Game review: Resident Evil 6

I finished this game on stream a couple weeks ago, though I have to admit I only beat 2 campaigns thus far. But was it a better play than number 5? Or was it still not as good as I had hoped for? I say we find out together! Be aware: spoilers!

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The war on bio-terrorism continues as Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, and other famous Resident Evil stalwarts battle a seemingly familiar adversary. It has been ten years since the Raccoon City incident and the President of the United States has decided to reveal the truth behind what took place in the belief that it will curb the current resurgence in bioterrorist activity. With no country safe from these attacks and the ensuing outbreaks, the entire world’s population is united by a common fear that there is no hope left. The story revolves around the development of the latest C-Virus.

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There are four characters, and thus four campaigns to play. This review will, thus, focus mainly on Leon’s and Chris’ campaign as those are the ones that I played, but I’m sure that some comments will also make sense for the 2 remaining campaigns. I first played Leon’s campaign, then I played Chris’ campaign. This means that Jake and Ada are still left to play. Leon’s and Chris’ campaign are inherently different. Chris’ is more action-based, so is Leon’s, but still a lot less considering Chris is a BSAA agent through and through, being the captain to a team reliant on him and his orders. Leon is a federal agent, working more for the government, and on his own. Chris, for example, has way more effective guns than Leon does, more militia based weapons, which, of course, makes sense. Other than that, their weapons and other collectibles, let’s call them, are similar in inventory. The only difference, however, is shown below. In Chris’ campaign, the tiny screen on the right bottom is more vertical than this cube, and honestly, I prefer Leon’s cube. It’s straightforward and easy to look at. The top bars are basically showing you how much health you’ve got left, and of course how many pills you have to heal yourself, and below is the amount of bullets you’ve got left in your magazine, and of course the amount of ammo you’ve got in total for that specific gun.

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Each campaign has a character, all except for Ada, I believe. Leon has Helena, Chris has Piers, and Jake has Sherry. The NPCs are sometimes great to have tagging along as they do get you out of dire situations by shooting next to you or providing cover for you, and of course, the famously known adrenaline revival shot they so happen to have galore. I have to admit that I was saved numerous times by my partner. However, sometimes they’re very neglecting and don’t do what they’re supposed to do, leaving you to clean up all the mess yourself. You can also play with an actual human being as your partner, who controls the NPC, but for a game that also allows single player, I’d say, especially in Chris’ campaign, that they could’ve done a little better with the boss fight game mechanics and play mannerisms of the NPC. I genuinely had to shift to a real human being helping me out, or else I was never going to be able to get past the section. That was definitely a bit of a downer for me in terms of gameplay.

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The boss fights were definitely way better than in Resident Evil 5, but I will say that I kind of hated, especially in Chris’ campaign, the amount of times you had to try and put the monster in the cocoon before you could even attempt to shoot again, break it, and stab it. Three times. On top of that, the monster in Chris’ campaign moved so much, that I wasted all of my ammo because I kept missing. There’s no time to properly lock-in and if you don’t have enough ammo, you just have to hope that your shot hits before the monster moves again. That did frustrate me a lot. I get that the Resident Evil franchise has different levels of their monsters’ transformation and mutation, but if you don’t get refilled on ammo during such a boss fight and are running out of ammo, you can’t do anything but die and restart, try different tactics. On top of that, when you do die, you have to restart the whole boss fight. There’s no checkpoint within. That, too, annoyed me at times. But, Leon’s boss fight was honestly super cool to me. I really loved the bug mutation they gave Simmons. The details on that monster and the design, *chef’s kiss*. Now that, I love. Now that, I can get behind. (See the proof below).

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I got one more thing to complain about before I forget. There’s no saving mechanism, at least not a manual one that Resident Evil 7 and 8 have. If the screen tells you that you reached a checkpoint, you believe the game saved. A checkpoint means a safe spot, right? I thought wrong. I ended the gameplay and was thrown back quite a bit, having to replay quite a lot, and of course, it was also the bit which was one of the harder ones in Leon’s campaign. Technically, the safest thing to do within this game is to wait until the end of an episode, which is hard, because some episodes are longer than others. On top of that, you can’t really see the subchapters that the chapter has, and that too annoys me because if they could make that more clearer, we’d know when it’s sort of safe to log out after the game tells you you’ve reached a checkpoint. That’d be my suggestion to Capcom for this game, and when they make a remake of it.

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Despite the new take they took in this game, I really loved the action packed gameplay. I’ve always loved action based games, and since I love horror games too, the combination to me was amazing. The gameplay when it comes to picking your skills, the shooting, everything is pretty smooth. I do miss the ability to really dodge, and it’s kind of hard to use your knife, so I do stick to guns mostly. I also love how the game has multiple campaigns, not just 2, but 4, especially when three of them are frequently recurring characters. I haven’t played Jake’s campaign yet, as I said, and he’s a new character, but he’s paired up with Sherry, and we all know her from game 2. The campaigns seem to all be vastly different, with of course some overlapping scenes, but Chris’ campaign had completely new enemies compared to Leon. I, of course, don’t know if Jake and Ada will have new enemies, but there’s only one way to find out! The emblems that you have to find isn’t that much different from game 5, so I don’t have many comments on that. The only downside is that in Chris’ campaign, some can only be obtained by Piers, same for some trophies. That does annoy me too, because Piers isn’t known within the Resident Evil franchise until this game, and introducing such a huge responsibility, in a sense, did strike me as surprising. I truly loved this game, it was WAY better than game 5. That one was such a doozy, that this one was a huge step up. Again, I really loved the action packed gameplay, and I do hope they’ll keep it when they remake it. It’s a nice different experience compared to the previous games (before remake 4 came out, which is also a bit more on the action side than the original).

End conclusion: yes, I recommend this game! I shall give Resident Evil 6, 4,5 out of 5 stars!

Love, Skye Lewis ❤

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