Resident Evil 6

RE: Michael Bay edition

Playing Resident Evil 6 is kind of like watching a Michael Bay movie. There’s an explosion in almost every cutscene, people are spouting off cheesy lines of dialogue, and the special effects are really awesome looking. I like it, but I feel a bit like I really shouldn’t be enjoying it quite so much.

A lot of people hate on this game, for a lot of good reasons I think, but me? I really enjoy this game.

The first thing I should probably start with is what this game is not. It’s not a survival horror title. I know...I know, it’s a Resident Evil game, which means it should be scary, right?

WRONG.

The RE series hasn’t been a survival horror series since RE Code Veronica came out...or maybe one of the other spinoff titles like Dead Aim or some such. I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head, but it’s unimportant.

RE4 came out and renovated the whole dang shebang, switching the focus from creepy, slower paced games to run around frenetic action titles. You fight monsters, it’s true, but the monsters usually aren’t presented in a very terrifying manner. Exciting? Oh yes, very much so, but not in quite the same ‘I am about to be ripped to pieces’ way as in the older titles.

The end result of this focal shift was that the RE titles became much more appealing to the mass market. RE5 brought in the coop elements and was even more action packed than RE4. Also less scary, but who really cares about that? Well, turns out the original fan base did. So great were the complaints about the more action oriented gameplay, that Capcom attempted to change things up a little bit with RE6.

So, for the first time since before RE4 came out in 2004, we once again have zombies in an RE title. I know, shocking, right? Zombies in Resident Evil? It’s more likely than you think.

What we’ve had since then are strange parasite things called Las Plagas that mutate their hosts into monsters. The parasites are much more intelligent than the zombies, providing a greater variety of enemy types capable of using weaponry against you and turning your RE experience into a third person cover based shooter. Don’t worry, we’ve got those in this game too, though they call them something else.

It’s kind of hard to review RE6 as a whole game, because there are four campaigns that you can play through cooperatively or by yourself if you wish. Some of the campaigns have wildly different gameplay and enemy types.

I’ll break em down for you.

The one you’ll likely start with is Leon’s campaign, due to it being the first on the list and Leon being the playable character in the mandatory ‘prologue’ chapter that you must play through in order to progress. The prologue chapter serves as a tutorial of sorts and chronologically takes place towards the very end of Leon’s campaign.

As a consequence, you will have no idea what the HELL is going on.

You should get used to it, because you’ll have that feeling a lot while playing this, assuming you can get past the issues that apparently made the majority of the rest of the player base quit in frustration.

I’ll get to those later.

So Leon’s campaign costars Leon Scott Kennedy, one of stars of RE2 and the main character of RE4, and Helena Harper, a series newcomer. They are both secret service agents, but poor Leon’s career is probably about to take a nosedive, due to the game starting off with him shooting the President’s reanimated corpse as it tries to munch on Helena.

I think I would like to point out here that RE’s representation of female characters has traditionally been very progressive. Most RE ladies are strong, independent, brave, and easily as capable as their male counterparts. A notable exception to this is Ashley from RE4, but that’s a story for another time. Helena very much embodies these attributes and I like her a lot. Hopefully she’ll warrant another showing in a later title. Suffice it to say that she can keep up with Leon and the two of them make a pretty good team.

Their campaign starts off at a fairly slow pace, proving that if they want to, Capcom can still do the whole ‘slow and creepy’ thing. However, once things pick up, they hit fever pitch intensity and seldom ever slow down again.

The campaigns are divided into separate missions and the first mission in Leon’s campaign took me about two hours to complete. After I was finished I had to shut the game off and go do something else for a while. It was INTENSE.

This particular one is notable, because it tries to incorporate the old with the new. It’s the only one with zombies and the gameplay is a little more slower paced than the other campaigns. It at least tries to be creepy and survival horror-ish, though I don’t think it really succeeds. The final boss in Leon’s campaign is perhaps the most memorable RE boss I’ve fought in a while and I had a ton of fun facing off against him. He’s just so sneeringly evil that I almost can’t help but like the guy.

Leon’s campaign is full of tragedy and revenge and is noticeably darker than his last showing in RE4. It’s the one I’ve played the most, mostly because the gameplay is reminiscent o the old RE titles I think.

There are almost no gameplay differences between playing as Leon or Helena, though Helena has an awesome shotgun no one else has and Leon can dual wield pistols and has a knife I never use.

