What’s your name, soldier? Sit and spin, diiiiick. Where do you get off having that much bad
boy attitude?! He doesn’t play by anyone’s rules! What are you, some kind of bad boy? Yeah, I’m thinking I’m a bad little boy. Resident Evil 6 is such a dead horse at this
point that I’ve been using the very idea of reviewing it a joke on this channel. But there’s a different side to the story
worth covering, since the game’s reputation has evolved over time in a way that’s not
frequently seen. At launch, most critics regarded it as a colossal
failure, with major outlets giving it scores as low as three out of ten- three out of five
would have been considered low for a game in this series. One of the common complaints was that the
game was a pathetic attempt to cash in on the success of military shooters, with Capcom
abandoning horror in pursuit of Call of Duty like sales goals. Along with that the controls and mechanics
were derided as clumsy and broken, the monotonous action sequences were tiresome, the camera
was frustrating, the quick time events were- you know what, just fucking everything, everything
about the game was terrible. Sales momentum dropped sharply after launch
and Capcom rebooted the series with a much more focused and horror based vision that
has served them well since. It would be easy to write the game off as
an embarrassing miscalculation but then it would be hard to explain how the game has
kept selling over the years, taking the number three spot in the rankings. That’s not the number three spot in the
Resident Evil series, that’s number three in Capcom’s entire history, and it’s just
a sliver away from being number two. Granted, a lot of those sales came after the
game landed in the bargain bin, but it still counts for something that Resident Evil 6
just refuses to die. The game’s fans will claim that it continues
selling because it was an extremely fun action game with groundbreaking third person controls
and combat mechanics that were misunderstood by the majority of critics. Their argument is usually that Resident Evil
6 should be approached like a Platinum title, a stylish, over the top action game like Vanquish
or Bayonetta, and that the haters rejected it simply because they were too closed minded
to accept anything that wasn’t survival horror. So who is right? As the internet’s most unbiased nobody I
feel as if it’s my reluctant duty to answer this once and for all, beginning with the
most important point: the controls work really well. Nothing is more fundamental to enjoying Resident
Evil 6 than understanding its mechanics, and this is one area where Capcom has to be blamed
for failing to communicate this to players. Playing RE4 for the first time, I was able
to pick up the controller and dive right in without a hitch in spite of the game’s radically
different perspective. That’s partly because the PS2 controls were
almost identical to the older titles, but also because RE4 was such an intuitive and
straightforward game. In comparison, RE6 feels like it has too many
buttons doing too many things, with combinations of buttons doing other things. It’s not a game that you can just jump straight
into with good results. Usually games with complicated controls have
a tutorial to walk you through everything you need to know; Resident Evil 6 technically
has one, but it wastes its time trying to impress you with explosions and slow moving
quick time events. Considering the percentage of gameplay taken
up by those things, maybe that decision actually makes sense. Capcom explained it by saying they wanted
something cool at the start of the game. And what better summary of RE6 could there
be that the developers didn’t bother teaching you to play because they thought an explosion
would be cooler… an explosion you’ll see later in the game anyway and that they copied
and pasted here because they wanted you to see it twice. But if you take the time to practice each
move on your own and build up the muscle memory, there’s an incredible amount of mobility
at your disposal. You can duck or roll in any direction to avoid
attacks, and even when you’re on the ground you can continue evading. You can power slide with guns blazing and
reverse direction to continue shooting up the enemy’s back. I actually can’t wait for an enemy to throw
something or take a swing since flopping around is so much fun on the face of it. That mobility ties into the new melee system. In past games you were mainly shooting and
could occasionally open up a chance to melee when hitting certain spots. Resident Evil 6 still requires stunning to
perform the most powerful attacks, but you’re free to punch and kick whenever as long as
you have stamina. Pressing aim and fire at the same time will
let you do a powerful quick shot which stuns the enemy right away and sets them up for
easy follow up attacks. One of the common complaints when the game
came out- and one that I shared- was that ammo was far too limited. It felt like a sick joke; to turn the series
into an action shooter and deny you the ability to shoot. But if you actually use the new melee system
that problem goes away… sometimes. More on that later. The game also has a lot of great context sensitive
animations for the attacks depending on your position relative to the enemy and environment. Any time someone defends Resident Evil 6 they
inevitably share a bunch of clips or gifs of wrestling moves to prove that the game
was great, and the action is really flashy and polished. It’s clear that Capcom spent a lot of time
getting the core mechanics to feel great and it’s unfortunate that so many couldn’t
appreciate it. So does that mean that the critics really
were closed minded and that Resident Evil 6 was a misunderstood masterpiece? NO. The big problem with that argument is that
Resident Evil 4 exists. This is the game that gave you ammo when killing
