The Shinji Mikami / Hideki Kamiya / Hideaki Itsuno Review Megathread - by froghawk
Malf on 17/9/2018 at 22:51
If you can get a hold of it somehow, do play P.N.0.3. It's a wonderful game. I love it to bits.
froghawk on 18/9/2018 at 14:21
I'd love to!
RESIDENT EVIL - REVELATIONS (2012)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/resident_evil_rev-_2012_capcom.pngDirector: Koushi Nakanishi
Writer: Dai Satō
This spinoff was originally released on the handheld Nintendo 3DS, and was billed as a return to horror. The protagonists of the original game (Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine) are the stars of this one, though they're virtually unrecognizable thanks to some new voice actors and character designs. Each of them is perpetually followed around by a new character, but unlike in RE0 or RE5, your followers can't be killed, nor can you control them. These extra characters seem to exist solely to provide commentary. The game takes place before RE5, at around the same time as the RE: Degeneration movie.
REvelations begins with great promise, hinting at a game which recaptures the spirit of the original Resident Evil with the over-the-shoulder camera of Resident Evil 4. The setup is perfect for a classic style RE game - bioterrorists unleash a new virus, t-Abyss, which creates an outbreak of oozing sea monsters on a derelict cruise ship. Jill is sent to investigate the situation and figure out which of 3 shady organizations is behind it. Early on, these cruise ship segments are fantastic and a lot like the original RE's Spencer mansion - an isolated and claustrophobic setting, a big key hunt, a large environment to roam around and slowly piece things together, and lots of atmosphere (complete with odd camera angles - the rocking ship replaces the fixed framing). You spend more time narrowly dodging enemies than trying to fight them, since they brought back the dodge move from RE3 (though it's just as finicky and inconsistent as it was in that game) and ammo is scarce early on. There's even a moment where you can drain water from a dirty bathtub - what better tribute to the original could there be? You get separated from your follower for much of these sections, which also helps, though he doesn't get in the way much when he is around.
Sadly, it seems the devs didn't want to make the excellent horror nostalgia trip they were hinting at with these early cruise ship sequences. I get the sense that they were trying to strike a balance between appeasing fans of the classic RE games and fans of the modern 3rd person action titles, which prevents the game from living up to its potential. The cruise ship segments are constantly interrupted by generic, bland, and linear 3rd person shooter segments at other locations which could have easily been chopped out of any other 3rd person action game from 2012. You literally do nothing but run around and shoot things in these sections - there's no exploration, no puzzles, no key hunts, and no atmosphere, making these segments feel bland even in comparison to RE5. This is the side of the game that ends up winning out - before long, even the cruise ship segments become brief, linear snippets where you're running away during a countdown, or quickly swimming through flooded areas, with constant cutscene interruptions - any atmosphere the game had early on is completely eradicated. What hinted at becoming a modern update of classic RE horror turns out to be a dime-a-dozen action shooter. If the gameplay doesn't kill the mood, the awful hollywood action soundtrack certainly will (don't let the rather nice title theme get your hopes up about the music). The monster designs are pretty cool, but something about how they move makes them distinctly unhorrifying.
Part of the problem is their experiment with the game's format - it's divided into 12 episodes, each lasting a mere 20-30 minutes (this is another very short game - my final clear time was a mere 5hr40min, less than half as long as RE5 and about a quarter as long as RE4). I assume this format is because the game is for a handheld console, meant to be played in short bursts, but it just doesn't work for this historically slow series. Revelations has more of a story packed into its runtime than any RE title which preceded it, which is nice on one level, but it also means you can never really get immersed in the setting as you're constantly getting pulled out of the game by cutscenes and scene changes (and every scene is so brief - they rarely exceed 15min). The story, which involves the early days of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA) and some epic conspiracy theories, is classic RE and quite enjoyable (yes, you find a secret lab on the cruise ship - shocking, right?). This makes it all the more frustrating that they chose to deliver it in such a cinematic and fragmented way. Every episode is preceded by a recap, which would have been fine if the episodes had been longer - but instead, the game pulls you out for a pointless recap every 20-30min, further ruining the atmosphere and immersion. Can the target audience of this game really not remember what happened in such brief spans of time?
