Resident Evil 6 Review (PS3, Xbox 360, PC, 2012/2013, Capcom)

Talk about a divisive game.

The last few Resident Evil titles are not without their critics, let alone those who are outright dismissive of them. However, in spite of the very vocal bandwagon that derides this game at every turn and all that they say this game is guilty of, there are some things you can consider positive about this outing.

What we have here is pretty much a cash cow franchise. Almost two dozen games have been released with the name, with very few of them considered non-canon (Gaiden comes to mind). Three of them managed to sell upwards of five million or more copies, it has spawned a lacklustre but financially reliable film series, a bunch of shitty novelizations have since been written, and it has become a focal point of the survival horror genre. 

Then again, Resident Evil 6 is not considered survival horror anymore. Would that be a correct assertion? Overwhelmingly in the face of all odds; yes, this is not a survival horror title. Survival elements are at a minimum, and frankly there's too much shit going on at almost any one time for it to be considered horror; it's not visceral, it doesn't play on your fears, and it's just not scary. But is that really so much of a detriment? Has this series ever been all that scary, considering that only the first game (and it's startlingly good remake) actually managed to be so?

This is an action game, through and through. It has very light horror elements, namely in Leon & Helena's campaign, but you won't leave scared. The tension is very low, as well, only ever coming to fruition during a frustrating sequence (typically quick-time events, though this game is more forgiving than most in that regard) or a halfway challenging boss battle. Otherwise, this is a straight up action shooter, and it doesn't suffer from that. If you just stop looking at it as an entry in a "scary" game series, which the series has almost never been (again, take note of the one exception), then you may be able to look at it with less unfair scrutiny.

The amount of effort put into this game is quite evident: a sprawling, if not overstuffed story, large cast of characters, up to six hours of gameplay per chapter (and there are four of them), possibly the best Mercenaries incarnation yet, and a fantastic roster of enemies means that Capcom didn't quite skimp on anything here. The old favorite zombies return, nastier than ever, almost acting as a foil to the Ganados/Majini-like J'avo. The difficulty is downright brutal at times, which doesn't include the ridiculously over-used quick-time mechanic. And each character has their own movesets and playstyles, setting them apart from the rest.

Yet there are many problems present. One is in the sheer length of the story mode, and just how inconsequential it ends up feeling. Too much crap is piled into the story and it just doesn't end up working all that well after what feels like thirty hours into the game. Most of the time, each character storyline simply meshes into the overall narrative shared between them, so it means that you're only really taking on a different perspective of the same incidents depicted in the plotline. Only Ada's campaign comes off as meaningful, because the rest are burdened by red herrings: Leon & Helena are hell-bent on killing the guy who jumpstarted the viral infection, at least in their starting location; Chris & Piers are hell-bent on capturing/killing Carla who thinks she's pulling all the strings; Jake & Sherry are just trying to get the hell out of dodge pretty much. While all of that crap is going on, Ada is unraveling every villain's plans & giving everyone cover at one point or another, effectively curbing the apocalypse just about all on her own. If any character is the real main character in this drawn out story, it is Ada, because she has the most far-reaching effects on the entire plot. Which is a neat touch considering how much of an enigma she is in the other games, but this really could have been just her game and it wouldn't have suffered for it. The other character storylines would have been better used as shorter bonus chapters, but then people would mostly have ignored them anyway.

And then those fucking quick time events come into play. And how often they do!

Do I need to haunt myself with the knowledge that these things exist in such an abundant supply in Resident Evil 6? This game contains more of them in just the tutorial than half of any of the previous games combined. And they often occur as part of what should be normal gameplay, usually as a dodge mechanic or simply because Capcom tried, and failed miserably, at cramming too many controls into the game. I'll get into that last bit later but this game is brought down by the sheer number of button prompts, big-time. The only upside at all is that they aren't buggy (at least from my experience) and they are a bit more forgivable than most. That's not much of a defense, though; this mechanic will be seen as an anachronism quite quickly, if games don't fucking drop them soon enough.

