PlayStation 3 Review: Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil 6 is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a brilliant game.  I am someone who hasn't been a fan of the franchise's turn to action from survival horror, and while this isn't quite a return to the original games in the series, it finds a much better balance than RE 4 or RE 5 did.  The controls are fluid, the changes from previous iterations seem well considered, and it all looks absolutely fantastic.  That isn't to say that there aren't issues which ought to have been considered and fixed, but despite those, the game remains brilliant.

The new title provides three different main storylines (plus an Ada Wong campaign) with more playable characters than just those four.  And, for you Resident Evil aficionados, RE 6 marks the first time that Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield have been available as campaign characters in a single game.  As for the story, well, that's never really been a strong point of the series, has it?  Okay, yes, they've created a mythology, but it's so twisted and convoluted that unless you're exceptionally involved in it all, said understanding doesn't travel much past there being a bad company called Umbrella Corporation who has been mucking around with human genetics.  Umbrella is now well on its way to destroying our world via a zombie menace (okay, that may totally not have been the goal and there may have been some nefarious, subversive elements within the corporation but the upshot of it is that the world is quickly coming to an end due to the corporation and/or its people).

Listen, don't worry about it, the game certainly doesn't.  Just accept that there are zombies all over creation and that your job is to get from point A to point B killing them as you go.

It truly is a matter of going from point A to point B — Resident Evil 6 is an incredibly linear experience.  Obviously as the game has a tale to tell (no matter how clearly it manages to tell it... or not tell it) there is a necessary starting point and an end point, but you really are just travelling along a single predetermined path as the tale unfolds.  In fact, the game stops repeatedly—far too much—in order to let bits and pieces of the story take place via cutscene.  Perhaps the reason that it feels as though the tale is so minimal is that it all comes out so slowly in such irrelevant-seeming bits and pieces.

Beyond that, the three different campaigns mean that we're really getting three different stories instead of a single one.  Yes, there is an overarching tale and the three individual stories are linked together, but it still comes off as something akin to three separate games, not interlinked ones (even if the stories do actually come together at spots). 

Article Author: Josh Lasser

Josh Lasser, formerly known as "TV and Film Guy," and complete with a Masters Degree in Critical Studies in said areas, gives his opinions on TV, Film, and Entertainment in general. All of which he does in a shameless attempt to try to get paid to do the exact same thing. …

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