The one main improvement over RE4 is the lack of quicktime events - they basically only occur when you get grabbed by a monster and have to quickly press a button to get free. There are never any mid-cutscene, which is really refreshing for an RE game from the co-op action decade. And on that note, the arcade mode in this one (Raid Mode) is an action-focused co-op version of the campaign without all the story bits. I'm pretty sure this is the only RE game released between 2005 and 2015 that doesn't have a co-op main campaign, even though it feels designed for it thanks to the extra character following you around. I didn't really explore Raid mode, so if anyone here wants to play through it with me, I'm down.
On the plus side, the PC port is excellent. Unlike most of the other games thus far, I was able to run this at native resolution (1440p) without a single slowdown - quite surprising, as this game is much newer and the graphics are much better than those titles. Many have complained about the controls, but I didn't have a single issue with them, which is a first for Resident Evil on PC. It also autosaves regularly (as in RE5, the typewriter save system is gone altogether in this one). It's too bad the best RE port I've experienced so far was wasted on one of the worst titles.
RATING: 4/10 sea creepers - So much potential wasted on dumb action
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/300px-scagdead_scan.jpg
froghawk on 18/9/2018 at 14:22
RESIDENT EVIL: DAMNATION (2012)
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https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/biodamnationposter.jpgProducer: Hiroyuki Kobayashi
Director: Makoto Kamiya
Writer: Shotaro Suga
This CGI film acts as a prequel to Resident Evil 6. It takes place in a fictional ex-Soviet country called the Eastern Slav Republic, which is engaged in a civil war. Leon infiltrates the country after hearing rumors that BOWs (bio-organic weapons - Umbrella monsters) are being used as soldiers in the war there. It turns out that someone has figured out how to control the lickers from RE2/survivor/5 by using Las Plagas, then sold them to the rebels. They also sold a few tyrants (resembling Mr. Big X from RE2 to) the government. Leon tries to diffuse the situation. Meanwhile, Ada Wong meets with the president, pretending to be a BSAA agent. As in RE2/4, her goals are unclear and a bit shady.
This feels like the point the overall story of the series has been building towards - the monsters can finally be controlled and used in a military setting. I didn't find it as consistently entertaining as RE: Degeneration - the plot was a bit hard to follow at times and the pacing could have used some work - but it's still head and shoulders above the live action film and captures the ridiculous b-movie spirit quite well. The CGI looks incredible this time around - it very nearly looks live action in many shots. The facial animations still leave a bit be desired and can be rather awkward, but many of the environments and props are shockingly lifelike.
Rating: 6/10 shady ex-soviet leaders
catbarf on 21/9/2018 at 22:34
Hey, just wanted to say I appreciate the writeups, this is some good stuff. Are you going to be getting to RE6? I'd be curious to see your take on that title.
froghawk on 22/9/2018 at 00:49
Thanks! Yep, I intend to follow this all the way to the end.... I just need to convince my friends to suffer the rest of the way through it with me, as they ran away halfway through.
RESIDENT EVIL: OPERATION RACCOON CITY (2012)
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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/OperationRaccoonCity.jpgDeveloper: Slant Six Games / Capcom
Producer: Peter Doidge-Harrison
Directors: Andrew Santos, Tuomas Pirinen
Each Resident Evil game developed by Capcom after Mikami left became steadily less Resident Evil than the last, and this is the point where the series totally abandons every gameplay element typically associated with it in order to appeal to the Call of Duty crowd. Capcom decided it was a bright idea to outsource a RE title to Canadian developer Slant Six, who had previously developed only the SOCOM U.S. NAVY SEALs series. This 4-player 3rd person squad cover shooter is designed around a hypothetical alternate universe scenario which takes place during RE2/3 during the outbreak in Raccoon City. It's designed around a battle between HUNK's Umbrella Security Services and US Special Ops.