enemies, and gold and other trinkets that could be traded for bigger, better guns. The old games were about avoiding the use
of resources at all costs, this game was all about expending them (now that’s a hell
of a gun!). It introduced quick time events and cover
shooting. It sped up the pace by ditching puzzles and
turning the world into a linear rail so that you could blast through enemies and gather
jewels more efficiently. It was a total betrayal of everything survival
horror was about. So if fans really are so closed minded about
change, why is it that this game is almost universally revered as a masterpiece? What did Resident Evil 6 do in comparison
that was a bridge too far? Letting you roll on the ground? Listening to most of the arguments in favor
of the game, you get the sense that its fans would be fine with everything taking place
in one big room with zombies funnelling in for you to endlessly roundhouse kick. And that’s kind of what Mercenaries mode
is; this is probably RE6 at it’s best, with the focus purely on its combat. But a full game needs a lot more than that;
there’s got to be connective tissue holding it all together. The reason Resident Evil 4 got away with what
it did is that it was nearly perfect all the way through. The opening segment is so fun that it’s
hard to resist starting another playthrough, and afterwards the creepy farm slows things
down and pulls you in to explore. Then there’s another big action section
followed by more atmospheric silence. The game knew just when to change gears to
keep the player interested, and that pacing is such a major part of why the game works. The slow quiet moments are every bit as important
to the game as the action sequences, and without them the action would lose its relative intensity
and become boring. Resident Evil 6 completely and utterly fails
in this regard, mainly because its slow segments are terrible. Jake’s campaign has a chapter where you
search a mountain for three digital macguffins of some kind. Stringing these things across a large mountain
feels like the most uninspired kind of busywork a game can throw at you, as if the developers
needed to fill 15 minutes of time and couldn’t come up with anything better. The few things they tried to make it more
interesting only made it worse and worse to play; it’s already hard to see and the snowstorm
whites out your vision randomly. There’s a giant icy slope with snipers,
machine gunners and snowmobilers charging down it and if you get hit or do any of your
fancy moves you’ll slide all the way down to the giant cliff at the bottom. This is video game hell. And RE6 is full of segments like this. Ada has to search an aircraft carrier for-say
it with me- three whogivesashits, running through dull, copied and pasted barracks,
scavenging for ammo to fight waves of identical enemies using mechanics that lost their appeal
two campaigns ago. When you finally find a key, a monster eats
it and disappears through a vent, padding this junk segment out even more. At times it feels like a High Voltage Software
game- It looks, sounds, and plays like a game made by a much smaller studio with fewer resources. There’s no particular mood to most of it;
the past games were incredibly good at setting a tone for each area. This game’s idea of atmosphere is putting
a couple mannequins in a dark room Aaand that’s it, I guess we’re done with that. There’s an awkwardly long car ride that
I assume is supposed to feel tragic, but after the thousands of zombie heads you’ve suplexed
off during the multiple outbreaks within this game alone it’s kind of hard to feel much
of anything at this point. The soundtrack is full of generic military
themes and stuff that sounds ripped off from other
sources. This is also a matter of taste, but the visual
style looks like someone severely crushed the blacks and blew out everything bright
with bloom. It’s the game equivalent of doing this. Resident Evil remake is a great example of
dark visuals done really well. The lighting and the objects within it are
given special attention, and even the dark areas have a lot of carefully placed detail
to soak in. Even the objects that are brightly lit in
RE6 usually look like junk, and there’s a sense that the darkness is hiding how little
there is to see otherwise. And the game has a lot to hide, considering
that getting close to practically anything will reveal GameCube level assets. The only thing that consistently looks nice
is the character work. Wait a minute… this lady gets around. Resident Evil 5 may not have had much horror
atmosphere, but it was at least an amazing looking game for its time and it still holds
up fairly well. RE6 feels like a step down, and at least on
PC it literally was, with some effects being downgraded. It’s clearly a game where you’re supposed
charging forward without looking around too much. Wait a minute… that guy gets around. The obvious reason for the rushed visuals
is that Capcom was stretched thin developing four scenarios at once, something that turned
out to be much harder than they were expecting, and that’s all Resident Evil 5’s fault. You can pinpoint the exact moment Resident
Evil died as a horror series and it’s right here- when zombies with AK47’s started tactically
ducking behind cover and firing back, the series had finally completely stamped out
the last trace of horror. If you could replace the monsters in your
game with normal humans and it wouldn’t make any difference, you’ve fucked up at
making a horror game. The near universal response to RE5 was that
it was still really solid fun, but that the series had veered too far into action and
needed to tilt back towards horror. The problem is that Resident Evil 5 went on
to become the best selling game in the series, and even the very best selling game in Capcom’s
history until Monster Hunter displaced it. There was no way that Capcom was going to
