Hello and welcome back to Andi Hamilton’s Resident Evil weekly. I bloody did it, I went and played through Resident Evil 6 last week and, well, let’s just say I was very surprised with what I found. I’m going to have to re-jig the Resident Evil list at some point in the future based on these new findings. I would say this is perhaps the end of my Resident Evil kick but I’ve also replayed Resident Evil 7 and am currently halfway through a quick run through the original game on original hardware and am having a really great time. Will it ever end? Is 2023 the year of Resident Evil?

No, because Zelda and Street Fighter are out in the next couple of months. For now, you’re going to have to put up with a bit more Resi…

RESIDENT EVIL 6

I think, around the time of its release, I really didn’t want what Resident Evil 6 was delivering. Resident Evil is a series that contains several of my all-time favourite videogames and I love them because of how Resident Evil they are - they scratch a really specific itch - and while Resident Evil 4 changed that a fair bit, it is a bloody action masterpiece in its own right, so the disappointment I felt from the move to much more action-based gameplay and a focus on co-op with Resident Evil 5 was still stinging a bit. Resident Evil 6 doubles down on both of those elements to the point where it really isn’t a Resident Evil game at all. I finished it but I didn’t really enjoy my time with it.

Playing it last week, I can safely say that Resident Evil 6 isn’t a bad game at all - in fact there’s some excellent sections during its three campaigns - but it is about as far from a Resident Evil game as you can imagine. That does mean, however, that it isn’t the worst mainline Resident Evil game because, frankly, it isn’t one. It is all-in on the co-op action stuff started with Resident Evil 5 but, for my money, improves on it in every single way. It’s a really varied, relentless campaign that also happens to be one of the most bloated messes of a game I’ve played in quite some time. Capcom were high as fuck on their own supply by this point. Just think about it for a second - three full AAA budget campaigns that are the length of any normal Resident Evil game, all offering a different approach to the Resident Evil style in order to appeal to as many parts of the market as possible. They thought they could do no wrong, that bigger is absolutely better and that this was going to be the Resident Evil games to end all Resident Evil games. It nearly fucking did end them, too.

Let’s get the bad stuff out the way. The best way to describe the overall Resident Evil 6 experience is that it is a jack of all-trades, a master of none. Everything about it seems to be desperate to placate the needs of a different audience - fans of Resi 4 and 5, fans of the classic survival horror games in the series and this mythical ‘Call of Duty’ audience that every publisher was after a slice of around the time of its release. It even tries to appease fans of the dreadful Resident Evil movie series and get a bunch of that unfortunately massive audience on board. It’s so big and bloated. A glorious mess but a mess nonetheless.

There’s THREE full campaigns to play through (four if you count Ada’s one that ties all three together, that you should play after you’ve finished the rest) and they’re all quite different. Leon’s campaign tries to stick closest to the classic Resident Evil formula, Chris’ is basically all action and the one trying to be a standard Xbox 360/PS3 third-person cover shooter while Jake’s campaign is one that is the most unique, with a few stealth sections and some hand-to-hand combat thrown in. The problem here is that none of them truly excel at what they’re trying to do - there’s better Resident Evil games, better third-person shooters, better co-op games and, well, just better available. You could knock near two thirds of the content out of Resident Evil 6 and have one of the tightest, exciting shooters around but unfortunately, it tries to satisfy too many different audiences all at once and ends up falling short on three different fronts.

Then there’s the plot. Jesus Christ, the plot. Look, it is fair to say that Resident Evil was already in the wilderness in regards to some sort of compelling, sensible connective narrative at this point and it is also fair to say that if you come to a series that contains a fight with a zombified elephant and a wizard who can control slugs by singing expecting something straightforward and grounded then more fool you, but Resident Evil 6 is something else. Any game that opens with you shooting the zombified president of the USA is a game that immediately draws a line in the sand and says “once you cross this, there’s no going back. You’re either with me or against me.”

It’s not just that the plot of Resident Evil 6 is nonsensical bullshit but that it hits you with this bullshit at a relentless pace. That’s Sherry Birkin?? He’s Wesker’s SON??? Ada is a good guy???? Wait, Ada is EVIL?!? Chris has post-traumatic stress induced amnesia?? Leon’s boss is behind everything and always has been??? What’s a Neo-Umbrella?? Hang on, there’s TWO Ada Wongs????????? Resident Evil 6 gets away with this constant assault of baffling plot points by never really sticking around long enough for you to actually think about them but this also has the effect of everything feeling utterly transient and worthless, like they’re just throwing daft twists and turns at you for the sake of it rather than to actually contribute to the narrative, the characters or the overall Resident Evil series lore in any meaningful way.