The second campaign is my absolute favorite. It stars Jake Muller, another series newcomer and Sherry Birkin, who was last seen in RE2.

Jake is a wisecracking, baddass mercenary who actually isn’t quite as stereotypical as that last phrase might make him sound. He’s a ton of fun to play as. Sporting more melee moves than any three of the other characters combined, Jake is capable of going toe to toe with the toughest creatures in the game...with his bare hands. In fact, series fans might notice that a lot of Jake’s moves are strangely familiar, but I won’t spoil the surprise of his true identity for you.

Sherry Birkin is a survivor of the now infamous ‘Raccoon City Incident’ and she’s very familiar with the ubiquitous bio-weapons that people seem to willfully throw everywhere in the RE universe. If you’re playing as her and have a particularly aggressive Jake player, you might feel slightly underpowered, but honestly you can just shoot everything before he can crush them with his bare hands, and keeping back is oftentimes a much smarter option anyway. Sherry has a stun baton you can charge up and fry enemies with in close quarters, but then so do a lot of your enemies, so it can be quite entertaining fighting them off.

This campaign has an entirely different set of enemies than Leon’s. The game calls them J’avos, but it’s just the Plagas parasite by another name...only now they are smart enough to use guns on you. There are a large variety of J’avos enemy types, but most of the time you’ll feel like you’re in a cover based third person shooter, at least until you’ve dealt a certain amount of damage to one of them and they mutate into a monster right in front of your eyes.

There’s crazy, over the top action sequences, multiple firefights, giant monsters, and an enemy boss almost as persistent as Nemesis from RE3. It’s good fun from start to finish and Jake and Sherry are great characters to play as in their own right. I’d love to see another RE game with just the two of them, in fact.

The third campaign is my least favorite of all four of them. It’s dark. It’s dreary. It’s uninteresting, and it’s no coincidence that it stars my least favorite of RE characters, a Captain Chris Redfield of the BSAA, an organization founded to fight bioterrorism with a survival rate hovering at around 1% for active service members.

I would like to point out that I didn’t start out disliking Chris. He’s fine in the first game and Code Veronica, but as the star of RE5, he looks like he’s been taking steroids for years, and gives off a thick necked meathead vibe I really don’t care for. He’s a little less bulked out in this installment, but they took his heroic stoicism and levelheadedness and replaced them with alcoholism and blind rage, neither of which did his personality any favors.

So yeah, good times.

Chris has been in RE5, 6, Revelations, and is likely going to appear in Revelations 2. At this point, I’d rather play as almost anyone else. I am very tired of him.

The other main character of his campaign is Piers Nivens, who I only really like because he’s not Chris. He’s got a bad case of Chris hero worship and...that’s about it. We learn nothing about Piers other than he likes a good steak after a mission. The guy’s a puppy, happily following Chris from place to place, no matter how reckless his C.O. gets or how many men die under Chris’s command due to said recklessness. Piers has a frikken sweet anti-material rifle (is that a real thing?) with a thermal scope, making him much more fun to play as than Chris.

Their campaign is full of Chris swearing, raging, and chasing after people he blames for killing his team, while also getting everyone on his new team killed in the process. He finally regains his ability to think clearly towards the end of his campaign and stop acting like a total jerk to everyone, but good grief.

The main question in my mind while I was playing through this travesty was: where the hell is Jill Valentine? She’s also a member of the BSAA and RE6 has two of the largest bio-terror attacks in the RE universe in years. She’s Chris’s partner...or at least she was before some idiot promoted him to Captain and started giving him squads of redshirts to send to their deaths. They’ve worked together for years, so her not being in this game is just plain weird.

What did she do, take a sabbatical? I can’t imagine her quitting. She’s just as dedicated to the cause as Chris is, not to mention the earlier games kept hinting at the two of them being in love with each other.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, there’s never any payoff in the RE series romances. There’s a bit of romantic tension, a little bit of history between the characters being hinted at and maybe a longing look or two, but that’s it. It’s not really the focus of the games, but it still annoys me that no one can ever seem to develop any sort of lasting relationship with anyone else in the RE universe.

If I had to guess, I’d say they left out Jill because she would’ve likely slapped the angst out of Chris until he was functioning competently again. Regardless, the female/male partnership dynamic present in the two other major campaigns is thrown completely off with this one because of it.

Oh, and their boss is a giant...uh, thing. It be large and ugly and very difficult to kill.