The generic 3rd person shooter elements that I lamented in Revelations have become the entire picture here, though thankfully in a somewhat more complex way. Essentially, this is a generic squad shooter wearing a Resident Evil skin, which I guess is unsurprising given who developed it. The campaign steps it up from RE5's 2-player co-op to 4 player co-op. Part of the reason this game was so reviled is that there is a 7-mission campaign for each team, but only the USS campaign (which lasts around 3.5hrs if you hit the par time for each level) was included with the base game. The first mission of the Spec Ops campaign was included as a teaser, and the rest was sold separately in two 3-mission 'Echo Six' DLC packs, currently being sold for $10 each when not on sale. In order to get the full 14 mission game, you had to pay a lot of extra money, and since both DLC packs featured a lot of level recycling from the main game, people were quite mad (except for many console players, who received the DLC for free). The game was very blatantly chopped in half to sell in pieces, which is made especially clear by the fact that the final bullet-sponge boss doesn't appear until the very end of the DLC (seriously, that might have been the most annoying bullet-spongey boss I've EVER encountered, but at least it wasn't hard and I never died and had to try again). In total, the two campaigns took me around 11hrs, which each mission taking 20-50min.
The Umbrella's Security Service campaign follows their attempts to ensure that all evidence of Umbrella's involvement in the Raccoon City outbreak is erased. There are 6 different characters to pick from, all with dumb names and awful costumes. Each has a different role (assault, recon, medic, field scientist, demolition, surveillance) and accompanying special abilities which can be upgraded using XP gained from playing the game and collecting data items. I'm not sure why all of them and their main adversary are Russian - I guess it's the old neoMcCarthyist make-all-the-bad-guys-Russian routine. It is fun to see events from the side of Umbrella's henchmen, and it would also have been fun to see areas from RE2/3 recreated with much better graphics if not for the fact that they look oddly generic to the point that it's easy to miss what they're based on. The path through them is completely linear, which also makes recognition a bit more difficult. The game takes place in an alternate timeline, allowing the USS to encounter several characters from RE2 who never crossed paths with them in said game. I actually quite appreciate that this game is non-canon - it just feels like the right decision.
The Spec Ops campaign overlaps more with Resident Evil 3 for its first half, centering around meetings with Jill and the Nemesis. It's weirdly hard to find this campaign in the game's menus - rather than having it start right after the USS campaign like you'd expect, the only way to access it is through the 'Free Play' menu. The characters are just reskins of the USS roles, to the extent that whatever ability upgrades you purchased with XP for the USS characters carry over into the new campaign. By that same token, you fight hordes of USS soldiers (who, for some reason, never appeared in the actual USS campaign, unlike the Spec Ops soldiers appear all over this campaign). For some reason, the USS soldiers look pretty much identical to the Nazis from the new Wolfenstein games. As I mentioned before, the levels are largely reused from the Umbrella campaign, making this yet another Resident Evil game where the two campaigns cover the same ground with different characters. It's a good bit more challenging than the USS campaign, though, particularly with respect to the boss battles. Mission 6 was especially challenging - it started out hard and never stopped escalating. I died something like 46 times across 50 minutes - it was a bit excessive. It ends with some prime sequel bait, but that never came to fruition despite the fact that this game is one of Capcom's bestselling titles, perhaps due to the poor critical reception.
Ammo is unified, which actually makes a great deal of sense here as you can only hold one weapon at a time and there are tons of different weapons (many of which feel pretty much the same to me - it's already overkill, and for some reason they sold even MORE weapons as DLC). You or your teammates can become infected, at which point you need to use antiviral sprays on yourself or each other within a certain time window to prevent zombie transformation. As in RE5, first aid sprays affect all the teammates in a radius around you, and they also cure bleeding (life drain) in addition to low health. Green herbs, on the other hand, can't be stored, must be consumed in the moment, and can't be used on teammates. The team AI wasn't the best I've encountered, but it's certainly a hell of a lot more useful than the AI player in RE5, probably because there's no inventory to manage. There are a couple mechanics that I only discovered towards the end of the game thanks to hints on loading screens, and I wish the game had done a better job of telling you they existed. I didn't even get a chance to try using a zombie as a shield, as I only saw that hint right before the final boss (and I'm still not sure how to do it).
The monsters are what you'd expect at this point - zombies, fast crimson head zombies, lickers, hunters, tyrants, Nemesis, and a new 'parasite' that's basically the head crab from Half-Life and provides the source material for the final boss. These monsters are generally fun to fight, but battling the human enemies is the opposite of fun. They're oddly difficult to hit even when parts of them are exposed through cover, and they can kill you quite quickly. They're more fun to battle later in the game, when you've purchased abilities that allow you to more effectively pit them against the infected enemies, or when a hoard of zombies and hunters is already facing a soldier group when you arrive at the scene.
