The first big triple AAA release of the Q4 has arrived! Resident Evil 6 tries to combine all the elements from the new and old games into a universal one that will please fans of both the horror and action RES games, sometimes it works out well, other times….. No…. Just no…..
STORY
Resident Evil 6 reintroduces an element from the old games by allowing you to play as all sorts of different characters across 4 campaigns that show you all the sides of the latest biohazard outbreak. You play as some of the big guns from the RES franchise like Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield (who finally meet in a RES game!) and new comer Jake who is the son of Albert Weasker, the main antagonist of the whole series, you can also play as Ada Wong in a secret fourth campaign that can be unlocked by completing the other three.
The overarching story deals with several massive bio terrorist outbreaks happening in different places on the planet and the efforts of the main characters trying to stop them and find out who exactly is behind them all. This starts a globe spanning and time jumping story that requires multiple playthroughs to fully unravel.
Leon‘s story begins in a small town called Tall Oaks where the president wants to reveal the truth behind the Raccoon city incident finally known to the public, things go wrong as the entire town is turned into mindless shambling zombies that are all out to kill him and his new partner Helena Harper.
Chris’s story begins (timeline wise) in a Eastern European warzone called Edonia to stop a outbreak where the products of the C-virus are first encountered, some pretty messed up things happen and in the beginning of his campaign, Chris is a very broken man.
Jakes story also begins in Edonia where we see how the outbreak began in the first place and how Jake got his powers, we also meet Sherry Birkin from RES 2 who’s his partner and the Ustanak, a powerful Nemesis like monster that will constantly hunt you throughout the story.
I really like these big globe/time spanning stories and showing off the multiple sides of through different characters, its definitely a more involved and better told plot than the past RES games and it gave the protagonists more personality and character development than before.
THE GAMEPLAY
The gameplay is your standard modern TPS, however there are some changes/additions; some push the series forward while others are so badly done they bring down the games quality significantly.
For one you can move and shoot now! Sounds kind of idiotic for me to mention it in this day and age but there you go, you can finally move and shoot in a RES game. The controls have been reworked so your character moves faster and doesn’t feel like such a tank all the time.
Aiming your gun, moving around, performing melee moves and traversing is all much faster and smother than before, but the speed also creates some issues particularly with the camera.
To put it bluntly, this is the worst camera I have EVER had the miss fortune of encountering in a video game, the camera will try its hardest to make your life a living nightmare. It constantly goes all over the place, in close quarter areas its to close it clips through your character and you can see what you or you’re enemies are doing, this makes simple actions like melee incredibly hard to pull off and it will get you killed a good number of times.
Another old feature that they brought back from the old RES game is the sparse ammo, you will never have enough ammo and this forces you to make every shoot count, it also increased the tension of each battle that is until you find out about the melee…..
The melee makes the guns completely pointless, it is so overpowered that there were sections of the game where I just killed everything with my knife and/or fists and I did better than with my gun! The special 1 hit kill attacks that you get every so often only make the issue more prevalent.
Leon‘s campaign particularly suffers from this because that whole campaign is ment to be scary and tense, however when you know you can always just round house kick everything and win, it just makes the hordes of zombies a lot less scary.
A new addition to the gameplay is the ability to fall on your back during battles to escape enemy attacks, you can perform roles on the ground and pretty much get a 360 degree view of your surroundings, however this more often than not got me killed, besides the combat role the floor combat is pointless and you’ll forget you even have it most of the time.
A common criticism that the games getting is the overabundance of QTE‘s, since I grew up playing games like God of War that are very QTE heavy, it didn’t bother me too much, but I can see where people are coming from, if you hate QTE‘s don’t buy this game because you are going to get one every 5 minutes, the game attempts to be cinematic and only a certain group of gamers will be able to enjoy this aspect of the game.
The game also has some traditional Capcom issues, for example, when you get hit by an enemy you fall on the ground, then it takes your character FOREVER to get his ass back up, then you get knocked back down and it just goes on, and on, and on, until you die and have to go through that all over again, if there’s one game they shouldn’t have used as an inspiration, its Lost Planet 2.
The co-op is another aspect that got improved, and then broken again. This time you don’t have to manage your AI partners inventory and they don’t even have a life bar during solo play so you FINALLY don’t have to baby sit them.
Where the co-op gets busted is that there is no point in playing with another player! If your human controlled partner dies you both go back to the checkpoint, you also can’t exchange items or ammo and besides kicking in doors, nothing fun or interesting is done with the co-op.
The mode that is supposed to be played with a friend is actually better if you play it alone! Wrap your head around that.
Besides the campaigns, Mercenaries mode make a return, its basically Horde mode where you have a timer that constantly goes down, to give yourself extra time you have kill as many enemies as possible, its fun, its an adrenaline rush and I had a blast playing it.
Agent Hunt is a new mode where players can take control of the zombies, invade other player’s campaigns and try to kill them, it sounds really cool but believe me, and it’s broken. The camera is even worse when you control the zombies, your attacks are pathetically weak and the human players are so overpowered you don’t stand a snow balls chance in hell of killing them.
The gameplay is just a mediocre, broken TPS that attempted to do some steps forward, but did twelve steps back, resulting in the worst RES game in terms of gameplay.
THE PRESENTATION
Resident Evil 6 runs on the MT Framework engine that’s been used by every Capcom release of this generation, back in 09 when Resident Evil 5 came out it looked spectacular, 3 years later…. Not so much.
The character models and monsters all look fantastic and some of the environments do genuinely look good, however through 80% of the game it feels like all the textures are missing. Most of the environments look like a basic texture was slapped onto it but it’s so poorly rendered I honestly thought the game had texture popping in issues.
I waited for 10 minutes for the textures to finally load and they didn’t, which means they were programmed that way and it isn’t some glitch or error in the game like it as in Mass Effect 1, it really is just poor programming.
The music on the other hand is very well done, in the Leon campaign it gives the game more atmosphere and raises the tension while in the Chris/Jake campaigns it adds to the action and it makes you feel like you’re part of a huge warzone, until the gameplay ruins it for you that is.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Resident Evil 6 was a game that had high goals it wanted to achieve, but this is yet another example where trying to please everyone, you won’t please anyone and the overall quality will suffer because of it. Resident Evil 5 may have been a polarizing game for some people, but it had a focused vision of what it wanted to be and in my opinion it executed it well.
Resident Evil 6 on the other hand feels like it was made by three different developers, put together a month before release and just thrown out there expecting the name Resident Evil to carry the sales despite its quality, considering the games already shipped 4.5 million units Capcom was right about that part.
As the first big release of Q4, Resident Evil 6 is a huge disappointment, beyond it just trying to please everyone, it tries to copy other franchises and emulate them, and instead it comes off as just another C level rip off of CoD or Gears of War.
If you’re looking for a game to rent this weekend, RES 6 might be worth checking out, but do not I repeat do NOT buy this game at full price, it simply isn’t worth it.
FINAL SCORE: D-
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