Another plague, perhaps a plantar's wart on the foot of this game if you will, is the camera. It is hands-down, the single-worst camera system in the series' history. No other game comes close. When I played the demo, I had no idea just how nauseating the camera can be. Just the act of running (a neat but long overdue gameplay mechanic) forces the camera into conniption fits, with it bouncing wildly with each stride. It gets caught in the scenery often, and the angles that it defaults to are horrendous, requiring constant readjustment from the user. Sometimes it's a battle against the camera that leads to the player getting killed, and that alone makes this a huge negative for the game.

Of additional note is both the interface and more importantly, the controls. The interface isn't entirely bad, but it requires understanding just what the fuck it all means. There are symbols for each option and while it is mostly common-sense, you're often too busy fighting against the real-time nature of the pause menu to figure out what each option does without clicking on the quit button. But what is worse yet is the control system. It's just as bloated as the storyline, if not moreso. There are so many commands to pull off in this game that I don't even think the game itself lists all of them. 

Often is the case where you have to pull of multiple combinations of each & every button, sometimes just to pull off rather arbitrary moves. Want to dodge an incoming attack? Hold the attack button and press the run button. Want to perform a dive-roll? Hold the attack button while moving forward and press the run button, too. Want to, almost pointlessly at that, switch your orientation from the default left side of the screen to the other? Well, learn yet another combination of buttons. Get used to it, and try to remember it. This is excessive and unneeded. Less is definitely more here, and I hope Capcom learned something in this regard.

In spite of these flaws, and there are certainly more, this game does have its strengths. It can be legitimately fun, there are a number of mechanics that were long overdue such as the ability to sprint and free-standing melee attacks (limited by your energy gauge), and like I mentioned, the enemies are great. And about the only good thing about Jake & Sherry's campaign is also one of the most badass things in the series; the Ustanak, who is the successor in virtually every regard to Nemesis. You may or may not come to embrace the eventual final exit of this juggernaut, which is something of an accomplishment in this bloated story. And this game does challenge you at times, legitimately outside of those dastardly quick-time events. Often it is because the game conceals easily missed but simple ways of moving the game forward, or taking down a boss, clearly because most players come to expect something much more out of these situations. And the game has a skill system that adds some depth to how you play, allowing for all sorts of combinations each time. 

The Mercenaries, as mentioned previously, makes a marvelous return. And while it may turn off some players because of its difficulty, for seasoned players such as myself it is a welcome evolution. Couple the game's new controls (which is certainly a good & very bad thing at the same time) with that which has been established in the last couple of games, and you have a clear winner. There are many stages to tackle, there are unique challenges in each, the enemy progressively gets nastier over time with each successive kill, and you get a feeling of accomplishment through it all.

And while it certainly does recycle a lot of the functional foundations of the gameplay (many animations and moves, even some sounds and mechanics, are noticeable to a seasoned player such as myself), it doesn't have a shortage of newly-created assets. If anything, the game has a lot to offer, but it all feels so fragmented so as to lose cohesion between it all. And if the storyline didn't suffer from excess and from one frustrating forced cinematic sequence after another after another after another, it wouldn't hurt so bad. I don't live in a bubble where I truly believe that this series was ever, with the exception of the original game, scary. And I don't clamor for the days where we had fixed camera angles, tank controls, and sometimes superfluous item management in the classic games. Not to say they were bad, but they were wearing thin to a point.

Here's to another title, addressing all of its legitimate issues and paying heed to none of the obsessive bullshit from bandwagon-riding detractors.

The Rundown:

Positives

+ The Mercenaries returns, delightfully.

+ Has overall the best graphics in the series yet.

+ In spite of the overlong storyline, it has its engaging parts.

+ New character Jake opens up new gameplay styles.

+ Ada's chapter shines among the mostly "meh" ventures preceding it.

+ Adds an actual sprint function, actual dodge ability, and free-standing melee (perform it at any time), among other things.

+ Almost all of the enemies are a blast to, well, blast away or boot in the face. 

+ Zombies make a return, and they're nastier than ever.

Negatives

- The story mode feels way too long for its own good, and overstays its welcome.

- In spite of Leon's short-lived atmospheric appeal, and Jake's hybrid of survival & high-octane action, Ada's campaign is the only one really worth playing.

- Complicated and overpopulated controls.

- The most quicktime events ever witnessed in a single Resident Evil title yet. Just the tutorial section had about a dozen of them, all amounting to about five minutes of gameplay!

- A few bugs affecting play, most noticeable in the Mercenaries.

