Resident Evil 5 Versus Mode
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 3:39PM 
Resident Evil 5's story mode is nice, but versus is where it's at! The $5 add-on for Resident Evil 5 is awesome, and I've been playing it tons. It has a million problems, sure, but somehow it manages to be extremely fun.
Let me sort out some of the confusion of what we're even talking about here before going into the details. Resident Evil 5's main mode is a story mode that you can play single player (with an AI partner) or co-op (with a human partner) over system link, split screen, or online. When you beat the game, you open up a new mode called "mercenaries." Mercenaries mode is distilled to be just actiony goodness. No story, no RPG-leveling-your-weapons bullshit, no grinding of any kind. Just pure action and the challenge to score as many points as you can in a given time.
Remember, that mode is part of Resident Evil 5 (without buying an addon) and comes in single player and co-op flavors. There are 8 levels and 10 characters to choose from. Buying the versus mode addon allows you to play mercenaries mode with four players instead of just two and adds competitive options rather than just cooperative. You can choose between 2v2 and free-for-all (1v1v1v1). In either of those modes, you can choose between the horribly named "Slayer" and "Survivor" modes. My friends constantly forget which is which between those two modes, so we stopped using the official names entirely. My handy mnemonic is "Slayer mode is the mode where you don't slay the other players as much." We call it deathmatch (aka survivor) and either score attack or just "mercs mode" (slayer) because mercs mode used to mean the score attack mode before the versus update.
Free-for-all games inherently have the problem of being about who gangs up on who with alliances and kingmakers. I've played 2v2 about 99% of the time to avoid that, most of it with an awesome guy named Blicen who's in the military in real life. Maybe that's what makes him so good with the sniper gun, I don't know. We played the deathmatch mode a bit, and it's actually better than we expected, but score attack is where it's at.
First, a description of deathmatch mode though. You start with only
