Resident Evil 6: The Kotaku Review

When I first started encountering RE6‘s new tweaks , I thought they’d make the awkward tone-deafness of the plot and dialogue bearable. I liked the Combat Gauge, a stamina meter that depletes as you use hand-to-hand combat. Use it too much and you’ll eventually be forced to draw your weapons to kill enemies. That balancing act throws players back into the resource management that is a hallmark of Resident Evil

Quick Shot is another step forward that addresses complaints about the lugubrious nature of Resident Evil games’ controls. It’s a stronger, faster attack that spins you around to blast immediate threats, but it also drains a section off your Combat Gauge.

Some enemies will change shape depending on where you shoot them. Blast an arm on a J’avo soldier and it’ll transmogrify into a swollen, whip-like bludgeon. Or maybe a shield. Weird human-animal hybrids—like man-spiders and upside-down moth-thugs—sprout from human skin after taking damage in RE6. Each type requires a change in strategy to best deal with them.

Playing as the sidekicks offers even more variation to the experience. Their attacks differ from the main heroes in complimentary ways. Jake’s chaperone Sherry, for example, wields a stun baton that lets her smack up enemies with any drain on her combat gauge stamina. The electrified truncheon also kills off enemies without the need for an additional—and time-consuming—finishing stomp. Piers’ sniper proficiency lets you handle ranged threats while Chris eliminates enemies up close.

The enemy design branches along several different trains of thought, too. Zombies in Leon’s campaign are closest to traditional undead shamblers. Chris and Piers fight J’avo who are just as nimble and combat-skilled as they are. Jake and Sherry run through extended chase scenes with a Nemesis-like beast on their trail. Variations on just about every sort of enemy that’s been in an RE game show up here.

You’ll encounter zombies that run, throw projectiles or spit acid. They also shoot machine guns at you, dodge and pounce, too. Some mutate when wounded, others shamble towards you with explosives making it necessary to shoot them from afar. The C-Virus at the root of the game’s bioterrorism spits out many mutations of enemy and part of the scant amount of fun in RE6 is in seeing what happens when you shoot a bad guy.

Resident Evil 6 comes across as a conscious effort to grow the palette—and hopefully, the appeal—of Capcom’s long-running series. Different UI skins, different musical motifs, different weapons and different clichéd attitudes all show up in the game. RE6 isn’t quite a set of triplets, though. It’s more like one lifeform with three heads. And the problems some have had with RE over the last few games persist with this installment. The palette that the dev team is trying to expand feels stubbornly inbred and obsessive, filled with boilerplate conspiracies uncovered by characters who are walking clichés. So, no, this installment isn’t a giant leap in storytelling acumen.

All the campaigns criss-cross over each other and it’s neat getting three, sometimes four points-of-view of a critical moment in the game. Leon’s campaign feels purposefully throwback; it’s more moody horror-focused, at first. Chris’s missions are more gung-ho action affairs—with vehicular combat—that feel like military squad-based brofests like Gears of War. Jake runs through one, long cat-&-mouse chase as he tries to escape a near unkillable enemy. His levels offer up some martial-arts hand-to-hand brawls amongst all the shooting action, too. The extra unlockable campaign goes the stealth route, in what’s probably the biggest departure from the other story options.

The intersection gimmick is a great narrative trick wasted on a terrible story. The interwoven nature of the campaigns also serves to highlight how similar everything feels. In Leon’s campaign, it feels at first that each body you stumble over is a corpse that could re-animate and attack you. Chris’ angst over soldiers dying under his command and Jake’s wise-cracking acrobatics start off feeling like they hold different possibilities but all of the campaigns devolve into a dull room-clearing, door-opening, boss-fighting cycle of boredom.

There is an unforgivable amount of quick-time events in Resident Evil 6. Those prompt-driven button presses and other context-sensitive actions make it hard to ever feel a sense of flow in the game. The constant pop-ups to press a button to open a door or vault up to a ledge broke any kind of immersion I might have felt while playing. Even worse, the cover system here is awful and made me resort to a run-and-gun style more than I would have liked.