“When there’s no more room in Hell“

Game Info
Publisher:	Capcom
Developer:	Capcom
Genre:	Horror
Release Date:	10/09/2012
Meta Score

To say Resident Evil has had influence in the survival horror genre would be to cut it short: the first time the term was ever used was in discussing 1996’s Resident Evil (though it was retroactively applied to a few other titles). This franchise has been one of the primary titles in delivering people chills and scares, and the first Resident Evil game (as well as the Gamecube remake) still sits up there as one of the best survival horror games of all time, as well as one of the best overall games of all time.

It’s crushing to see how far Resident Evil has fallen with its newest iteration. RE5 was, by many, considered to be a severe misstep, exacerbating the faults of RE4 such as excessive QTEs, overly long action scenes, and over the top, unbelievable set pieces without maintaining much of what made RE4 great: the creepy atmosphere, the simple yet investing plot, some great puzzles, the terrifying set up of item management.

I came to RE6 with hope. After such a bad misstep with 5, I wasn’t expecting them to fumble, but there’s no other way to categorize RE6. From top to bottom, it’s a severely flawed project that is so ridiculous, over-the-top, unrealistic and insane that the only way I could get through it was with copious amounts of alcohol and a friend who joked about every single scene with me

Story: Resident Evil 6 tried to take on a more mature story than the past games. It shines through the cracks, and you can see parts where they tried to tell a story about terrorism and mishandled power, but all of that is lost in the stupid and clumsy handling of the story. The game is built with the modern concept of withholding information rather than changing the story as it goes, which isn’t a problem, except that there’s nothing you can’t guess from the very outset of the game. The only reason you can’t point out the final boss from the very first second is that he hasn’t been introduced yet.

A great deal of story development has been eschewed in favor of set-pieces as well. The set-pieces can be crazy and often get great deals of laughter, though I suspect that isn’t the goal of a game hell-bent of being scary. In the opening scene, Leon flies a helicopter between a wall and train car, grinding it until it jettisons out through an office building and hits a hanging fixture with Leon falling out of the helicopter onto glass over a room of zombies, which is then shattered as the helicopter falls through it. And that isn’t even one of the more ridiculous set pieces in the game.

Another thing that seriously hampers the story telling of the game is that it’s broken up among three (cough cough) campaigns. This can be neat at the points when the stories intersect and you get to go “Oh hey, it’s Chris. What’s up buddy?” but that can get tired really fast when you play the second or third campaign and you have to watch the same scene you’ve already seen but play it just a little different.

The campaigns are also preset is a really, really stupid order. The game sets it up so that you should play Leon>Chris>Jake, but Jake has the most boring and anticlimactic ending out of all three campaigns and really doesn’t fit as the game’s main ending (cough cough). You can play them out of order, and I sincerely would recommend trying that. Leon’s first chapter really gives the game’s main set-up, but I think Chris>Jake>Leon would be much more satisfying (especially since Leon’s campaign is literally 1/3rd final boss battle).

The story just feels really excessive and pointless. I’d have been happy for a single campaign that tied together the characters I cared about, but the game went really far out of the way to ruin the status quo for characters like Chris, or to build up back story for characters like Helena and Piers without much success. It’s hard to care about a girl wanting to save her sister when I’ve already let 70,000 people die (true story) and I’m about to get another 10 mil or so killed. To put it simply, the story in RE6 just doesn’t work. The only reason to stick with it is if you want to see how the series ends. Or if you’re going to MST3K the shit out of it.

Graphics/Presentation: This game is actually pretty good looking, but that’s like saying my epic painting of a turd is well drawn. The game may look good, but I don’t want to look at what they’re showing me. The monsters aren’t scary, they’re just gross. I don’t need to see a monster’s intestines reach out and pull his legs back to him (even if he does have a bitchin’ name like Rasklapanje). I don’t need to see a zombie’s legs explode into some sinewy thunder thighs that can power kick the crap out of me. And I certainly don’t need to see a man explode and turn into a spider. That’s just…

The monster design in RE6 is terrible. Horror plays on already existing fears and mildly altered possibilities of reality. It violates something in a simple way (Psycho violates privacy, Aliens violates fertility, etc.). RE6 does none of this. I have no fear of my muscles exploding out of my body. The monsters have become more of a chore than anything else, though giving them nicknames can be fun.

I would like to give the game some props for deciding to include split-screen co-op, which made the game bearable, but I do wish they hadn’t made the screens so tiny when you play in split-screen. We were playing on a large HD TV, and we still had to lean in to see what was going on. The screen was essentially 40% black space.

Another minor quibble, if they spent so much time with they’re 30 second death screens of a zombie eating my guts out or a spiral blade coring my insides, why did they not animate it more? Seeing a zombie bite me to death is really unimpacting when it leaves neither a mark nor blood.