- That fucking camera is about as bad as watching any Michael Bay film. In other words, it stricken with attention deficit disorder AND an extreme case of Parkinson's disease.

- Zombies all over the place, with dynamite, at every turn is more frustrating than anything else (The Mercenaries: No Mercy mode)

- No one plays the multiplayer anymore.

- Somewhat poorly conceived UI.

- Inconsequential story conclusion and a misguided primary villain.

C+

Martian Gothic: Unification Review (PC/PSOne, 2001, Take-Two Interactive/Coyote Developments)

This is just one of those examples of a game you were disappointed in, but would have loved to see much more come of it.

Developed on a budget disavowing the development team of just about any freedom (in tandem with some objective dissonance within the team itself which led to the hackneyed product we have today), Martian Gothic had the foundations of a rather solid survival horror experience. It had the chills, the atmosphere, the fantastic music, a very desperate gameplay model with limited weapons & ammunition, and unfairly difficult enemies (indeed, the enemies are either invincible or are predominantly just obstacles to be overcome), and quite the distinct storyline underneath it all.

But things just didn't fully turn out the way they should have.

The graphics are a rather mixed-bag, with butt-ass ugly character models that would make the original Resident Evil laugh, almost non-existent lighting effects, and a general lack of polish all compounding the aesthetic disappointment. The saving grace here is in the background sections, or the level design, which, for the most part, aptly portrays the implied chaos that pre-dated the events of the game's plot. However, it would have been monumentally better if the game had an actual lighting system to accentuate the atmospheric prowess we could have beheld. It wouldn't have hurt to darken many of the areas as well, because for the most part, this game is BRIGHT, but not in a good way, due to an issue I've mentioned at least once before.

It would be criminal of me to omit the tidbit that Stephen Marley, the writer and designer of the game, intended for this to be a survival-horror game more akin to Resident Evil than what it turned out to be. While it did end up being a very similar game (albeit a far slower, less consistent one), the overt emphasis on puzzle-solving notwithstanding, it was meant to be even more apt in that comparison. Instead, we got a prodding, "Guide dang' it!" kind of game that threw mostly obscure puzzles with clues that even Sherlock Holmes would scratch his head in solving. The action is not even there, really, because you will realize that enemies can't really be killed. Zombies don't ever die, but instead get knocked down, just to get back up again (the rate of revival increases as the game goes on). The rarest enemy in the game, also an element that had a lot of untapped potential, serves to be a dangerous obstacle to the player. That is, until you get a weapon halfway through and kill them with relative ease. There are ankle-biters in the game, but they have terrible AI, are viable to get glitched severely (you'll see a lot of it in either version where one of them is seen in impossible places, unable to touch you at all), and can be ignored entirely.

A definite strength going for our adventure is the audio. All of it is fantastic and builds one of the strongest atmospheres around, in spite of the elements that bring it down. The music is minimalistic, resembling the rustling of wind, enforcing a "haunted house on Mars" vibe. When it lifts at times, it's ominous and mysterious, taking on a dark orchestral sound. All thanks goes to FirQ (the artist responsible for the music in the game). And then there are the sounds of monsters. Zombies, or "non-dead" as they're called here, emit creepy guttural sounds when they rise from their slumber. If one grabs your character (and that's all they'll do in this game), a loud instrumental sound will play that may make you jump the first few times. My favourite, however, is in the menacing growls of distant TriMorphs, which are tripartite monstrosities consisting of three individuals clumped together into one killing machine. If you're in the immediate area of a TriMorph (often just behind a door near your position, or just the next camera-frame over), you'll hear its animalistic growling.

And then the story comes 'round, and it's kind of obscured by a "let's-cover-all-possible-grounds" methodology. I'll flesh out what I mean here: when you thought this game was a mystery, driven by adventure & mired by infrequent adversity, it later turns out that the game is a Resident Evil-esque survival action romp slowed down by sometimes ill-conceived puzzles. At other times, it may as well be a point & click adventure title, slow & prodding leaving imagination to the player. And then it becomes some kind of avant-garde combination of all of those things. Are you confused yet? Did all of that work out to produce a consistent, solid product? No, not really.