The pace is exhausting. I love the game Strider because of how it chains a series of incredibly exciting set-pieces together to form one breathless run through five stages. From the word go, you’re doing cool shit and this keeps up until the very end, twenty minutes later. Resident Evil 6 is twenty HOURS. Twenty hours of being bounced from sequence to sequence of wildly varying quality. Again, no section really sticks around long enough to outstay its welcome but at the same time, nothing is particularly engaging. It’s all very throwaway and disposable.

Thing is, when Resident Evil 6 hits, it is fantastic fun. One of Leon’s chapters has you go from dealing with an outbreak whilst on a plane, crash landing said plane, fighting a near indestructible monster in the fiery crash site, battling through a market full of regenerating monsters and then fighting a giant monster whilst on the roof of a speeding train, all in the space of an hour. It’s thrilling stuff - about as far removed from the original Resident Evil formula as possible - but thrilling nonetheless. Although the overall plot is a bit of a disaster (with one boss being a tonal low point for the entire series, somehow even more awkwardly shit than the stuff in Resident Evil 5) the actual character stuff is pretty good! Leon is still the absolute hero of the piece, Jake and Sherry start off as extremely convoluted entries into the Resident Evil canon but develop a very likeable relationship as a team throughout their journey. The real star of the show is Piers Nivens, the other character in Chris Redfield’s campaign. Let me tell you, if you’re playing Resi 6, pick Piers during Chris’ campaign - he’s basically Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2, while Chris takes on the role as Snake in the same game, the grizzled veteran who you see do all of the stuff that gave him his legendary status. Piers seems like a bit of a boy scout, a boring, bland character at first but by the end of Chris’ campaign, he’s PIERS FUCKING NIVENS.

As a co-op experience, Resident Evil 6 is twice the game Resident Evil 5 is. There’s so much variety to the co-op stuff, where it often has both players doing quite different things. Resi 5 is just a series of varied firefights and the odd part where someone has to pull a switch. Resi 6 will do things like have one player drive a vehicle while the other shoots at enemies, or one person be performing some puzzle section while the other is locked in pure combat, for instance. There’s loads of short minigame style sections which, although a bit hit and miss in terms of quality, offer a nice change of pace for their brief durations. There’s also a few parts where two of the game’s duos meet up for a big firefight and it is possible to have the game matchmake you with another team of players who are at that section in the corresponding campaign, giving you a short four player event to take part in. The trade off here is when playing single player, these are sections you basically have to do twice during a full playthrough, which is a bit disappointing, but unlike Resident Evil 5 where the focus on multiplayer is so detrimental to the single player experience it doesn’t feel worth it, here the opposite is true.

It’s also an absolute stunner of a game, even years later. The HD version that I played through gives a little lick of paint to everything, sure, but the presentation just oozes quality. You can SEE the money Capcom spent on this one. The China levels are packed with detail, the light and shadow of the subway section in Leon’s campaign is used to create some effective zombie movie atmosphere and, speaking of zombie movies, there’s another section during Leon’s campaign where you play through the moments immediately following an infection outbreak. This is a whole year before The Last Of Us and Capcom absolutely nail the total chaos of a city falling apart in a matter of minutes - cars crashing, people screaming, everything exploding while zombies run around grabbing hold of anyone unfortunate enough to be within arms reach.

The combat is also really fun. The controls are now that of a standard third person action game but with the added wrinkle of having a stamina bar that you can burn to pull off a bunch of attacks that add a lot of STYLE to the combat. Melee attacks are far more varied and actually useful (with Jake having a full hand-to-hand combat style that works surprisingly well), loads of new takedowns (with some wrestling moves that’ll get you off your seat!) and being able to dive to the floor like Chow Yun-Fat and then start rolling around on your back firing off shots never gets old. It is cool as fuck. Again, that word again - variety - there’s so many different types of enemies, different types of encounters and different choices you can make in combat and not all of them land, but this game is the Resident Evil version of Stevie Wonder playing darts. Capcom throw enough stuff out during the twenty or so hours to hit the bullseye a few times. It’s just a case of whether your patience lasts through the times they miss the fucking dart board.

Honestly, I have to rethink my stance on this one. Despite there being a lot I don’t like about this game there’s still something in here that kept me on the hook for the entire duration. Resident Evil 6 might be a big old mess but its one that has just enough quality moments throughout to make it a more interesting and entertaining time than Resident Evil 5. Sure, it might not be a Resident Evil game any more but it is definitely a very good action game, one that is almost certainly a great time on co-op. Resident Evil 5 manages to be a bad Resident Evil game AND a bad action game. At least this gets one part of that equation right.

THANKS FOR READING.

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