One of my fondest memories as a child is my dad surprising me out the blue with a copy of Resident Evil 2, one of the most talked about games on the school yard. He didn’t know I wanted it, he didn’t know it was popular, it was just a father doing a nice thing for his kid. Who knew that such a precious memory that filled me with such joy as a child would result in filling me with incredible angst, anger and frustration two decades later?
Welcome to Terrible Tuesday. Where I play the worst games so you don’t have to.
I know more about the Resident Evil franchise than anyone rightly should. I’ve experienced so much of it I believe I could be considered certifiably insane by the state. Don’t believe me? Here’s a run down.
I’ve played:
Resident Evil
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
Resident Evil: Code Veronica
Resident Evil Gaiden
Resident Evil (GC)
Resident Evil Zero
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil: Outbreak Files 1 AND 2
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition
Resident Evil Revelations
Resident Evil Revelations 2
By the time Mercenaries 3D and Operation Raccoon City I was thankfully smart enough to avoid some of the bullshit. I also avoided the Chronicles only because my Wii existed for Rock Band and Smash Bros only. Though I did watch Let’s Plays of both games. As an aside, Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2 and Evil Within are all under my belt as well.
I’ve watched: Resident Evil, Resident Evil Apocalypse, Resident Evil Extinction, Resident Evil Afterlife, Resident Evil Retribution, Resident Evil Degeneration and Resident Evil Damnation.
I’ve even read the S.D. Perry novels where the author displays a weird, borderline perverse Misery starring Annie Wilkes level obsession with STARS Bravo member Rebecca Chambers. Yes. All four of them. But hey, we all have skeletons we’re very ashamed of in our closets.
Oh Rebecca, you’re so good at running.
I even own a copy of the Resident Evil Archives.
Is it because Resident Evil is particularly good? No. Not really. I can count the best offerings of the franchise on approximately three fingers. It’s an odd series to keep up to date on, I admit, and this is coming from the guy who refused to stay on board with Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy because they couldn’t get their shit together.
So I heard the warnings of Resident Evil 6 well and good. Read the reviews and several forums on websites across the great expansive web with warnings to stay far and away from the game. I read of Capcom’s own vast shame over the title paired with their promises that they would never, ever let something like 6 happen again.
My response?
“It can’t be that bad.”
So here we are. Where do we start? Oh where do we start.
I guess I should tell you what Resident Evil 6 IS. But honestly, as of writing this, I’m still trying to figure it out. You can play 4 different campaigns in this game, from seven different perspectives. Each campaign starts some place else on the game’s overall “timeline of events”, so some characters start in the “middle” of the story while some are at the beginning. Each character also has different motivations and circumstances. Each campaign also plays different from the other, even with escalating levels of difficulty, Leon being the most “relaxed” (relaxed is a relative term here, trust me), Chris being the most action oriented and Jake requiring overall finesse.
You following all this shit yet? Because I actually needed a guide to tell me which campaign to play first as who and when.
I feel like two theories were at work here. First, breaking up the timeline and character perspectives was done for replay value. Second, each campaign was meant to feel like a different genre. The problem is even with Jake’s Russian Olympian Gymnast act and Leon’s more toned down survival horror approach, each and every single campaign was inevitably about balls to the walls action, which destroyed any remote feeling of atmosphere or setting. I might take issue walking into a Woody Allen movie about a lovelorn book author to see JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield monster had a guest role tearing up downtown Manhattan out the blue. Roughly the same feeling here.
I don’t want to spend too long on the fast food garbage bin this game calls a plot, but let’s break it down for the hell of it. As Leon and Helena, you’ll get the intensity of having to kill Leon’s best friend, the President (Note to NSA, I’m only relaying the plot of the game.) Helena then takes you on some kind of vague quest that involves revenge or saving the planet or something, I don’t know. You have newcomer Jake Muller and adorable Sherry Birkin, last we saw as a child, who is now 26 years old and complete spank bank fodder, because that’s not creepy. Jake is related to series baddie Albert Wesker, and it shows because Capcom seems to believe his assholish, football star shoving nerds into lockers behavior makes him about 100% cooler than he actually is. Sherry then takes you on some kind of vague quest that involves revenge or saving the planet or something, I don’t know.
Hay guys remember when I was 12?
Finally there’s the series beefcake, puncher of rocks, arguably one of the two or three primary protagonists (sorry Claire, go eat a dick, signed Capcom) of the entire franchise; Chris Redfield. Chris is defending the world from bio-weapon threats alongside rookie and white knight Piers Nivans, who I assume joined the military so people like Jake would stop shoving him into lockers for his nerdy name. Last we saw Chris, he was on a desperate quest to rescue the lady he’s definitely not tapping Jill Valentine from the clutches of that pesky, mustache twirling Wesker. It was a revenge quest if you will. In RE6 Chris takes Piers on some kind of vague quest that…
You guessed it.
Involves saving the world or revenge or something I don’t know.
