Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil 6 was widely regarded as a total flop. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, because I actually really liked it. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

The first thing I noticed was that the disk was interminably loud inside the PS3. There really didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, but I was aware of the noise for the whole of the game.
The game starts in the midst of a scene that you'll actually experience again later on, but it gives you a taste of how things are going to go. This segment is more of an interactive movie, with brief movement of off the set path
Herbs are now taken in tablet form for health, which makes a lot more sense than imagining a character to be chewing on a leaf while bleeding copiously. Although even tablets don't make much sense in that scenario.
I was struck by just how SHINY all the hair is. It is really distracting.
There is a hell of a lot of adrenaline in this opening part, especially with the helicopter. It's pretty non-stop, but I really enjoyed it.



After the title screen is the campaign select for the main game. You can choose between Leon's, Chris' or Jake's campaign, and there is some different shadowy action going on in the background if you hover over each of the names.
I selected Leon's campaign first, and chose to play as Helena, who reminds me a lot of Jorja Fox. The first thing that happens is once again very dramatic, as the President is shot.
I must admit that I can't recall how much of the gameplay dynamic is transferred over from Resident Evil 5, because I played very little of it.

You have a PDA that will point you in the right direction if you hold down the L2 button. This is undeniably handy, but, I found that I came to rely on it too much, and if it was never there in the first place I probably would have found my way around just fine.
I thought the melée moves were good, and a far cry from barely being able to defend yourself if you ran out of bullets, as in the earlier games. The camera, however, gets pretty damn annoying, especially when it gets stuck around your head.

I need to invest in something that will take proper screenshots.

"Style is our middle name."

The AI is not always very speedy at defending you. In regard to partner interactions, what is listed as the "Follow" command on screen actually causes "Fall Back," and the exchange of partner praise and thanks sounds very sarcastic.
It becomes hard to find ammo and herbs fairly quickly during the non-stop pressure. Look for the red arrows above bodies, and snag anything before it fades. During the scenario on the bus, it took ages for me to get any ammunition. Leon's occasional shots at the main enemy didn't seem to have any merit, and I had to kick a lot of bad guys to death before I finally got some damn shells and could end the fight fairly quickly. The zombies in this game melt, which is a bit strange and possibly explained by the C-virus in some way.

The cathedral chapter seems to be my favourite part of the game. I'm not entirely sure why, it might be the barely-fleshy skeletons that I am terrified of and fascinated by in equal measure. There are a lot of lever puzzles and pulling switches in pairs, something that I seem to recall from Resident Evil 5. It was also in this part of the game that I discovered that "Serpent Emblems" are a thing.
I found the laboratory area tricky because I have Dyscalculia; in simple terms, it's the numbers equivalent of Dyslexia. As well as being horrible at mathematics, I muddle-up the order of numbers I have just read, even if they are only three digits. This meant that I opened some of the doors that I really didn't want to, in that laboratory. I can't help but think that for every player without Dyscalculia, this wouldn't have been a puzzle at all.

Yay wheelchair access.

Hello there.

We run into Ada, which is rather mandatory in a Leon campaign. However, she looks very facially different this time around. The catacombs in this campaign are creepy as all hell; there are skeletons up close in crawl spaces and sat up posed out of their coffins. Who lit all those candles, who moved the skeletons, and who are all the dead people?!
I appreciate how frequent the checkpoints are in this game, because it would be very frustrating if they were spaced further apart.

I find that the "Beat the chapter without . . . " awards are the result of me not being able to get the given thing to work, rather than consciously trying to get through without it.
The campaigns of different characters intersect with each other, which is interesting at first, but somewhat repetitive from the perspective of those other characters.
Speaking of repetition, there are a lot of successive boss fights with Simmons that just become absolutely ridiculous. Die already.

There are further FMV sequences after the credits of each campaign, and a different song plays during each campaign's credits.

Lordy.

