Resident Evil 6 Review

In some ways I wasn’t looking forward to writing this review. Now don’t get me wrong I love Resident Evil, I play Resident Evil 2 and 4 from time to time because let’s be honest they were the best the franchise has had to offer so far. Now we come to Resident Evil 6, but is this the direction we want the series to be taking?

Resident Evil 6 begins as Leon Kennedy, the gritty cop from Raccoon City, wakes up in the middle of what looks to be the apocalypse. Buildings are falling around him and zombies are everywhere. Sounds great so far right? Flash forward ten minutes and our hero is now running like a seasoned athlete over burning cars as a wall of fire chases him. Ok, this is getting a little worrying. No fear dear readers for Leon then jumps for his dear life to a circling chopper while battling an ankle hungry zombie in a grumbling quick time event.

I don’t know about you but this isn’t the way Resident Evil was supposed to end up in my opinion. Even though its lacking predecessor was sloping on uneven ground of franchise loyalty, it was still able to offer gamers something quite solid and enjoyable. Resident Evil 6 though suffers from a really bad case of unsure identity. It is kind of like a man is looking into a mirror and wondering “Am I gay, or am I straight?”

This is based on the fact that Resident Evil 6 attempts to cater to multiple audiences through a selection of different, lengthy campaigns. Sure each individual character story is a near ten hours long, but it is the complete spiralling difference in narrative that just makes the quantity seem incredibly unappealing and forgettable.

These campaigns come in the form of different character perspectives that players must adventure through to understand the full outcome of the story. First you have Leon’s two cents on the outbreak that tries to give fans something that they have long being missing in survival horror. Instead though you end up with an experience that gives too little of what fans wanted to begin with, while also borrowing from other franchise successes but completely forgets why they were good in the first place.

The developers were probably all sat around a big table with three different games on the drawing board. The tough thing for them though was that they all just couldn’t agree on a final decision and so just shoved them all into the same game. Though the intention of this was good, it is saddening to see the plot suffer because of this and especially the game’s ultimate villain. Resident Evil 5 fans will know that series regular Albert Wesker has been finally defeated, the funny thing is though that because of his death the devs all of a sudden ran out of good ideas for bad guys. I seriously got to the final boss fight for each campaign and just thought “Who are you again?”

Umbrella, the company behind the whole virus thing has been gone for a while and it is a shame to see Capcom spend most of their time trying to copy other games and completely forget about their own franchise lore. Not only that but because the actual story suffers, so does the sense in existence for its constant stream of dim witted enemies. I truly don’t understand why the enemies transform into multiple forms of insect, or animal and it is never actually explained either. On one instance I fought a boss that transformed into a saber toothed tiger, tyrannosaurus rex and finally a spider/fly. In another I ended up fighting a huge man eating snake that never quite got given a reason to exist.

The game just throws these things at you and expects you to accept them, but you just can’t. Not only that but the main cast just aren’t that likeable either. Most of the characters you play as have for some reason turned into unrelatable jerk faces. Chris Redfield and his little chum Piers are the main criminals in this act of douche baggery, and it is not until you get your controller on series newcomer and Terminator Salvation inspired mercenary called Jake that it truely comes apparent. He seriously has some personality issues to deal with and I feel that if Capcom had not tried to make him Resident Evil’s attempt at Dante then I probably would have accepted him as a series regular for the on-going series.

Gameplay wise things kind of go a little hit and miss too. Fans have been screaming for the ability to walk and shoot for years upon years and finally Capcom have given them what they have been craving. Sadly this comes with a few hiccups along the way. I don’t really understand why the developer decided to put the vault, action and cover crouch action all on the same button, but they did. This means that you will be spending a lot of your time trying to hide behind tablets, sand bags and boxes only to see yourself climb over them and take a machine gun to the face. Sure it is manageable if you take it slow but for a game that is trying to appease more to the action crowd, this kind of things needs to be executed with a thought of mistake. In some ways it is best to take your steps slowly though because more than once I have found that the game would like nothing more than to kill you with its own scripted environmental changes. At one point I was running down a spiral staircase only to be crushed without warning by ninja-like falling debry that crunched me from out of no where. In another campaign I was blasted off a bridge from an enemy tank just because I was on the wrong side of the scripted event. Yeah thank you right there narrative progression.

I really hated that the game ran along a path of very scripted events. Unlike the popular Dead Space games that did it right. You will always come across a number of idol bodies during your journey. Sure you might think to double tap them in the head but sadly you will find that your wasted bullets will only go through their lifeless bodies. Upon walking up to them though, you will soon discover that those thought to be dead lumps of flesh are actually there for scripted cheap scares and attempts at chipping your health away. There is no way around it but to just accept it and move on. It doesn’t even help that it contributes to the fact that your health will be low for the majority of the game.

One thing I really liked about Resident Evil 5 was the ability to upgrade your weaponry, but this feature has ultimately been dropped in 6 in favour of a skill based system that lets you pick from a list of different abilities, such as increased weapon damage to larger enemy drop rates. It is a welcome change I guess but it is a shame that the fun micro management of dumping cash into your favourite guns has all but gone.

Combat itself though has improved a lot this time around. Gone have the days of hoping that a bullet won’t ding off an enemy’s head like a plastic dud and finally bullets feel like they make an impact when colliding the a victims squishy skull. Shooting enemies will generally blow chunks off their body and seeing them crawl towards you in blood filled anger gives a rather good sense of awesomeness when popping the final bullet in the enemy’s eye socket.

Unusually though the game tries to keep its classic feel of resource management but completely forgets that it chose the action game route. There will be times where you will run out of every kind of ammo and all you will be able to do is sit back and let your AI partner farm some boxes of shells for you. This might be because the game tries to make you use the completely revamped melee system more over weapons, but to be honest I would rather be shooting enemies than round house kicking them across the screen like Chuck Norris.

On the note of the AI though I have to say that my reaction it is was one of surprise and then disappointment. The AI partner is A LOT better this time around but don’t let their now added invulnerability and skill at headshots fool you. At times I have noticed my partner shooting walls, leaving me to die and in some instances standing idolally by as I scream at them to help move a team environment object.

You can play all of this through the game’s added multiplayer feature but really why would you want to suffer all these problems again and with a human partner is could be potentially dumber than your AI counterpart. Other additional modes have been added like the classic Mercenaries mode, but I found myself losing interest fast as I realised that the tiny time limit and fact you can only kill up to 150 enemies before a game over became a very unappealing factor.

Capcom have also attempted to copy a feature From Software’s popular Dark Souls game got famous by. This mode comes in the form of a separate option called Agent Hunt where you can invade other player’s campaigns and try and kill them for the fun giggle of it. Sadly the infected characters you play as are all so different in damage output and health that sometimes you might be stuck playing as something that won’t give you that tiniest bit of advantage.

Finally I come to the visuals. What is surprising with this one is that the overall aesthetic quality has shot down a tad bit since the beautiful HD outing of RE5. The animation is still top quality for the most part but I don’t really understand the drop in its graphical presentation. The console versions especially suffer from a case of rough edges and blurry textures. It may be a better idea to buy the game for the PC if you do decide to give it a shot.

Resident Evil 6 is available now for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC!

For more information on Resident Evil 6, click here.