Here’s the problem with that. Every major plot villain in the Resident Evil franchise died by or before 5, including the monocled maleficent maniacally laughing Wesker. Any villain Chris and by extension the fanbase has an emotional connection to seeing deep sixed has been well and deep sixed. Which means Chris is only on a revenge quest in 6 because it worked well the first time. It also makes Chris look like a crazy person. I want you to keep in mind your favorite Hollywood action star. Your Christian Bales or Mel Gibsons. Pretty badass on screen, right? Pretty batshit fucking crazy in their personal life, correct? That’s Chris. That’s what Chris sounds like.
Chris is also a misogynistic, abusive, layabout drunk. Which is basically the same thing as the take charge, heroic, white knight he’s been portrayed as in the five titles he’s appeared in prior. If they wanted a “retired vet” storyline for Chris something like this would have made more sense:
After shit talking Chris I will say I found his campaign the most fun.
Just reflect on that while I move on.
While I would never credit the Resident Evil franchise for having the tightest controls in gaming history, I would at least give it credit for being overall successful for what they put forth and creating an enjoyable experience in its own right, even if the titles don’t age well like say… Resident Evil 1 through 5. You know. All of them. But in actually playing them the first time, during the time period they’re released, yes they can be effective and dare I say fun. With titles like Resident Evil 4 you’re able to say to yourself “Well at least Capcom learned what worked and what didn’t, and they seem to be making an honest attempt at making the gameplay feel better each time.”
I guess an “honest attempt” indicates “actually trying” and “actually trying” means knowing “what the fuck you’re doing.”
Resident Evil 6 is a fundamental breakdown on the most basic levels of gameplay. It’s got some exciting, visceral, over the top action sequences that would make Michael Bay blush, genuinely spectacular spectacles of spectacle.
But it turns out that shit doesn’t matter if the most base of your mechanics don’t come together.
I’ll give a perfect example. Rookie cop turned low rent James Bond wannabe Leon S. Kennedy has an early level where he’s supposed to dodge trains via everyone’s absolute favoritist gameplay design in all of history, Quick Time Events. This is nothing new to the Resident Evil series, I mean you can understand why Capcom keeps using them since no one complains about them, so after dodging my first two trains with QTE, I figure the third train coming at me must also be QTE. Law of threes, right?
Wrong.
That’s a “You Are Dead.” Fine. Reload. Two QTE’s. One analog dodge. Here comes the train rushing at me, I get the warning to duck. I run to the other track to avoid it and I…
Still get hit. No, not by a different oncoming train, by the same train I avoided by a wide margin. It’s because the train’s hitbox is so ridiculously wide, unless you’re practically up against the other wall, you’re somehow sucked in by the train’s magic train vacuum and smooshed into apple sauce. I not only tested this, I went online to double check that I didn’t just suddenly get Jared-bad at video games. There’s a very similar avalanche later on, where being gently kissed by its first speckles of snow counted as you being you buried under its mass.
Hey I remember when you were 12.
What else… What else… Healing now takes place via mixing and eating breath mints in an over-complicated process. There’s a dodge roll Max Payne style with about none of the style or effectiveness of Max Payne. There’s a cover system. I’m told there’s a cover system. Sticking to cover was like trying to get a soapy super bounce ball to stick to teflon, and enemies could still shoot through cover anyway. So far so good.
Minor mistakes like this permeated through the entire game, gathering and collecting into a giant problem by game’s end. Now I’m not calling Capcom’s bad here, they only had 600 developers and millions of dollars in cash invested in this project, touting it as the “biggest Resident Evil ever.” In no part of that do they say they hired Quality Assurance testers, thus they are not at fault.
Now Capcom knows how to make a good game by ripping off a ton of other good games. Call of Duty, Gears of War, Far Cry, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, X-Men, Thomas the Tank Engine, Spongebob, Avatar the Last Airbender, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, Spyro the Dragon, Skylanders, They Fly starring Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park also starring Jeff Goldblum, you name it Resident Evil 6 ripped it off.
My favorite part of the game is the Skyrim part. Where zombies in chainmail work centuries old traps. Sound goofy? You must not appreciate what an intense ride Capcom created for you.
Here’s the fly.
For all the hardcore gamers out there, can you tell me the three big mechanics in video games that work great in their own genres, but feel like absolute nightmares when they show up in other games?
If you said Stealth, Driving, and Swimming, you guessed correctly.
Next question, guess which game implements all three of those things?
Ding ding ding. Vanna White tell them their prize.
Stealth, Driving and Swimming all perform about as well as you’d think they would in Resident Evil, the franchise that made walking feel like handling a Boeing 747. When presented with these sections I’d often wondered if slowly driving glass shards under my fingernails wouldn’t be a more pleasurable experience.
As part of all the spectacle the game would throw your way, you could find yourself getting SO caught up in the big sights and sounds that your character would die during the event. That’s right, practically every big “ooh” and “ahh” in the game can and will kill you if you don’t keep moving and, well, ignoring it. It’s kind of like releasing a 200 million dollar feature film but telling you to keep your eye on the popcorn the entire time instead lest you spill it all. It also felt really fucking cheap, like hiring a guy to smack that same popcorn out your hand then telling you to get the fuck out the theater.