walk away from sales like that, but they also didn’t want to lose longtime fans. And that dilemma seems like the origin of
the split campaigns. Chris’ scenario feels like the one they
wanted to make. It picks up right where the zombies with guns
idea left off and amps up the military shooter vibe. Leon’s was meant to be the one for horror
fans. The idea of having one scenario for action
and another for horror isn’t necessarily terrible. If they had just stuck to those two and actually
made them distinct from one another then it might have worked. The problem is that Leon’s campaign is hardly
less action focused than any of the others; it’s just as full of explosions, quick time
events, and diving around with guns blazing. Everything that was supposed to make this
“the horror scenario” was just superficial nostalgia; you’ve got the star of Resident
Evil 2, using his Resident Evil 2 handgun in an old creaky building in the midst of
a zombie breakout. But the zombies fly through the air like circles
du soleil performers, and there are only a few brief instances where it’s even remotely
scary. The game has the absolute balls to put you
in a classic Resident Evil type location with locked doors and then force you to watch someone
else unlock them for you. When people say that Resident Evil 6 is a
nonstop action thrillride, they probably don’t mean the part where you slowly walk for ten
minutes following your 5th grade math teacher around. While we’re waiting, here’s a list of
things you can do that are more fun than playing Resident Evil 6: play Bayonetta, or Vanquish
or any of the other much better games that people compare this to when trying to defend
it, apply for a bank loan, read a good book, feel tired, take a walk in the sun, confront
a friend, violate parole, let the past die, kill it if you have to, press the power button
and turn Resident Evil 6 off, and many more. This isn’t a complaint that the game isn’t
enough like the old ones; it’s a complaint that the game is trying to do some other kind
of horror and doing it badly. The point of this sequence is to find the
guy’s daughter, who is infected. Guess what happens? Yeah, that. You go through a large number of scripted
set pieces like this, including a quick time event sequence in a car. Quick time events were pretty effective when
used for things like the knife fight in Resident Evil 4, since it revolved around split second
reflexes. What’s the point of using them here? The game never passes up the chance to throw
another CONTREEVED button mashing sequence in, and even with the option Capcom added
to disable them they’re still there and you still have to sit through them. Then there’s a flicker of hope- you emerge
on the streets to see absolute chaos unfolding, and the music is really good. The game actually has some real atmosphere. It was always interesting to roam the streets
and see the aftermath of the outbreak in the older games, and this was a good chance to
navigate the city while that was unfolding all around you. But then a scripted car crash happens, an
ambulance crashes to block off every route and you’re forced right back onto the linear
rail to start another scripted sequence that will in turn lead to another scripted sequence
that will always end the same way. It’s not a game as much as it is a Universal
studios ride- the one where the shark pops out, and this type of gameplay gets worse
and worse each time you revisit since it just becomes a matter of going through the motions
once you know what’s going to happen. Scripted sequences can work really well when
used in just the right places, but not when everything revolves around them. The game is practically automated to run without
you; it just needs you to press a couple buttons. Most critics thought that Leon’s campaign
was the best, probably because it’s the only one that has any real semblance of atmosphere
or horror, but it’s the worst in terms of utilizing the game’s mechanics. I didn’t like Chris’ scenario at launch,
but revisiting it now with a better grasp on the controls I actually found it to be
the best. Mainly because it has the highest concentration
of actual gameplay vs scripted events. But as it drags on it fails to change the
pace and the action starts to get boring and frustrating. The j’avo mutating when shot is an interesting
mechanic, but the entire game is basically reliant on that one hook. Resident Evil 4 ramped things up as it went
along with the first parasite appearing only once you got a few chapters in. The j’avo are mutating right from the start
and things never really evolve beyond that. I don’t care how they mutate, they’re
all the same machine gun toting bad guys to me, and when they do transform it makes me
dread having to spend twice as long taking them down (“how many of these assholes do
we have to kill?”). Yeah, no shit. And Chris still has plenty of his own bullshit
sequences like this one, where slightly running towards the edge of the dock causes him to…
die?! This motherfucker can’t swim? He should be able to just punch the water
out of his way. At one point you fight a helicopter that spends
a lot of time out of range and when it does appear you’ll probably get swarmed with
a bunch of chicken men. It seems to shoot right through cover and
your limited ammo does become a major problem here, since you can’t exactly melee a chopper
out of the sky, and if the meager amount the game provides isn’t enough you’re in for
a painfully long slog of punching enemies until you get more. Jake’s campaign has you fight the same chopper
again, only this time from the street level where you have an even poorer view of it,
even less ammunition, and don’t even have the excitement of it shooting back. Welcome once again to video game hell. What exactly is the appeal of this supposed
to be? Just to have the campaigns cross over, even
if it leads to totally meaningless gameplay? The game is filled with these “boss fights