The first chapter of the game (battling Spec Ops soldiers in Willian Birkin's lab) is well and truly awful, and I was ready to write the game off right then and there. I was expecting the worst, but the game improved quickly and I actually had some fun, much to my surprise. There were some severely frustrating moments, to be sure, but the base gameplay was enjoyable. I think the claims that it's the worst title in the series are severely hyperbolic, though I wouldn't call it a good game. In context with wildly popular team-based zombie shooters like both Left 4 Dead games and Killing Floor, not to mention games like Dead Island and Dead Rising, it's easy to see why people were so hard on it - if it had come out 5 years earlier, I think it would have seemed much more appealing. Coming out in 2012, it was the latest in a glut of trendy zombie action games, and it ranked near the bottom of the pile. It fares a bit better against recent titles from its own series, though - the gameplay here is much more complicated, chaotic and fun then the rudimentary shooter bits in Revelations. It's much easier for me to enjoy this game for what it is than with RE5 and Revelations, as it doesn't retain any of the RE gameplay tropes. It never pretends to be anything more than the dumb shooter it is, and thus refrains from hinting at a superior horror direction like the aforementioned titles (though at least it takes place at night... I'm looking at you, RE5).
The PC version of the game is quite broken, partially because it uses Games for Windows Live and thus requires a good bit of tweaking to get functional these days. As far as I can tell, the matchmaking never actually worked, and thus I was never able to try the PvP Versus mode, where the game's two teams are pitted against each other in several different 8-player game modes. I played the entire game in single player (and it really says something that it was tolerable in that form, as I can't say the same of any other RE co-op title including a few upcoming reviews), but it's easy to imagine that this would have been decent fun as the multiplayer game it was designed to be. The PC port also just isn't very well optimized, with frequent slowdowns despite its age. I can only imagine how badly this ran at launch and how much this disrupted the gameplay at the time. In short, it's very easy to see why people were furious about this game when it came out, but now that it's a bargain title and many of its issues have been mitigated (aside from getting it to run properly), it isn't the absolute worst way you could spend your time.
RATING: 4/10 awful leather supersuits. Not as bad as you may have heard as long as you don't expect a Resident Evil game or any originality.
Inline Image:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/residentevil/images/2/24/USSWOLFPACKTEAM.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20160924144639
TannisRoot on 25/9/2018 at 20:20
Would be interested how you'd rate The Evil Within by Shinji Mikami and its sequel Evil Within 2.
I hear the second is much better than the first. The first is a diamond in the rough imo. It's deeply flawed and the complaints against it are 100% legit. That said I do really enjoy it despite its shortcomings and it does feel more like a sequel to RE4 mechanically than RE5 or RE6 were.
froghawk on 26/9/2018 at 02:59
You'll find out very shortly, as I've prepared some truly massive walls of text for those titles! I wouldn't say it's closer to RE4 than RE5, though.... I thought RE5 was basically a verbatim rehash of 4 on that front aside from the co-op and real time inventory.
froghawk on 26/9/2018 at 05:55
The year 2000 may not have been a winner for this series, but 2012 was undoubtedly the worst year in its history. Here's the final title of the year, and the worst and biggest of the pile, bringing the shooter trilogy to a close:
RESIDENT EVIL 6 (2012)
Inline Image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Resident_Evil_6_box_artwork.pngProducer: Yoshiaki Hirabayashi
Director: Eiichiro Sasaki
Writer: Shotaro Suga
In the late 2000s, Capcom experienced a mass exodus. Their most skilled personnel flooded to Platinumgames and Nintendo. This left the remaining team with something to prove, so they decided to make the biggest, longest, most ambitious Resident Evil title ever. This game tries to appeal to every type of fan, throwing survival horror, fast paced action, melee combat with fancy kung fu moves, vehicle sections, puzzles, and quicktime events into the mix, with everything geared towards both co-op and competitive online play in order to appeal to an even broader audience. Financially, this approach paid off - while first year sales were low thanks to middling reviews, people kept buying it at a steady rate. The game ultimately sold more than 9.5 million copies, making it one of Capcom's highest grossing titles, though it still came up short of the precedent set by Resident Evil 5 (which has sold more than 11.5 million units).