The final campaign stars the enigmatic and mysterious Ada Wong, a fan favorite who has appeared in RE2 and RE4. Ada usually keeps everyone guessing as to her motivations and purposes. It’s difficult to tell who she’s working for at any given moment or what she’s going to do. The only two things you can really say for sure about her are that she’s a mercenary who takes very strange jobs and she kind of has a thing for Leon.

Her campaign has no real co-star, though there is a playable character named Agent who has no appearance in the cutscenes and you can only play as him if someone else has started a campaign and invited you into it. He can’t even interact with some stuff.

Ada has a crossbow with interchangeable bolts and some other neat stuff to play with. Her campaign is kind of the secret campaign, so you should probably play it last if you want to find out what’s really going on behind the scenes in the other campaigns without prematurely spoiling anything.

Ada merrily skips from place to place, interacting with the other characters in interesting ways while she matches wits with new and old enemies. She helps out Leon and Helena and Sherry and Jake, while being heavily involved in Chris and Piers campaign as well. She faces off against almost all of the enemy types you can find in any of the campaigns, making hers perhaps the most diverse to play through.

She shows up at the end of Leon’s campaign and fights with him and Helena against their boss. It’s kind of fun seeing the same events unfold from another viewpoint.

Though a lot of us are fans of the creepy elements, the newer gameplay, and the coop modes introduced in the latest entries in the series, the truth of the matter is that it’s the iconic characters that keep RE fans coming back to it, time after time.

Leon’s always chasing Ada and Ada is always one step ahead of him with a ‘catch me if you can’ vibe. Claire has this quiet, sweet nature about her that a lot of people find really appealing and Chris has the heroic stoicism thing...well, usually anyway. Jill seems to be always losing Chris or vice versa, but she’s strong and independent when given her own spotlight. Wesker was the perennial badass villain through multiple games until the final showdown with him in RE5.

Even the once-mighty Umbrella Corporation itself is a character, though it has been thoroughly disbanded in the in-game universe, it has left behind a lasting legacy of bio-weapons and a string of copycat corporations I’ve come to refer to as: ‘Umbrella by any other name.’

There have also been a host of side characters, but most never make it beyond a showing in one game before vanishing into the background, never to return.

We know the games aren’t really survival horror any more, but most of us don’t seem to care. We play em anyway and just gripe a bunch about it. Weirdly enough, Capcom keeps advertising them as survival horror games and watching some of the ads makes me just shake my head in wonder. What could they possibly be thinking? Why do they think these things are scary still?

Compared to what the series once was, the current games are so drastically different that they may as well belong in a different category entirely. Is that really a bad thing though? I loved the older RE titles, but I also really enjoy playing the newer ones. I don’t find them scary at all, but the coop elements are quite fun (when you can find someone willing to play it with you) and the action is fast paced and exciting. The only reason Capcom has gone in this direction is because the games have sold well since RE4. Right now they seem like they might decide to reverse the trend and try to regain some of the fans of the older games, hence the Revelations series, but I think what happens next is still largely up in the air.

So let’s talk gameplay.

For the most part I absolutely love the camera controls in RE6. You have an over the shoulder view, which you can switch from right to left shoulder with the push of a button. While standing still you can aim the camera anywhere, allowing for that most important of things, screenshots of the characters from the front. Oh and I suppose it allows you to peek around corners, which can be useful as well and is quite helpful for aiming purposes when you want to check behind you without turning around.

The only problem happens when the game rips camera control away from you and switches you to a fixed camera perspective. This occurs when certain exciting sequences happen, usually a giant monster chasing you or some such. The main problem is that it is terrible and gets you killed. Sure it’s all big and dramatic and flashy looking, and I love the special effects, but it SUCKS. I don’t need to see the giant monster from this angle, or if you are going to do something like that, make it happen in a cutscene and fill it with quick time events if you have to. The controls go all wonky when you switch to a fixed camera angle and it gets me killed, REPEATEDLY.

STOP IT.

Thankfully, this doesn’t happen often, but it’s hard enough to find people willing to play the game with me without this rubbish going on. Other people don’t have my tolerance for these sorts of things.

The control scheme is fairly complicated and clunky when you first start playing. Unfortunately, of the people who have played this game with me, one of them just quit after a bit because of the controls. You can strafe and dodge and take cover against things and peek around corners and up from behind cover. Aiming and shooting mechanics feel fluid and responsive, and RE6 is a far, FAR better third person cover shooter than that godawful mess of a game called Operation Raccoon City.

