Resident Evil 6 Review
Played on Xbox One (base)
Developed by Capcom
Released 2nd October 2012
Played Co-op
A lot of hope had dissipated before Resident Evil 6's launch when many of its revealed design choices came into the spotlight. The idea to "evolve" the series into an action genre, abandoning its survival horror roots to reach a greater market was one of the few red flags. Another aspect of its development that should've been a more noticeable flaw is how the development team contained over 200 members. A large group and a monetary goal always make games feel less like a work of art and more like a conglomerate scam. Despite this, the game launched commercially strong with sales hitting 4.9 million copies (enough to be Capcom's 4th best-seller at the time) before plateauing. Critically, it was the weakest of the franchise, being one of the only games in the series to not receive a positive review on Metacritic.
Story
The story of Resident Evil 6 is worse than I could've imagined. There are a total of four campaigns you can play through: Leon Kennedy's, Ada Wong's, Jake Muller's and Chris Redfield's. The game tries to be creative by having each of these campaigns separate from one another with their own defining objective, while also trying to synchronise each of their events to show that they're all happening simultaneously. However, all that the discontinued timelines do is leave the player feeling discombobulated while trying to piece together the incoherent story. The narrative having many continuity errors also doesn't help it in this situation.
Despite Leon's story being the most akin to the horror origins of the series, this game is so filled with mind-numbing explosions and "adrenaline-filled" sequences that it felt more like an action-packed film than a game. In fact, it felt like a Hollywood-forced project that was only released to capitalise on the audience's enjoyment of the previous titles.
The only positive that I can think of that can emerge out of this dumpster fire of a narrative is that it contained a pretty cool concept that I wish was given another chance. The idea of the C-virus mutating and evolving its hosts at an alarming rate wasn't executed too badly, however, with such an intriguing premise, I wish it was given another chance as it feels like a goldmine of great ideas waiting to happen. One last good thing about this game is limited to the co-op but if you are going to play solo - don't. This game is best enjoyed with a friend by your side as some of the ridiculous things that happen are perfect to make fun of, and that's where the majority of the fun comes from.
Gameplay
The gameplay is appalling. The worst part about this isn't how poorly executed or how badly they messed up simple steps, it's how they let any of these concepts progress this far. In fact, I'd say that these executions of the smooth sliding and running or the gunplay were possibly one of the only redeeming factors of the gameplay if it weren't overshadowed by its disastrous, conceptual flaws.
Resident Evil 6 follows the same formula as Resident Evil 5, that being an action-packed co-op adventure. The difference, however, is how much Resident Evil 6 abandons the near-perfected aspects of its predecessors. From the most minor things such as making the HUD so ugly and convoluted to navigate through, to relying on QTEs to provide suspenseful moments. Previous titles would successfully pace out their action between sections making each one as, if not more, exhilarating than the previous moment. What this game does is over-fuel the player with excessive shootouts and explosions, ultimately making it unfun. The action simply drags on for too long, progressively losing its intensity and it being designed in such a sloppy way doesn't help it. There is so little downtime for you to cherish the area you just played through that when you do experience downtime, you feel washed out and even bored. This re-occurring boredom doesn't just pop up during the rare breathers, rather, it makes an appearance throughout the game. The levels are haphazardly copied and pasted between campaigns to re-tell the story and align the narratives. However, all they end up doing is making you re-do plain objectives that weren't designed for fun, but instead, designed as filler.
Some other nitpicks I have that served as constant annoyances and overwhelming flaws for me are this: Why is the player built like a flimsy piece of paper that gets knocked over by everything? Why does the co-op option exist for Ada if the invited player can't interact with objects, appear in cutscenes or do anything to help the host? Why does none of the weapons feel unique enough to warrant a reskin in between campaigns? Why was I consistently given ammo and healing items, making the whole game feel unnecessarily easier? Why is there a QTE for every dramatic door that needs opening?
One positive thing I can say about the gameplay is the enemy selection. The J'avo are a very good addition to this game that fits with the lore. These enemies "evolve" by how your shots and hits land on them. If I constantly hit an enemy's torso/arms, they'll transform their arm into a large shield capable of bulldozing. If you headshot an enemy, they change their upper body into this stag beetle monstrosity. These two evolutions appeared the most with, unfortunately, barely any sign of other mutations. However, in certain circumstances, I was able to fight against new evolutions such as a wing-sprouted enemy and more.
Bossfights
The bossfights are incredibly shallow. Typically when making a boss fight, you slightly innovate the gameplay by advancing its basic concepts and fundamentals. This game does the exact opposite and simplifies the already-numbing gameplay even further. There is no flavour in these bossfights. They all consisted of us unloading all of our ammo into the boss with even less strategic employment involved. The only good thing about these bosses is that they do have great designs and the over-exaggeration of the C-Virus concept is magnificent, but it's a shame that couldn't be said the same about the gameplay.
Characters
Giving the characters in this game extra screen time is the equivalent of seasoning cardboard. You might improve the overall quality, but you're most likely doing nothing but prolonging the terrible moment. All of the new characters introduced for this game are so incredibly forgettable, and plain and have the biggest sense of basicness that the characters could say their name 500 times on screen and I still won't remember or care enough about them to remember it.
Also, these co-op pairings make it seem like the developers didn't think the whole thing through. This is due to how whoever plays the returning character will make their partner feel like they're a side character not worth the attention. If the plan was to entice players into every campaign with these returning characters and try to prioritise the new ones, then it backfired tremendously. It would've been significantly better to have Leon with Ada or Sherry, Chris with Jill, etc., and then put the new characters in their own campaign with their own spotlight to at least prevent tainting the fan favourites. Other than this, it's pretty obvious what the characters were like: the new ones were vanilla, equipped with poorly written one-liners while the classic icons remained (mostly) identical to their previous instalment's counterpart.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere strikes a very unfortunate mix of balanced decency and atrocity. For example, the sound effects provide enough of an impact to be called fulfilling, however, the music is very 'meh'. The intense, horror-themed orchestra has this action-game tempo that didn't work well with me as all I can think about when I hear it, is any scene with the Symbiote suit from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. Another case is how the character animation was good but the facial animations were way below sub-par. Or how the designs for the characters and enemies look great but the environment they were placed in had incredibly inconsistent textures. These characters could have details on the fabric of their clothes but non-interactable items littered around the area look like they're still rendering in early 2000s graphics. They didn't affect my time playing the game, but these small inconveniences ultimately ruined my potential immersion into the world.
Story - 3.5/10
Gameplay - 3/10
Bossfights - 4/10
Characters - 3/10
Atmosphere - 5/10
Bad
While Resident Evil 5 was mostly mediocre, it did have some downs that were redeemed by how you could spin the flaw into a joke with a co-op partner. Resident Evil 6 has a similar philosophy, however, the whole game was so awful that it looped all the way around to being a fun experience you can shithouse with a friend.
