The Resident Evil series is a popular one with its hands in great games, great books, and depending on who you ask, great movies. The ninth installment of the series, Resident Evil 6, is no exception on last-generation consoles. I was interested to see if the current-generation version could hold up with its predecessors and not surprisingly it did. It has both a gripping, emotional story with beautiful graphics and a lot of replayability added in its Mercenaries mode. Since, in my opinion, the story is the best element this game has to offer, let’s go into that a bit more first.
The story of Resident Evil 6 takes place fourteen years after the Raccoon City incident and has you play as one of several characters after a bioterrorist attack in different parts of the world that released the C-Virus. The campaign has four different storylines that twist into each other but offer different ways to play through them. The storyline you play is determined by the pair you decide to pick at the start of the game which includes Leon and Helena, Chris and Piers, Jake and Sherry, and the mysterious Ada Wong.
Leon and Helena’s campaign is what gives you most of the main story and has them chasing after National Security Advisor Derek C. Simmons who is revealed to be the man behind the attacks. Chris and Piers’s story has you playing as BSAA agents that are fighting against the recent bioterrorist attack and are tracking the girl supposedly behind the attacks, Ada, who is later revealed to be a person designed to look like her named Carla. In Jake and Sherry’s campaign, Jake is a mercenary with antibodies to the virus and Sherry is an agent assigned to go and get him for Simmons. They must also avoid being captured by Carla’s monstrous creation, the Ustanak, which chases you most of the game. Ada’s campaign provides most of the backstory for the game and allows you to play mostly stealthily to find the clone Simmons made of her and stop it from destroying the world with the C-Virus. Confused yet? Don’t be. This is just the beginning and it all plays out in a way that’s easy to understand.
This is my first modern Resident Evil game and it was surprisingly easy for me to just hop into the story with limited knowledge of the previous games. Each chapter is around an hour long and all four stories have five chapters so in the story alone you have around twenty hours of gameplay. The game also comes with a horde mode and multiple online multiplayer modes with both normal and ranked matches. The horde mode is called The Mercenaries and has you going for the highest score you can get by killing zombies in the limited amount of time, which you can extend by killing bigger mutants. The horde mode also has a second variation which increases enemy spawns but only allows you to kill 300 enemies before your game ends. These add a ton of replayability to the game making the title about as long as you are willing to play it. I’ve already spent dozens of hours in the game.
As I said earlier, the graphics are beautiful at 1080p and 60 frames per second but I did have a few problems with textures. The characters in the game look great all the time but the environment seems to have not been given as much of a touch-up. Many of the textures just seemed bland, blocky and blurry. At times they looked updated and were amazing but in some levels like the crypts, the textures just seem to have been ignored. Maybe the developers thought no one would notice because it’s dark? I don’t know. It’s just bizarre. The frame rate was very smooth and I never had any issues with stuttering or freezing. The cutscenes all looked amazing and a lot of the times I felt like I was playing an action movie.
In general, I found playing Resident Evil 6 to be fun and not just dragging through levels since the game had a good mix of normal shooting, puzzles and quick time events to give the title a distinct action-movie feel. The shooting felt very accurate and fun whether you pick enemies off with a sniper or go in their face with a shotgun. Quick time events were almost always realistic with an emphasis on quick. They provide a challenge and also usually don’t involve breaking your hand, but a few times they were very frustrating and I was terrified of breaking my controller. The puzzles in this game are honestly some of my most favorite parts and make you think instead of just placing a waypoint and say shoot. I wish they would have popped up more since they give you a break from the norm.
The interface in the game is amazing and shows you a little bit more about the character you are playing. Going into your inventory doesn’t pause the game so it is important to be able to use it quickly and effectively. I think it was pulled off very well and if you know what you are doing you can easily implement any necessary action. Anytime you are playing you have your smaller panel on either the left or right side depending on your preference which will show your health and ammo. It also allows you to quickly heal. One small feature that I enjoyed was that fact that you have a separate interface customized to the character you are playing so Leon’s and Chris’s displays will show up as different which I thought brought some personality to the characters.
With all of that out of the way, it’s time to talk about some negatives that really bothered me. In fast-paced sequences, it’s important to be able to see and figure out your objective and sadly that is where the game was the worst. Many times throughout Resident Evil 6 you have to run away from the threat of giant monsters or environmental hazards but the locked camera angles make it next to impossible to know where you are going. There are also many times in these running sequences where you have to slide, which mixed with the camera angles, felt very awkward and would also result in some rather unfortunate deaths since if you don’t slide far enough you die. I don’t use cover much in games as I’m the type of person that loves to rush in but when a character actually needed to take cover it’s next to impossible to get in cover. And when you finally do, have fun trying to peek up and shoot because the character will either turn the wrong way, detach from cover, or just not shoot at all.
Summary
Resident Evil 6 is a great third-person shooter that offers a great story and great graphics for both longtime Resident Evil fans and newcomers like me. It offers copious amounts of gameplay and if you enjoy the game, has enough replayability to last a long time. If the issues were to be fixed I have no doubt in my mind that this game could easily be one of the best action games I have played, but with the issues there are just too many problems to ignore. Even with the problems though the story stands out and makes this game worth giving, at least, a playthrough. With the game being only $20, it is more than worth it and I highly recommend checking it out. Had this been priced at $60 I could not recommend it but for this price it represents tremendous value and presentation.
Noel was a regular ICXM contributor in 2016, publishing 83 articles across game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the run-up to Xbox One S and Project Scorpio, plus the broader Windows 10 gaming push.