A Game I Don't Recommend: Resident Evil 6

Note: This will contains slight spoilers. (Do I even need to put this in? Is this story even worth a spoiler warning?)

Lately, I have been on a quest to play every mainline Resident Evil game from 4 to 7, including the two Revelations games. So far, my experience with the games have been from meh to pretty great, with one exception. I knew going in that Resident Evil 6 was a disliked game, but I wasn't prepared for how bad the game was really going to be.

I went into the game knowing it was bad, but I didn't know why. When I started playing the game, I thought this would be another game I played that people disliked but I liked a little. The very beginning of the game started out relatively strong for me. The shooting felt good, the graphics were pretty, the controls felt fully modernized instead of the half-steps Resident Evil Revelations had, and the zombies were normal zombies. But even in the beginning, bad elements of the game started to emerge. Button prompts, quick time events, and button mashing were apparent, the voice acting was terrible, too many cutscenes were chopping up the gameplay into little bits, and movement with the camera locked was really bad. All of this was just the prelude. What is to come is twenty hours worth of gameplay, four separate campaigns, and all of the good elements I talked about stripped with new bad elements to take its place.

Unlike other Resident Evil games, this one offers four different mini campaigns. One for Leon and Helena as they try to uncover who is the person behind the zombie attacks, one for Chris and Piers as they try to take vengeance against Ada Wong for attacking BSAA soldiers, Jake and Sherry as for Jake has the antibodies for the new virus that is making the new zombie apocalypse and Sherry is tasked with taking his blood, and Ada Wong as she is tasked with cleaning up her name because it's not her doing all of the evil stuff, it's her doppelganger. You can play the campaigns in any order, but I chose the order in which I described the campaigns. I can't remember if it matters story-wise what order you play the campaigns, but by the end I realized the story was crap anyways and that splitting up the campaign into mini stories is a bad idea. Having the one central story like in RE4 or RE5 is much better, as for those stories being more fleshed out plays out much better than mini stories.

In reality, the four campaigns weren't about looking at four different perspectives on an event, it was about having different gameplay elements to appeal to a mass audience. The Leon campaign played like a classic Resident Evil game with zombie galore, the Chris campaign played like shooter game, and so on. This attempt at mass appeal was a mistake and a failure. Instead of focusing on what they did great (a more Leon-like campaign), they quarter-ass each of the four campaigns, appealing to no one. Also, each of the campaigns have a lot of moments that cross with the other campaigns, which mean you play through moments twice. For example, Chris finds Jake and Sherry being surrounded by the enemy, so he and his team give supporting fire from the rooftops while Jake and Sherry fight on the ground. While playing as both sides to that situation is refreshing I guess, but this happens way too many times, and what was originally refreshing turned into boring and repetitive. Speaking of repetitive...

Playing through the same scene multiple times got pretty repetitive, but that is just one brick in the wall of repetivity the game has. The game had so many repetitive elements that by the end I felt exhausted from what felt like playing the campaign four times in a row. Shoot dudes, have most of them mutate so you can shoot them more, perform WWE moves on enemies, destroy boxes for loot, fight bosses, kick more doors than any police or military unit has ever done in there existence, mash the ever-living hell out of buttons along side quick time events, wait for your incompetent A.I. partner to catch up with you, get to a part with large blue zombies that can heal themselves, lose control over the camera and have to run away while dealing with the awful controls, play short and useless segments before hitting yet another cutscene, cry senselessly, give up on the game multiple times followed by telling yourself that not every game you play is a G.O.T.Y. game, and repeat. Campaign one down, three more to go. Each campaign tries to vary up the campaign by bringing in new weapons that still function the same as the other campaign weapons, having a different skin for the HUD that is equally as terrible as the last, and having a different style of gameplay for each campaign that still ends with you doing all of the things I said earlier.

I am not the type of Resident Evil player that says all of the new games are trash and to stick with the older elements. I am fine with the game evolving, but at the same time the older games had elements that are better than the new games, and six was the ultimate breaking point for me. The inventory system was terrible, as for there were not enough inventory slots and didn't give as much choice as to what you want as say RE4, the health system with the pills was terrible, as for there was never a balance between having too many pills with your inventory filled with extra hrerbs and having not enough pills. Instead of the weapons being upgradable, RE6 doesn't have weapon upgrades and instead has a terrible skill system that doesn't allow unlock that much unless you play through the campaign multiple times or play the other modes, which means actually playing more of this game. Some times, the game will do a classic RE thing like trying to find pieces of a key around the area to unlock the door or locking the camera for a quick second like the very early RE games. But even those failed, as for the game told you where the puzzle pieces are around the map and the camera lock didn't blend well with the modern controls.

