Rented, played, and beat Resident Evil 5 with Armegeddon yesterday. For the most part it was a very good game. I had a few complaints about it, of course. A common gripe seems to be that you can't walk/run and shoot at the same time. I didn't really care about that so much, as it's pretty obvious that the characters take on a shooting stance when they do that. I can also see it preventing a lot of friendly fire incidents as well as keeping it from turning into Gears of Evil.
The major weapon-related gripe that I have is the knife. It's fucking useless. If anything, you should be able to run and knife people, not hope that you wind up within range. The two biggest problems with the knife are as follows:
1) Its effective range is extremely low. In every single case you are in your enemy's melee range before they are in yours.
2) It pushes enemies back slightly.
Really, after chapter 1 the only thing we used our knives for was busting open crates and urns (though after a while that became less viable thanks to some urns having snakes in them). It doesn't do enough damage to justify its staggering weaknesses. Simply allowing the player to walk and use the knife would have made it a much more useful weapon.
The real deal-breaker for both of us was the final boss. I absolutely hate being left with no clue and that boss did. We couldn't tell if we were doing damage, how much longer we had to go, what to do, nothing. We just kept dying and dying and dying (mostly because of the amount of damage, plus his ability to do combo attacks) before we finally got lucky and managed to kill him. The second final boss stage wasn't as bad, just annoying above all else. We were planning to get the game until we got to that stage, then we both came to the conclusion that neither one of us wanted to do that battle again.
The graphics are simply gorgeous. I was very impressed with the skin textures in particular, both on the enemies and the players. It's nice to see that games are starting to nail the intricate way that skin reflects light. The levels were very detailed and, for the most part, the framerate held steady. Even when it dropped it was hardly enough to have an impact on gameplay.
The controls were competent but not outstanding. Some actions proved to be finicky, but for the most part they were responsive and easy to work with.
One thing that the game is sorely lacking is some sort of dodge button. I don't even want to get into how many times I watched a projectile come toward me and was forced to just take an arrow to the face because there was no way to move aside fast enough.
I could probably say more, but I have to get some work done. Ta!