for voyeurs.” In Helena’s game you have to run down a
long hall to collect ammo just to continue participating in someone else’s boss fight,
and when you run out of that, then what? Well, it doesn’t really seem to matter,
because it’s all scripted cinematic bullshit. And that really is key to enjoying Resident
Evil 6; you have to like stupid, pointless, exploding bullshit and action movie one liners- and you have
to be impressed by poorly handling vehicle segments that seem wedged into the game just
to expand the scale even further. If you bought a flying simulator that played
like this you would ask for your money back, but it’s in a Resident Evil game where you
don’t expect it, so that means it’s good, right? You’d better have an endless appetite for
this stuff, because there are four whole campaigns of it to get through. The big twist of Jake’s campaign is a stalker
enemy who first seems like a potential throwback to Nemesis from the third game. Unfortunately, he turns out to be nothing
but a quick time event generator, filling Jake’s campaign with even more of this garbage
gameplay than the previous two. By the time you get to Ada, whose scenario
was originally a secret and is even less polished as a result, it feels like everything wrong
with the other scenarios has culminated into its own campaign. Any fun derived from the core controls should
have dissolved by now, and even those mechanics I praised have problems. The game often melees the wrong targets or
uses the wrong object for cover, and in cases like this registers the wrong partner actions. The peripheral mechanics around those core
controls are mostly terrible; it was simple to heal in the old survival horror games. Resident Evil 5 upped the tension with a real
time inventory, which was arranged in a grid where each item was a single press away. Resident Evil 6 puts everything in the real
time menu, even the camera and graphics settings, which makes no sense. No one is looking for tension when trying
to turn their aim invert on or off. The inventory is arranged in a straight row,
which is the least efficient layout possible and requires scrolling through every item
to get to the one you need. And you’ll have to do this often, since
the game somehow manages to leave you empty on ammo but full on inventory most of the
time. Using an herb now requires mixing herbs together,
mixing those herbs together, putting them into a carrying case, and then tapping the
heal button to eat them like tic tacs. The system is so clumsy that you’re likely
to need to heal all over again from the damage you’ve taken while healing the first time. Revelations was a step away from the action
of RE5 and it simplified the healing process to one button press, and again, that was a
more horror oriented game. So why is it the fast paced, over the top
action game that has the most deliberately clumsy healing in the series? What’s the point? Bayonetta doesn’t make you enter button
combos to use a lollipop. Fans of the game defend stuff like this by
saying that you can mix herbs in between melee animations, or that you can use a hidden method
to mix them automatically by holding a button combination. It’s still a bad system, but more importantly,
why is the fast mixing hidden at all, as if it were the konami code? There’s a similar trick where you can hold
the action button to avoid the painfully long recovery times when getting knocked to the
ground, and if you’re lucky you might see the game flash tips like this on the loading
screen. The game shouldn’t have such frustrating
mechanics in the first place, but it definitely bury the “right ways” to do things in
places that most players will never find. Resident Evil 4 made its gameplay much more
addicting by letting you upgrade your guns with really satisfying results. Resident Evil 6, in another apparent nod to
online shooters, replaces this with a three perk system. Most of the perks have no obvious result;
there are two devoted to stabilizing aim and even with both I barely see a difference. The only ones worth bothering with are the
ones with explicitly defined improvements, like 5 extra stamina bars, and once you’ve
found them there’s no use bothering with the rest. You can only equip a few and most of them
don’t work, so what’s the point? The series lost a lot of potential replay
value by ditching its own great upgrade system in favor of poorly copying someone else’s. At this point, the dead horse has been beaten
into a gelatinous pulp and I have to stop. The fair answer is that the game is somewhere
in between both extremes, as the Buddha taught us; it’s not the complete loss that many
people made it out to be at launch and it does deserve more credit for the things it
did well, mainly when it comes to mobility. It is, in small doses, a lot of fun. But the game Capcom built around those controls
is bad, and no amount of “gitting gud” and learning to play the right way changes
the fact that the pacing is terrible and that scenarios are badly lacking polish. In order to argue that this game is good you
have to sweep an incredible amount of garbage under the rug. If you could edit games like a film and stitch
only the good parts together you might be able to make a really good game out of this,
but the half baked game we got failed as a vehicle for its own mechanics. You can still have fun playing it, but it
sucks. In a way, everyone is right about it at once. That’s just the kind of game Resident Evil
6 is; a partially enjoyable failure. If anyone wants to argue that it was unconditionally
great then you must submit evidence of yourself enjoying these bullshit sequences. I want to see you having fun fetch questing
for these keys or climbing these ladders or staring in genuine awe at the game’s 400th
explosion. Post your evidence with the hashtag badboywithxtremetude…
on myspace.
