.

The fusillade is at its fiercest in Heroes mode, which invites you to don the fringes and/or blazingly nineties' gear of classic Resident Evil characters like Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy. Playing as Claire on the Lockdown map, a large tiered warehouse that caters equally to midrange and close quarters battle, I got embroiled in a protracted face-off with somebody playing Hunk. After much jostling with SMGs and shotguns, Hunk chickened out and fled up some stairs, round a corner and straight into the embrace of a Licker.

Lickers? They're the skinless ceiling-crawlers with long, whippy tongues they use to snare you from afar. Originally designed to make players loathe and fear Resident Evil 2's fixed camera angles, they serve a purpose analogous to Left 4 Dead's Smokers in Operation Raccoon City, lashing you to the spot so regular undead have a chance to close the distance. (Drawn, no doubt, by the tantalising whiff of your freshly shed blood.)

I was enjoying my opponent's discomfiture when Carlos Oliviera appeared holding a flamethrower. You'd think he'd be on my side, Carlos, but flamethrowers don't appear to discriminate between comrades and foes. In short order, everybody - dead, alive and all the intervening shades - was a screaming pillar of flame. With my health in rags, I backpedalled to the stairwell and found myself face to putrid gizzard with no less than three Lickers, all at floor level, plus a clutch of garden variety zombies. Shit had already got real. What next?

Small arms combat, that's what. One of the weirder ways Operation Raccoon City's illustrious heritage manifests itself is via your secondary weapons. The regular controls are Gearsy - which is to say, Resident-Evil-4-sy with the addition of movement while aiming - but whip out your infinite, laser-sighted pistol and auto-lock kicks in. The animation joltingly resembles the older style of Resident Evil marksmanship, though the practical effects are different: you can easily and efficiently clear out whole mobs of zombies this way.

If the basic competitive modes are nothing new, Survivor changes things up a bit. Tasking two teams with reaching a helicopter with limited seats, it all comes down to timing: the helicopter arrives and leaves at fixed intervals, so if you get there too early, you'll have to defend the rendezvous against more leisurely players. There's an intervening network of corridors and chambers to navigate first, of course, with many a potential ambush point. Make a break for the pad, or linger to delay a rival? Careful - there's more than one route to the finish.

Whether you plump for Team Attack, Survivor, Heroes or Biohazard (the game's antidote-nicking take on CTF), you'll have a phat suite of load-outs to choose from, unlocked and upgraded with battle-earned XP. Primary weapons include single firing, semi- and fully automatic shotguns, rifles, LMGs and sniper rifles, and in finest Call of Duty tradition, you also get to bring along a special power.

Active varieties include Sonar Scanner, which lets you see through walls, Mimicry, which turns you into whatever you're pointing your gun at, and Neutralize Infection, which stops you becoming a zombie should the G-Virus take hold. Turning undead is more fun than it sounds, by the way - you get to watch yourself brainlessly flailing at team mates till one of them ends your misery.