Resident Evil 6 Review

I’ve been waiting on the new Resident Evil game to come out for what seems like an eternity.  Resident Evil 2 was my introduction the Playstation.  Nemesis was the first game I bought when I got my first Nintendo 64.  I enjoyed RE-4, but not as much as the others.  When RE-5 came out, I was giddy with excitement.  Not much gets me as excited as killing zombies.  Not even the L4D games can give me the “on the edge of my seat” excitement I get when playing a Resident Evil game.  And while I enjoyed RE: Raccoon City, it just didn’t have the feel that the rest of the games had in the series.  I am a Resident Evil fan, right down to the last strand of DNA.  Hell, I have the Umbrella Corp logo tattooed on my left wrist.

 As soon as I booted the game and it loaded to the screen with the name and the number 6 on it, I was already smiling.  And when I pressed Start and that familiar eerie voice said “Resident Evil…. Six…” I knew I was going to enjoy this game.  And I was right.  You start out by playing through an intro level of the game as Leon Kennedy and an injured Helena Harper.  This level is a pre-game to the actual game that basically shows you how the controls work, how to use the green plants to heal someone, and how to kill stuff.  I recommend you really pay attention here.  You’ll be using this stuff a lot, and the intro itself is nothing to sneer at when it comes to playability.  The helicopter scene got my heart racing.

 There are three campaigns to the game right out of the box.  And you pretty much have to play all of them to get all the pieces to the story.  Don’t worry, the playability is great.  There’s not a ton of repetition, so it’s like playing a different game each time.  When you are playing as Leon, the experience is focused on you having to think.  You can also play as Chris Redfield, who brings more of a “shoot everything that moves” feel to it.  The best shooting scenarios come when you play as Redfield.  If you are more about the hands-on approach and just want to kill stuff close-range, then you can play as Jake Muller (From RE-2).

  
These three campaigns tie together the gameplay and stories from the preceding Resident Evil games.  It’s kind of like they made a Frankenstein’s monster of bits and pieces of each of the older games and just shoved it at us on the slab.  There are some elements lacking that really take a bite out of the game.  The one that really got to me was the camera, especially when you’re playing as Leon.  When you are in a confined space and are backed up close to anything, you are pretty much blinded by anything behind him.  Even his head blocks your vision at times.  You have to move around to get a view, and at that perspective you may not be able to get a good shot at anything pinning you in.  I noticed this same problem with RE-4 as well.  It’s bad camera management and it’s just too damned close to the character.  But in the end, I did enjoy the campaign.

When it comes to Redfield’s campaign, it is as I said before, a lot of military-type action.  It seems to pull away from the original games and head toward a genre that feels like someone put an American soldier down in Europe with zombies and said “go for it”.  It doesn’t have the slow, thoughtful gameplay that is common with RE games.  There is a lot of running and shooting and ducking behind stuff.  Sometimes I forgot I was playing Resident Evil and had flashbacks to Call of Duty.  But only momentarily, mind you.

 
The campaign I had the most trouble with was Jake’s.  The controls were difficult, the vehicles were a pain in the ass.  I’ve never had so much trouble driving a snowmobile, real or virtual.  And I know for a fact they move much faster than that.  And I’ve never done so much thumbstick twirling on any game before this.  I seriously wish they had never come up with that key for gaming.  It’s just irritating as hell.  But in the end, there are some good parts to the campaign.  It has its moments and it is playable.  But if you are a die-hard RE fan, then you’ll notice that it doesn’t stick to the plan in the least.  The plan that has kept the franchise alive for all these years.

  
All in all, the game goes in three different directions on three parts of the globe, and even though the storyline is only understood if you play each campaign entirely, it still goes nowhere.  Like so many Hollywood movies, the storyline is just utterly depressing.  The only saving graces to the game were the return of Co-op mode, which feels much like RE-5’s did, and that the game as a whole is very playable and fun.  It brings back the feeling from so many of the old games that nerds from back then enjoyed and still enjoy from their RE experience.  After Resident Evil 4 I was thinking “Capcom, you need to try harder”, but after RE-6, I just wish they would tone it down a bit and stick to one method or another.  I probably won’t play this game over again the way I did RE-5, but I did enjoy it.  It felt much like the Resident Evil animated movies that Capcom released.

If you are going into this game thinking that it is going to trump all the other Resident Evil games, then you are going to be disappointed.  If you are just looking to kill some zombies and get a returning taste of past titles, then you might enjoy this one.  Overall, I did have a lot of fun.  And since I tend to pick out the bad and forget the good, I am probably being a little harder on Capcom than they deserve.  Because in the end, they were just trying to cater to all the fans at once.  I would most certainly recommend this game if you are RE fan or just a zombie fan in general.

 Score – 4 out of 5