The actual quality of the game tells an altogether different story - one in which the z-team bites off more than they can chew and fails miserably on every front. It so desperately wants to be the best game in the series, but every individual aspect of the game is so poorly executed that the sum of the parts ends up barely even feeling like a game, let alone something released by a high profile studio. The story tries to be the epic climax of the series so far where all the disparate plot threads of the series come together, this time using Lanshiang, China as the exotic locale. This time it's the C-virus (a combination of the T-virus with las plagas for maximal control, if I recall correctly), which creates a suspiciously wide array of monsters, from normal zombies to new soldier-monsters called J'avo to giant fat men with boobs to swarms of stinging flies. Several characters from older titles cross paths for the first time to stop the new citywide outbreak (Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield, Sherry Birkin, and Ada Wong are all playable characters). Despite its aspirations, the game ultimately ends up feeling like an irrelevant sideshow, less important even the much more intimate and small-scale side story of Resident Evil 7. Such an epic plot requires story momentum to work, but this game has absolutely no sense of urgency despite its cinematic aspirations (it's the only numbered game in the series that doesn't do any storytelling through readables). It tries to make up for that lack of tension by constantly bombarding you with an obnoxious 'epic' orchestral score, which instead has the effect of completely ruining the atmosphere of the visuals. The plot unfolds slowly and lazily, leaving you mostly in the dark about what's going on for most of its duration, before ultimately revealing that all of its twists and roundabout storytelling techniques were hiding a very standard and pedestrian RE story with a dull, generic new villain. The blanks are slowly filled in by telling the same story from four different angles (in a similar manner to Resident Evil 2. Code Veronica, RE4's DLC, and Operation Raccoon City, but with twice as many perspectives). This method of stretching out a game that's light on content is practically becoming a series trademark by this point. The characters also lack personality - Chris is as flat as ever, but even Leon lacks the wit he had in RE4. They try to give Jake a personality by making him crack sexist quips, which uh... doesn't qualify.
RE6 was directed by Eiichiro Sasaki, who previously directed the original RE co-op games, the Outbreak series (I haven't played those titles, and if this game is any indicator, I probably shouldn't). It immediately begins with an unskippable 20 minute long single player prelude before you even get to a menu screen - a flash-forward from Leon's campaign. I think it's meant to be a tutorial, but it does a terrible job of teaching you how to play the game, as quite a few elements have been added since RE5 which it doesn't bother to introduce. The Prelude pulls control away from you every 10 seconds, so it feels less like you're playing it and more like it's playing you. Gameplay is constantly interrupted by a barrage of awful quicktime events, or by the game taking control of the camera. The quicktime events are timing minigames, like pressing a button when a line spinning in a circle gets to a certain spot - a bit more intricate than the button mashing of previous titles, which makes them all the more annoying. I can't emphasize enough how incessant they are - I think I had to play 4 of them just to open a door. It's almost as if the game tries to throw all of its worst aspects at you right at the start, as the events taking place are also action movie absurdities. A plane crashes into a building, causing a giant explosion Leon has to run from with a quicktime event. He then jumps into a helicopter (with a quicktime event), shoots a zombie off his leg with another quicktime event... you get the idea.
As you may have gathered by now, the game is divided into 4 campaigns which happen simultaneously, and the campaigns intersect at key points - so people playing the other campaigns are supposed to periodically join your game for a 4-player experience. Each campaign is divided into 5 chapters which intially each last around the length of a film (75min-2hr for the first two campaigns, ~1hr for the next two). This makes each of the first two campaigns longer than any other RE game to date except 4 and 5, and the game as a whole is twice as long as either of those (~30hrs). Now, does this mean the game actually has twice as much content? HELL NO. This is one of the most padded games I've ever played, and it has absolutely no sense of proper pacing. It's one of those games where you've nearly reached the goal - it's right in front of you - then the floor literally falls out from under you and have to take an extremely circuitous route to get back. It's the sort of game where every boss has to show up several times throughout a given campaign and come back to life around 5x per fight. That's apparently still not enough of said boss, so you then you have to play through the main fight against that same boss again in a different campaign. The redundancy is so extreme that the game will even show you the same plot cutscenes before and after the reprised boss fight, though I actually didn't mind that so much since I played this game slowly over a year and tended to forget said scenes anyway. The characters frequently comment on all the repetition with lines like 'What, again!?' or 'I'm getting tired of this!' or even 'Why doesn't anything die anymore?' in a way which perfectly reflected my feelings - could the developers be self-aware? Not in any meaningful way, as they seem to feel obligated to show every event from every angle, regardless of whether it's fun to play it with every character. (For instance, watching a boss fight from a distance with a sniper rifle for 5 minutes is distinctly not fun.) They try to milk the campaign even further by implementing a skill system where everything costs so much XP than you have to endlessly grind to get an upgrade that actually does anything - no thanks.