There are also a number of characters introduced that seem unfulfilled or are missed opportunities. One of them, being known as "Ben Gunn" or "John Farr", merely populates a messy canteen, divulging cryptic clues as to the dark history of the base. That's pretty much it. Another, more egregious example of a poorly-conceived character is Judith Harroway. It eventually turns out that one of the team-members is intimately (literally) tied to the character, and a *SPOILER ALERT* conspiracy of rebellion rears its ugly head! It also doesn't help that the characters are not very-well acted, coming off as unconvincing given their situations. They seem almost ecstatic to be there, actually. It ends up diminishing the feel of the game. Some of the story elements, thus, seem to be abrupt cop-outs that come off as jarring rather than anything else.

Guns don't feel right, at all. Plus, they're given monikers that don't amount to anything, slightly diminishing the "oomph" factor. The weakest weapon, called the "Piccolo", is a pea-shooter and will be discarded immediately for something better. Plus, it sounds more like a fart than a gun. You later nab a nail-gun which is barely a step up, but can pin down one of the only other enemies present in the game (which you can ignore entirely anyway, making this gun kind of pointless to use). Later, you get your hands on a magnum-class handgun called the "Dillinger", which I can't complain about much because although it never really kills anything worth a damn, it sure does pack a punch doing its job temporarily dropping zombies. Then there are novelty weapons, like the Daedalus sub-machine-gun, which only serves to stop "non-dead" in their tracks but takes forever to put just one down. Then there are the novelties OF the novelty pack; the Psionara is a weapon that does virtually nothing to anything in the game, except for special, rare enemies that are affected by its psychic, non-ballistic delivery. The next one is the flare-gun  which kills the TriMorphs clean in one hit whilst doing sweet piss all to anything else (in fact, shooting it at zombies in the PC version reveals that they're not fully corporeal anyway!). What this all boils down to is that you'll only really use two, give or take three of those weapons; the Dillinger  the flare-gun  and yeah, the psionara, the latter of which does in-fact serve a pretty useful purpose once or twice. This amounts to another disappointing roster.

Bugs are aplenty, however. On the PSOne (not the original Playstation), you are apt to run into a hard freeze when you enter a decompressing airlock sequence. If you're playing on the PC, and you don't patch the game, you are liable to run into a game ending glitch every time in the following sequence: Matlock must traverse a ventilation duct to a locked room, and outpace a TriMorph in the process. Prior to this sequence, privy players (most wouldn't know of it if they don't refer to a guide beforehand) will place Kenzo, the "infomeshing" expert near a surreal switch/rock/whatever thing (it's hard to explain what it is and why it works at all). At the right moment, a door in the ventilation duct will shut right behind Matlock, trapping the oncoming TriMorph in the process. However, in the un-patched PC version, the door will shut but won't be physical, and thus, the TriMorph will go through it as if it were nothing. Because you need that door to survive this sequence, you'll die every single time. Given that this game is so obscure and it's been over ten years since its release, good luck even finding an available patch to download.

That's assuming you're able to play it at all to begin with.

The game's length also doesn't do it any favours. Not that a lengthy play time is anything to scoff at, but it has to be engaging throughout. Here, however, it's not; it's too confusing, puzzles and their clues/solutions are far too obscure to understand at all, the action is absolutely barebones that it can barely stand without crumbling to the floor, and it is boring for most of the game. It also doesn't help that puzzles seem to take centre-stage over everything else. Enemies are simply obstacles rather than individual challenges. There is often just one way to deal with any challenge, leaving little to the imagination of the player. The story is a mess, going from one note to another with poor transition often being the case. Oh and, I haven't touched upon the HORRID controls yet. Let's just say that, like many survival horror titles of the day, you are burdened with tank controls in this game. However, imagine a tank with leaking motor oil and broken treads, with a top speed of five miles an hour. And this tank takes FOREVER to turn and reach any modicum of speed. And then there's the fact that you have to press enter, once you activate "aimed" mode, to fire. What the fuck? Yeah, I thought that, too.

Characters, while they are free from absurdly retarded dialogue (think "Resident Evil" for the Playstation), don't come off as convincing because they don't exhibit the mood & urgency that you think their situations would rouse from them. Then the game appears to be flat-out rushed because there's little variety to the engaging elements, there's no final boss fight (even though you'll witness a brief sequence hinting otherwise, it means nothing), and the ending is both confusing and anti-climactic. All of that hard work, and what do you get? You get pretty much jack shit.