You can counter most types of enemy melee attacks with a quick mouse click if you can get the timing right with the onscreen prompt. It works quite well, though a lot of things will pounce on you if you aren’t careful.

Being grabbed by something triggers annoying QTE’s. Some of which are definitely easier than the others. On the higher difficulty, you can lose life faster than you can possibly mash the buttons, making getting grabbed by something an almost instant trip to the dying state unless your partner can help you quickly.

While lying on your back in the dying state, you can attack enemies with whatever weapon you have, but you can’t switch weapons and you can crawl slowly away from them. If you manage to avoid your enemies, you will eventually stand back up and be able to use health items to recover your HP. If you get hit in this state it’s game over. Either the AI or your coop partner can get you back on your feet and even give you some health in the process if they want to.

The more you practice with the controls, the more intuitive everything feels and the easier time of it you’ll have running around feeling like a badass. Unlike every other RE title in existence, RE6 allows you to run up to your enemies and punch them in the face if you want to. Of course, just because you can certainly does not mean you should. You may want to avoid whacking that twenty foot tall monster about the shins with your stun rod, for instance. It might squish you.

Melee combat is quite fun and is a mixture of amusing pro wrestling type throw moves and straight up beat downs. You can run at things and kick them in the face or slide into them and stagger them, allowing you to use one of the variety of coup de grace moves that are context sensitive depending on how you’ve staggered them. These are always entertaining to use and I love all of the different animations.

It must be said, one of the major sources of frustration while playing RE6 are the quick time events. QTE’s have been a scourge on the Resident Evil universe since RE4 came out. There may have been a few here and there before that game, but that was the one that mainstreamed them for the series.

After much frustration, I have come to the conclusion that not all QTE’s are created equal. The QTE in its simplest form, literally: press X not to die, is annoying if you don’t see it coming, especially in a cutscene or movie sequence, but is far, FAR less aggravating than some of the other types. There’s the: press two buttons really quickly not to die. There’s the: press certain buttons in sequence not to die. There’s the: press one button in certain places as a little marker in a circle swings around to not die. And then there’s my personal favorite: press X repeatedly as quickly as possible until you break your keyboard or your hand to not die.

Most of these I actually don’t mind all that much, so long as the onscreen button prompts don’t change every time, which is a bastard move that should get you punched in the face if you do it.

With timing and practice, you can get down all of these QTE’s through repetition and then continue on to the more fun aspects of the game. That last one though...I don’t even know why it exists. Why do I have to break my keyboard to continue the game, Capcom? Why am I hitting one button so many times so quickly that it’s actually hurting my fingers?

WHY DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GOOD GAMEPLAY MECHANIC??

WHY? Do you hate us? Is that it?

Why is it that the most dangerous thing in RE6 is not any of the monsters, but an incredibly aggravating sequence wherein Leon attempts to not crash a plane by pulling back on the throttle? My brother and I must have slammed that stupid plane nose first into the ocean over FIFTY TIMES. This is so much bullshit it’s not even funny. The only reason I can possibly think of that makes game developers include QTE’s like this is because they’ve never sat down and attempted to do these sequences themselves. Otherwise they might think, “Huh, maybe I shouldn’t put in this part where the player has to hit the X key sixty times in under ten seconds. It seems a little frustrating, unfun, and horrible.”

There are other ways you can handle this. There are other types of QTE’s if you must have them in your game.

STOP DOING THIS.

Okay...rant over. Calming down now.

As you can see, even though I love the game, there are certain things that just piss me right the hell off about it. For other people it just causes them to ragequit and I believe it’s stuff like that that gives the game its current fairly low metascore rating.

So what else is there to say about RE6? Well, the voice acting is great and I think it’s cool that they’ve retained their voice actors from the previous games, including Leon’s from RE4 and Chris’s from RE5. I even recognized a couple of people from those awful CGI movies they made a while back.

The graphics are impressive and the game looks great on the higher settings if your rig can handle it. There’s plenty to look at, gawk at, and take screenshots of if you want to. The game is very pretty.

As you play, you collect skill points with which you can buy skills in between campaigns from the in-game menu. If you beat a campaign you can equip three skills at once and if you beat all of the campaigns you can have eight skill builds you can switch to on the fly while playing. The skills give you a variety of bonuses and some tradeoffs, making it quite fun to balance your damage/defense ratio and create certain builds. In order to unlock many skills for purchase, you need to accomplish certain things, usually killing a certain number of enemies or racking up kills with certain weapons in order to unlock the infinite ammo skill for a gun.