The game is entirely cinematic which means the gamer doesn’t really get to play it. Every boss fight is basically a movie where sometimes you shoot it but mostly you wait around for the next cinematic cutscene or cinematic quick time event to start. Part of that cinema meant the game’s camera would often float away from your character, and stick to a generic building or door, kind of like a tour guide that would wrap your skull in his big meaty calloused hands and force you to look at one cinematic location while you walked.
But the cinematic use of light and shadows is beautiful, absolutely cinematically stunning and cinematastically jaw dropping people, so much cinema there I’m not even being cheeky. I’m not.
You know what else is cinematic? Not having any of that pesky “pacing” most action movies and games have to make their crescendos more memorable, such as Terminator 2’s . That way you make sure the player can’t tell one explosion from the next. Cinema!
Unfortunately they were so focused on cinema that the few sections you can actually play forgot to have gameplay, but that’s the price of cinema for you.
I always thought the term “Interactive movie” was hyperbole, but if any game has earned the saying it’s definitely Resident Evil 6.
You know what makes it ironic? Capcom actually used to be the masters of solid game design.
Hey.
Stop laughing.
You there. Stop laughing. Stop snickering and making your snide remarks. Listen it’s true.
Think of a game like Megaman. As internet celebrity Egoraptor so aptly points out, a Megaman game would never kill you outright. It gave you, the player, some breathing room to see how a new trap or new enemy operated before throwing you into the mix. If you didn’t take a second to watch and learn, it was often your own fault.
The first Resident Evil spawned the entire survival horror genre. It gave us the basics of atmosphere, puzzle solving, resource management and jump scares. It created a style of gameplay that flat out didn’t exist before.
Devil May Cry gave us some of the first examples of what fast paced combat could look like on a 3D platform, action-adventure games that came after it would attempt the same kind of stylized combat and combo rewards that Devil May Cry put forth.
Street Fighter is what helped push the limits of the 2D fighter. Going for faster, bigger, better, introducing parries and cancels and super combos. These are all Capcom games that pioneered this shit.
But I guess Street Fighter also pioneered button reading AI, attack priorities and larger than they look hitboxes, all of which Resident Evil 6 has implemented in their enemies to give them asshole level advantages. So maybe they are paying attention to their own playbook.
Seriously, the game is full of more cheap shots than a rundown college bar at happy hour.
You know, the biggest problem with Resident Evil these days isn’t that it attempted to go after that coveted Call of Duty gold, which is about the same level of fictional for game developers as Nazi gold, it’s not that it transitioned out of survival horror and into third person shooter.
It’s that it transitioned into third person shooter while wanting to keep Survival Horror mechanics.
Resident Evil still asks you to do a ton of inventory and resource management. Basically it wants you to go over a spreadsheet in a gun fight. Ask any accountant that’s been in a warzone, I bet you the two don’t mesh. What’s worse is RE6 has a few painfully long sections that ask you to go through story, search for ammo, kill a ton of zombies, solve a puzzle, complete a QTE and, if you die? Do it all over again. The checkpoint system is balls, and I’m forced to re-watch cinematic ingame cutscenes even if I already went through it. I didn’t get the memo that it was fucking 1996 again.
Now since we want that Call of Duty money we’re going to need multiplayer. With no multiplayer maps. Instead you can jump into another person’s game and be lucky enough to take over their AI partner with no ammo, no health, and in the midst of a swarm of zombies. If that doesn’t sound fun, you can instead participate in the “Agent Hunt” mode. Remember how fun and exciting it was to take over a special infected in Left 4 Dead? Except for the part where you’re likely to die quickly due to awkward controls and heavy concentrated firepower? Well guess what, it’s pretty much the same idea, only somehow worse. Your options range from shambling zombie that will be killed instantly, to shambling dog that will be killed instantly, to some kind of spider-mantis-monster-man-thing that doesn’t shamble, but will still be killed instantly.
Resident Evil 6 is probably an example of taking all the wrong lessons from your past successes. People, myself included, liked the more action oriented direction of RE4 and 5. We liked the multiplayer aspects of the additional modes such as the Mercenaries. This doesn’t mean we wanted “all action all the time” or for Resident Evil to lose its soul of horror first, action second. Resident Evil 5 isn’t survival horror by any means, but it had a great atmosphere and sense of place, establishing a busy, lively African village where something has gone horribly wrong (and yes, I’m going to willfully forget the fact the game had literal spear chuckers.)
Nothing weird about this.
Halfway through Resident Evil 6 I’m running around a Chinese water garden where men with grasshopper legs shoot uzis at a Russian gymnast while a tank chases him, shortly after escaping a hospital in my panties.
Did I mention the dinosaur?
Nothing weird about this.
I’m not even sure what game I’m playing anymore.
I don’t know what this is.