Gameplay/Controls: Resident Evil 6 feels gutted. There are so many gameplay aspects from the past games that have been dropped that this game just feels empty in comparison. You no longer have any form of item case, instead you have a scroll menu. The herbs are mostly gone, the only combining left being turning them into 1, 3, or 6 pills you pop to replenish your health. The only time you really ever have to worry about item management is playing on the Amateur difficulty where you’ll have to drop ammo when you have too much.

Speaking of difficulty, it can really be wild in this game. On the normal difficulty, RE6 can get pointlessly hard, throwing piles of enemies that transform into worse enemies at you all at once. The thing about the early Resident Evil games that made their monsters scary was how powerful they were. You had a few bullets to kill a zombie, and no real way to sneak around it. Now, there are so many it’s just annoying, and you can run past them in the game’s wide open spaces. Or just slide under them, since that’s a thing now. When you do get stuck in a room against piles of enemies or bosses, they can become bullet sponges. It’s can be hard because they game doesn’t equip you to beat your opponent.

The three campaigns each play relatively different from one another, enough at least that’s it’s noticeable. Leon’s part plays the most like classic Resident Evil. His chapter has a few puzzles (I use that term as loose as Valley Girl’s lady parts), and he gets to fight classic zombies (that don’t die when you pop their skulls). He also gets to fight a stupidly long boss battle that goes on for ages, and then comes back four more times in a row. Chris gets to play Call of Evil Duty, running and gunning in the middle east against enemies who shoot back and sometimes sprout Japanese-torture-porn-tentacle-monsters from their arms. Jake’s campaign is Metal Gear Evil, and is somewhat stealth based, requiring you to hide in lockers and avoid alerting the Ustanak, the giant B.O.W. that chases you throughout his campaign (for reasons not really explained very well).

Many people are going to complain about the QTEs, but I didn’t find them too terrible. They can get frustrating when you want to knock a zombie off of you, but it still feels like there’s considerably less than RE5, which I think is a victory.

The shooting works much better in RE6 than it did in past games, but that’s like saying season 6 of LOST was better than season 5. It’s still broken. What makes the combat bearable in this game is the pretty awesome melee system, which lets you beat the living daylights out of opponents with overpowered super kicks. The balancing factor here is that you have a limit to how many times you can use the attacks before you have to let it recharge.

I wish I could say that the gameplay was the worst part of Resident Evil 6, but the story is just so inane that even the terrible design choices, silly time wasting game chunks, and pointless puzzles (this game wins an award for worse puzzle design ever; they’re not even puzzles) end up in better shape than the story did.

Sound: Resident Evil isn’t bad in voice department. I liked all of the main voice actors and actually really liked the performance given out by Troy Baker as Jake Muller. All of the voice actors turn in pretty solid performances, but Baker stands out among them. One piece of voice acting I can think of that really fails is the commander in Chris’s plot, who sounds like he’s supposed to be a commentary on X-Com’s voice over, but in the end just sounds really bad. Luckily, he’s a token character who you only hear a few times, so it’s largely ignorable.

The sounds that the game does feature aren’t really anything special, but they aren’t bad either. Zombies moan in a convincingly zombie-like fashion, shooting sounds somewhat arcadey, but not distractingly so, and the J’avo’s exploding bodies sound pretty gnarly. The game doesn’t fall short in the audio department, but it doesn’t really shine either.

Replay: Each of the three (cough) campaigns in RE6 will take you ~6 hours to beat, but once you get through all of them, I can’t see really wanting to go back and play them again. RE5 was at least entertaining enough that some parts were worth replaying, and it offered the lure of getting better guns and more money. RE6 has hidden symbols and figures that unlock back story to the game, but that doesn’t seem like enough incentive to make you want to weather the game again.

The Mercenaries mode has returned, and with the pre-order and beating the entire game I unlocked a total of four maps. I’m sure there are more, but I suck at The Mercenaries, so I only put the most token of efforts into it. If it’s your cup of tea, it hasn’t really changed much, so just expect more of what you got in RE5.

As for online play, there are a few options. RE6 can be played co-op, and when you play with online, during the story intersections you’ll be matched with other players, which is a neat idea, but I never got it to work. You can also play the Agent Hunt mode, which allows you to pop into other player’s games as a monster, but all of these modes only earn you skill points to but more (mostly useless) skills, so I didn’t put much time into them. The game lacks any kind of true competitive multiplayer, which I normally wouldn’t care about, but having seen RE5, I’d be willing to bet that multiplayer will be released for RE6 as paid DLC.

There isn’t much to keep coming back to this game unless you really like, but the main game is plenty long enough, so there’s a good amount of content there.

Overall,Resident Evil 6 doesn’t need to be played. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t play it, it’s not that bad, but it’s also not good enough to warrant a recommendation. It’s just something that exists. Even while playing it, I was already forgetting what was happening, the game is just that unmemorable, despite its over-the-top action set-pieces. This game is like a kid who tried his absolute hardest in school but still ended up with a C because he couldn’t do any better. I tried thinking about how this game could be fixed, but all I could come up with was “Go play Resident Evil 4 again”.

Written By: D.R. Maddock