Operation Raccoon City dev: "I think we accomplished what Capcom wanted us to do"

Slant Six, the Canadian developer behind Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City has offered its take on the lukewarm critical response to the spin-off shooter.

Studio producer Mike Kerr told Eurogamer that while Slant Six would like to have seen higher review scores, it's confident that it has achieved what publisher Capcom originally asked it to do.

"[The critical reception] seems to be fairly polarised," Kerr admitted.

"It's challenging. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into the game and obviously we'd like to see the review scores be a little better than they are right now.

"In the end, I think our position on it is that we read every review and we try to pull out all the constructive feedback that we can so we can learn a little about what people liked and what they didn't.

"Then we look to what our internal goals were and what Capcom asked us to do and I think we accomplished what they wanted to do - we took the Resident Evil franchise in a different direction," he continued.

"And we've had a lot of really positive feedback from fans of the franchise - we're getting a lot of positive email.

"So, there's good and bad, but that's to be expected with every launch. We'd obviously love the review scores to be a bit higher, but we're really happy with the fan response."

Kerr added that, though occasionally "challenging", it enjoyed its working relationship with the Japanese publisher.

"There's always a challenge to picking up a new IP or an existing IP, especially one that is so ingrained in the industry and one that has exclusively been produced internally by a big publisher like Capcom," he explained.

"But we enjoyed the entire experience - it's been really, really good working with Capcom. They've been great to us and allowed us to express our own creativity within their franchise, which is great.

"As with any new publisher, it always takes a project cycle to get the communication pathways down, so there's definitely challenges there, but overall we're very happy with the experience we had with them."

The multilayer-focussed third person shooter arrives in stores today. Eurogamer's Rich Stanton was damning in his 4/10 Operation Raccoon City review.

"Operation Raccoon City is the latest product of Capcom's experiment in working with western developers. Previous games like Bionic Commando, Dark Void and Dead Rising 2 are a mixed bag at best, but this is the poorest result yet, with a show-stopping franchise in the hands of a studio that's clearly not up to it."

Next up from Slant Six is new IP Strata Scavenger and a mystery project for another big name publisher.