Next I played Chris' campaign, and again selected the secondary character, Piers Nivans, who might actually have the worst name ever. Even "Keith" may be a more attractive name than "Piers."
Chris' campaign was nowhere near as engaging as Leon's. I finished it in one day and quite honestly hated it.
It all gets very tedious with the gigantic Bio-Organic Weapons and the helicopters. There's a giant snake that harks back to Resident Evil 1, but it's invisible.
The driving segment of this campaign is pretty bad and requires skill not normally needed for survival horror games; skill that I don't have.
On the subject of skill, the "Skill Points" that you collect throughout the game seem to be somewhat useless and I never really got the hang of using them.

It was very annoying trying to beat the big cocoon monster with the falling platforms. That was seriously a lot of bullshit. I hated this campaign.


For Jake's campaign I elected to play as Sherry Birkin, whom you may remember from Resident Evil 2. There must be something about her voice or her mannerisms that is akin to Rebecca Chambers, because I had a few moments of feeling like I was back in Resident Evil 0.
"Ada" says something during this campaign, and a truer statement has never been made.

"Albert Wesker was a colossal imbecile."

There's a room full of mannequins, and that's pretty creepy. B.O.W. fights overlap with Chris' campaign, which is rather boring. In the snowstorm scenery, it's impossible to see where you're going, but the PDA points you in the right direction anyway. The snowmobiles are annoying to drive and kind of seem like a pointless attempt to insert more action into the game, not that it really needed any.
Ustanak, the indestructible guy, is a pain in the ass. The fear of him turns to boredom very quickly. You can rush through the maze part fairly quickly without paying mind to the moths, as long as you're really quick on the door wheel.

The passcode fiasco in the Chinese facility is also on the annoying side. It was hard to see the symbols in order to retain the knowledge of which ones I needed to press. Hiding in the lockers in an attempt to see them entered again, only got me found by bad guys. I had to leave and go back to the other side of the building before I could get the room to seem to reset and then another dude would come along and enter the passcode.
The entrance to the locker room disappears behind them after the cutscene.

The part with the tank is frankly utter balls and it's so easy to get needlessly tripped and run over.
There's a terrifying chainsaw-armed creature named the Ubistvo which makes a few stressful repeat appearances.

I did appreciate that on the turning lift towards the end, the X prompt does not come up unless you're at the correct doorway. That could have been a real pain in the ass otherwise.
So, while this campaign wasn't fabulous, it was still much better than Chris'.


The PS3 had a software update, which gave me Ada's campaign. There's some old-style Resident Evil puzzle-solving very early on, in the form of finding something hidden in a picture.
The submarine escape is mildly stressful; you can drown if you lose your way, but dying does allow you to learn the route.
You get to revisit the cathedral and the weird gaspy zombies, which I enjoyed and dreaded simultaneously.
The game uses camera angles to hint at the use of Ada's hookshot, but it can still be hard to find the right position to bring up the X prompt.
WHY ARE THESE BODIES ON THE CEILING?
The sheer number of dead people walking around, as well as the century that their armour seems to be from, is a little bit confusing.

The crossbow is actually a pretty decent weapon even though it doesn't seem like it at first. It's great on enemies with shells, and if you remember to manually reload an arrow during the enemy's recovery animation, you shouldn't get too overwhelmed.
Ubistvo makes an appearance for Ada too, which is uncomfortable as ever. You come across some actual zombies! You can snipe them from a set of rooftops, and jump along them to avoid touching the ground. Ubistvo unfortunately resurges along with some crawling zombies on the ground, which was totally not cool.
I found the train track segment a bit ridiculous, as Ada could surely have hopped over the electrical charge.

I feel like the game could have gone further with the enemies on the ship, whose armour accommodates spider fangs, and yet nothing really comes of them.
The indestructible creatures who multiply when shot, are another enemy that crosses the line from being scary to just being annoying.
The part with Carla is really quite genuinely disturbing.
Driving the helicopter was quite an enjoyable segment, much more so than driving cars during the other campaigns.
I noticed that Ada says "Simmons" a lot when she talks, and her ending is really lacklustre in comparison to the others. Her RE2 theme does resurface halfway through her credits, though.


In summary, a lot of things about this game were in fact tiring and annoying and just thoroughly unlikeable. And yet, I still feel quite positively about it overall.