The final thing I have to say about this abomination of a game that I have been referencing throughout this entry is the lack of control the game gives you. Constant cutscenes, button mashing and quick time events, and more make the amount of actual gameplay feel small. My least favorite enemy wasn't any boss, but this strange bee person, and I hated that enemy because running into it means having to mash my a and d key until they go away.

In the end, Resident Evil 6 is a terrible game that almost killed the RE franchise (thank God for RE7).It is a game so bad that I changed my difficulty from normal to easy not because of the difficulty, but because I wanted to get through the game easier. The only reason you should play this game is if you are playing through all of the RE games, or if you just like playing terrible games. From the bottom of my heart, I say that this is a game I do not recommend.

Coop is alright. Had a lot of fun playing that.

You say you've been on a quest to play every mainline RE from 4 to 7. Does that mean you haven't played the first 3 or zero?

Because you say the Leon campaign "played like a classic RE game" and that's incredibly untrue. I remember them PROMISING that Leon campaign would be there for the people who like the classic ones and then when everyone played it they were massively disappointed. It's nothing like that.

and if you haven't played the old ones, why did you skip them? REmake is a masterpiece.

I've written about it elsewhere, but I actually enjoy how much of a bombastic "swing for the fences" trainwreck RE6 is. Its failures do not come from a lack of effort or budget, but instead a lot of it feels like Capcom took all of the wrong lessons from the big AAA games of that time period and put them together into one product. Between the constant insta-death QTEs, the scripted events that wrest control from you every handful of minutes (often involving something, somewhere, exploding for no good reason) and the entirely self-serious nonsense storytelling, it's the kind of mess I can't help but admire. It's not good by any means, but I've derived legitimate enjoyment from playing it. The shooting actually has some neat mechanics, when it's not shoving terrible bullet sponge bosses or garbage QTEs at you.

I remember playing this shortly after they updated the controls from the apparent very bad to what we have now, and I remember having a pretty good time with it, I’m always up for some bad schlocky action. Then I came back to it when it came out on Xbox one and couldn’t stand playing past chapter one of Leon’s story.

@frostyryan: that was poor wording on my part. I meant to reference RE4 and not the earlier RE games.

@frostyryan: That Leon part was the closest the game got to original Resident Evil, which is I guess what they might have meant to say rather than it actually playing like any of the classic titles. It was slower paced, had a cemetery, had more classically looking zombies etc. Of course it goes off the rails in the end, as does most of RE6, but compared to Weskers campaign where you're doing hadoukens to mutating zombies in masks it's night and day.

I do agree with @arbitrarywater that the way RE6 swings and misses can be endearing at times, like the above mentioned insane Wesker parts. That said there was still a whole lot of bad "game" there that hampered your enjoyment once the novelty wore off.

@legend: yeah same here, I played through co-op with my brother and had some good fun with it.

@legend: That's the only way I played it, and I liked it.

I'm not precious about Resident Evil, so it was some dumb fun (like Blood on the Sand or the first Army of Two).

I didn't mind 6 but I really think that the game should have made you play the campaigns in a certain order.

This game gets way too much shit, it's dumb, but not any worse than 5 really. It's a middling action game, but with a lot of content.

@tothenines: Confession: I had more fun with 6 than 5...

I'd respond why i disagree, but someone already made a well produced video about it.
All my feelings are contained within.

I didn't try this on release, but got it for PC in a bundle last year. It sounds like you persevered further than I did, but I totally agree with your conclusions. Loved 4 and got on OK with 5, but this one was a real stinker.

Weirdly enough, RE6 is what? The second best selling RE game ever? Not sure if that includes are the re-releases of the earlier games, but... Damn. Even with mixed reviews and stuff at the time it still sold incredibly well.

I remember really liking the first demo, and then not really liking the second one. I thought the action controls were pretty cool once you learned how they worked but I never actually got around to buying it after the bad reviews. I haven't played RE 6 or 7, never beat 4 and only beat 5 in co-op with cheat codes lol. I kinda want to just play this game now after reading this for whatever reason.

I still unironically adore that game. One of my favorite games of the generation.

RE6 is one of the worst games I've played through to completion. I hate how the game took place in perpetual darkness. It made an already linear game feel claustrophobic, and not in a good survival-horrory type of way. The game was just ugly to look at.

Also, I hated Jake and Sherry. Also, I hate this game.