The developers were clearly banking on this game having a ton of people playing at any given time for the intersection point system to work. The chances of being at the exact right point to link up with another player's game at a loading screen are extremely low in a title this long, so this never works out in practice - I never experienced it once, despite a surprisingly large active player base. The only practical result of the intersection system that I experienced is the previously mentioned recycled content. What does work is Agent Hunt mode, where other players can join your game at certain points as monsters - but this means the story campaign is periodically turned into a deathmatch game, further killing the story momentum and making the game's identity feel even more confused. And that's when I actually encountered the monsters - there were many times that I was informed that someone had joined my game as a monster, but then I never caught a glimpse of them.
The game's identity crisis is a real problem - although there's a great deal of variety in each campaign, each one almost feels like a different game. The opening Leon Kennedy/Helena Harper campaign is a zombie shooter. The Chris Redfield/Piers Nivans campaign aspires to be Gears of War/Call of Duty, with nonstop action and obnoxious orchestral music (Capcom's head of marketing already admitted they were aiming for the CoD audience with Operation: Raccoon City, and that mindset continues here). The Jake Muller/Sherry Birkin campaign wants to be Uncharted for its first half, complete with searches through snowy vistas (the second half is more focused on the obligatory chainsaw boss rehash). The Ada Wong campaign is more puzzle-oriented. The core problem is that this game isn't good at being any of those games - there are countless titles which do each of these things better.
Part of the problem is that the environments feel bizarrely empty - there's virtually nothing to explore and no reward for doing so, and you're shuffled from place to place so quickly that the game never establishes a solid sense of place. The exploration element that defined the previous titles is missing, and what's left is a shallow, linear shooter where you spend most of your time doing ridiculous melee moves and tripping over things. You're hurried from one area to the next, and the paths constantly close behind you. The game decides when you can run and when you have to walk, and still frequently pulls the camera away. Speaking of the camera, it's a weird hybrid of the over-the-shoulder approach of RE4/5 and the fixed angles of the earlier games - a design decision which makes absolutely no sense, and instead just makes the camera confusing, unpredictable, and frustrating. The ways the devs spent their time is a bit perplexing here - for instance, they put in the effort to give each campaign a different HUD, but they didn't bother to make any of the HUDs intuitive or easily usable.
I guess Capcom took the criticisms of RE5 mostly happening in broad daylight seriously, because this game takes the exact opposite approach - it's SO dark that it's nearly impossible to tell what's going on half the time. The game's brightness calibrator is broken - it tells you to turn the brightness down until you can't see the number 6, but it was still perfectly visible at 0. Everything on screen was either super bright or pitch black at 0, making it impossible to tell what was going on, so I had to turn the brightness up well past the recommended setting to see anything at all. The level design may be boring and linear, but it's strangely hard to navigate at times - we often got stuck going over an area repeatedly before discovering that whatever we were supposed to find was hidden in plain sight, as the visual design obscured the most important bits. I actually kind of like the look and feel of the visuals, but they're totally undermined by the level design and obnoxious score - all the moodiness is sucked right of out them. With that said, I suspect the darkness is partially so extreme to mask the shoddy textures, as it looks a bit washed out, cheap, and less modern than RE5.
