There is a partner standing next to you for the entire length of Resident Evil 5, and that single decision costs the game the only thing its series ever had that nobody else did.
Horror runs on isolation. Not on monsters, not on gore, on the specific feeling of being somewhere you should not be with nobody coming to help. Resident Evil 4 understood this so well that it could put you in bright daylight in a village full of people and still make the walk to the next door feel like a decision. Take that away and you have an action game with unusually slow controls.
Sheva is competent enough as an AI companion, which is faintly damning. She shoots things, she gets in the way sometimes, she consumes ammunition you would rather have kept. Playing with a human is better in every way except the one that matters, because two people laughing at an inventory screen is the opposite of dread. Capcom has built a genuinely good cooperative shooter and shipped it under the name of a horror series.
What makes it incoherent rather than merely disappointing is that the controls did not move. You still cannot walk and shoot. In Resident Evil 4 that was a design choice with teeth: standing still to aim was a commitment, and the tension came from choosing the moment. In a game built around two players covering each other against enemies that flank, it is just friction. Capcom kept the constraint and removed the reason for it.
The setting has drawn a lot of argument since the first footage two years ago, and the criticism about how the game frames its African location and enemies is not something I am going to wave away as oversensitivity. Some of the imagery in that early trailer was careless in a way a company this size should have caught internally, and the final game softens it without ever really engaging with why it was raised.
None of this stops it selling enormously, and that is what I expect to happen. Resident Evil 4 rebuilt the series by taking a risk. Resident Evil 5 protects that success by taking none, and the safest thing Capcom could have done was add a second player and let the fear leak out.