The skill builds give the game quite a bit of replay value as you can carry skills, skill points, and weapons from one difficulty level to another, thus pitting your accumulated firepower and skill against the most powerful enemies the game has to offer. I love this stuff, honestly, though the hardest difficulty in the game doesn’t allow you to equip your skills. I must confess that I haven’t tried that one yet. Kind of looking forward to it...except for the QTE’s of course.

Some idiot decided that the game’s quick time events needed to get harder the higher the difficulty setting is. Some idiot needs smacked. I don’t mind it if the monsters are harder to grapple with. I JUST HATE THAT DAMN PLANE SEQUENCE.

Alright...calming down again. Now where was I? Oh yes, the gameplay.

The coop elements use steam, but sadly, there’s some definite room for improvement. If you create a private game, you can only invite people from the lobby, not from a campaign you’ve already started, which means that if your partner disconnects, you have to restart. In practice, it just means that you create a public game and invite someone. I’ve noticed nobody’s playing all that much, so you’re probably safe, but if random people join I believe you can kick them.

If you play without a human partner, the AI is actually pretty good. It’s not very aggressive and will stick pretty close to you if it can. The AI controlled characters aren’t as powerful as you are of course and you should expect to do most of the work, but the important thing is that they aren’t stupid and perhaps even more importantly than that, the AI is immortal. No longer do you need to worry about them running into swarms of enemies and causing you to fail the mission ala RE5. Let em take the brunt of the punishment if you want. They can’t be killed except for in certain boss fights. This means that you don’t have to babysit the AI and its presence isn’t terrible or intrusive, thus making the game much more fun and playable than it otherwise would be.

At certain points in the game, Capcom envisioned so many people playing RE6 that they tried to implement a mechanic where four human players could interact with one another for certain major events in each campaign. I forget what these are called, but they only trigger if you and another set of players are playing two different campaigns and reach the correct point at the same time. In practice, this NEVER happened to me. It is pretty cool to have different teams working together at certain points though. There’s a place where Leon and Helena work with Sherry and Jake and another place where they compete directly with Chris and Piers in a sort of race. Sherry and Jake team up with Chris and Piers to fight some giant monsters at the beginning of their campaign and Ada will occasionally drop in at certain points in everyone else’s.

It’s a cool idea. Too bad I’d have to actually coordinate with two other people who are playing this in order to get it to work and even then, these four player sequences are pretty short. The player base is just too small. Maybe it worked when it first came out, but I never saw it and I bought it the day of release.

There’s another type of game mode called ‘Agent Hunt’ where you can play as a random enemy type in another person’s game. You’ll spawn in constantly and harass the players and I never quite figured out how to do this successfully. Mostly you’ll just get killed repeatedly and the people who are running the campaign can decide whether or not to enable this mode. I had this on one time and killed some dude about twenty times with my assault rifle that had infinite ammo. Oh and you can enable and disable that in the settings too. Odds are, if you’re joining a game where it’s enabled, you probably aren’t going to really get anywhere. You ‘win’ when you manage to kill the humans.

There are multiple other competition modes and Mercenary modes where you can play with other people cooperatively. There’s even a L4D2 crossover with the main characters from that game you can play as if you want to.

If you get all of the DLC, there are a bunch of different variations on the survival modes, some of which are more fun than the others.

I guess I’ve blathered on long enough about a game very few other people actually like. To address certain concerns from hardcore RE fans, no, RE6 is not a slow paced, creepy survival horror game. It’s really fun third person action, with equal parts cover shooting and hand to hand combat.

It’s also fairly polished with only one recurring glitch I’ve noticed (that being when you’ve dealt lethal damage to a monster and it will trigger a QTE while dying, essentially managing to injure or kill you even though it’s already dead). There are some horror elements that pop up here and there and people are dropping like flies as bio-weapon after bio-weapon goes off in the background and the situation gets worse and worse.

Explosions rock everything and the heroes scramble all over the place trying to contain the various outbreaks. Most of the game is so over the top that you can’t really take it seriously and it’s chock full of good old Resident Evil cheesiness. Multiple campaigns, multiple characters to play as and loads of tweaking with the skill builds equal a ton of replay value and a lot of fun in my book and it’s coop to boot!

I like it, but I guess a lot of people don’t. Really curious as to what they are going to do with RE7.

I think I’ll probably be happy so long as it doesn’t star Chris.