The mechanics are surprisingly complicated for a simple multiplayer shooter, but instead of adding depth, they just overcomplicate everything. There's a skill upgrade system and all sorts of dodges and rolls you can do - but the game really, really sucks at telling you how to do them. The new inventory system is technically a simplification, but is somehow significantly harder to use. It maintains the real-time inventory where each item takes up 1 space regardless of size from RE5, but nothing is laid out on a grid anymore, so you have to scroll through all your items in real time as quickly as possible. The game as a whole isn't quite as heavy on quicktime events and ridiculous set pieces as the prelude, but they're still frequent and irritating enough that the game shows some self-awareness and the lowest difficulty does them for you. The gunplay feels wimpy, and there's never enough ammo, leading to an over-reliance on ridiculous melee combo moves that take the tension out of the attempted horror bits. Pretty much every element of this game feels poorly implemented and underexplained, making the whole feel unsatisfying, insubstantial, and frustratingly obtuse. It's simultaneously dumbed down and counterintuitive - like making a Call of Duty game with Dark Souls design principles. When I played RE5 with a friend, we couldn't survive without voice chat since we needed to plan strategy - but there was no strategy to plan here. None of these complicated gameplay elements actually create any gameplay depth, and the mechanics are ultimately quite dull. Also, did I mention that there are nearly endless unskippable credits after every single campaign? Who thought that was a good idea? I didn't think I'd ever yearn for a return to RE5's mediocrity, but here we are.
Ada's campaign was originally released as a day 1 DLC episode, but the backlash was strong enough that it was soon integrated into the game. It's odd that they tried to pull this, as most of the actual plot reveal takes place in this campaign! While I appreciate that they responded to fan criticism, there was one particular bit that they probably should have ignored. People complained that the campaign didn't have co-op, so Capcom lazily added a second character to the campaign, 'Agent' (strongly resembling HUNK), so that it could be played cooperatively beyond just at the intersection points. The problem is that this insertion makes absolutely no story sense - Agent isn't a part of the story at all, so he vanishes during the cutscenes and is barely able to participate in the game. Agent can't interact with puzzles, doors, or treasure chests and is frequently locked behind a door to watch Ada do things. All he can do is occasionally jump into fights, but since the campaign was designed to be single player, there isn't even room for him in many of the game's tight corridors. Since steam already has a mode where you can invite people to watch you play, I'm not sure what they were thinking. Ignoring all that, the puzzles in Ada's campaign were about as unintuitive and nonsensical as you'd expect at this point.
There is, of course, a mercenaries mode (and an extra hard mercenaries mode). These modes can be played with Left 4 Dead 2 character skins, which have the effect of making you wish you were playing that superior title. Mercenaries can be played co-operatively this time around. 4 more multiplayer modes were also released as DLC. 'Predator' is a 6-player mode where one of the players plays as one of the recurring bosses and the other players fight him. 'Survivors' is 2-6 player deathmatch mode. 'Onslaught' is a 2-player survival mode against waves of enemies, where one player's success creates more enemies for the other to battle. I forget what 'Siege' is, probably because I couldn't try any of these modes, as they all seem to be dead.
I may have stated that Survivor and Operation: Raccoon City got more hate than they deserved, but my charity only extends so far - this game probably deserves even more hate than it gets. The only thing that saves RE6 is the experience of playing with a friend and laughing at how bad it is - and I played with many different friends, as no one person could handle more than a couple hours of this relentless awfulness. The best things I can say about this game is that the PC optimization was fine and the co-op interface worked far better than that of RE5 (this one even includes a local splitscreen option with a keyboard & controller option). I experienced little to no technical issues with any aspect of the port, which is honestly kind of shocking given how shoddy this whole affair is.
RATING: 2/10 J'avo - Certainly the worst numbered title in the franchise, if not the worst period. One of the most awful games I've ever played!
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https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/monster/images/4/49/Glava-Sluz.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130225202247
icemann on 26/9/2018 at 09:51
2/10 dayam.
Sulphur on 26/9/2018 at 10:51
I agree with all of the criticisms, but maintain that RE6 remains a blast in co-op exactly because of how relentlessly stupid it is. Treat it less like a horror game and more like Michael Bay Presents: Resident Devil. (President Evil?) It's the cheeriest I've ever been while failing to save my partner from an overenthusiastic zombie plunging them both into a gruesome death by woodchipper. I mean, whoever knew Resident Evil would one day do an unintentional homage to Fargo?
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https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/794060619310990895/9AEF5A79C4C1713AE7D50FECFECE0EE41549E234/(Jesh's caption to the above: '"meh" - Leon')