However, it's the little things that keep it from being an abysmal, less than average game. It has its moments: the foreboding atmosphere (which, if improved as I described earlier, would have been utterly fantastic), the genuine scares you'll get that aren't typical jump-scares, a basis for a chilling enemy, and neat concepts such as the exploration of Mars & the possibility of life beneath its cosmic-ray battered surface. The negatives kind of outweigh the positives, though. It deserves a retry, though.

---

Two and a half TriMorphs out of Five

The Rundown:

Positives

+ A chilling, interesting storyline, albeit requiring a bit more fleshing out
+ The backgrounds you traverse through are fitting, portraying a tale of chaos & terror
+ The audio is superb, only hampered by audio glitches (sounds sometimes cut out) and generally low quality bitrate.
+ Decent characters that don't succumb to complete idiocy, typical to the genre

Negatives

- It's ugly, seriously. Character models would fit right in with a Playstation launch title. No lighting effects other than specially designed "lights." Disappointing enemy designs.
- Tank-like controls that tank-like controls laugh and/or scoff at.
- The bugs are aplenty
- Rushed, especially evident toward the end
- Sadistic puzzles that are often nigh-impossible to decipher or require nothing but trial-and-error
- Limited save system, which can be punishing to less inquisitive players.
- Barebones enemy roster that is disappointing, feels unexplored
- There's a dissonance of mood between the characters and the game's storyline/atmosphere as a whole. Everyone is either understated or nonchalant about being in a Martian base haunted by ancient ghosts, invincible zombies gnawing on their necks, huge masses of former humans shambling on them in places, mind-numbing psychic phenomena, and a lonely, oppressive atmosphere. What is wrong with these people and why were they told to be so detached emotionally & mentally?
- Boring overall. It never really goes to great lengths to engage the player, and just when you think it's going somewhere, it settles right back where it's been for almost the entire time.
- Hasty, rushed, lame ending.

EA Wins "The Consumerist: Worst Company in America" TWICE IN A ROW

I know Electronic Arts is a shitty game distributor/publisher which regularly practices shady shit like micro-transactions where they need not be, persistent-online DRM (always have to be connected to EA's servers in order to even play, and in the case of the latest SimCity, your files are not stored clientside so get ready ot lose your shit often!), and locking out content you otherwise have on game discs in order to bilk even more money out of customers. In spite of these things, and indeed there's more bullshit to EA than listed above, they are a GAME COMPANY.

You are not forced to buy games for any reason whatsoever, and they are a hobby. If you participate in what's called Major League Gaming, then you consider it an e-sport. Otherwise, you do not need them to live. You don't prolong your lifespan by "consuming" them. You hardly even grow as a person by playing them. You just stimulate your mind with bright colours, loud noises, and (mostly) minor quibbles of plotlines here and there.

Yet at The Consumerist, who runs polls every year for its readers to vote for the worst company in America, EA won this distinction two years in a row. Readers allotted 78% of the votes to Electronic Arts, with Bank of America coming in a distant second and with Comcast light-years further. It is the FIRST company ever to achieve this at The Consumerist. Keep in mind, that Bank of America lost with nearly half the votes last year. This year, Bank of America lost again with even less votes.

So here's the summary: Monsanto and that lot continue to erode nearly every market connected to the agriculture industry (which covers just about all of it), oil & natural gas companies are spearing ahead with pipelines that will inevitably fuck up, banks continue to abuse peoples' finances and take their properties away, pharmaceutical outfits trudge onward with their status as legal drug cartels, and telecommunications companies like Comcast and AT&T assault freedom of information & customer satisfaction every day.

EA, however, releases shitty or unfinished games (SimCity should rile you up), forces their customers to deal with persistent-online DRM, forcing customers use their knock-off of Steam (Origin) to even play with their products in the first place, they bilk customers out of more money by hiding content you already possess, PERMANENTLY ban paying customers "by accident", and they adore the machine-gun vomit of superfluous and pointless DLC. All of that might seem bad if you didn't read anything before them, but they affect VIDEO GAMES. I like games myself, and consider myself a mid-core gamer (I'm not casual, but I'm not hardcore either), but I have priorities.

The Consumerist, please help your readers whose priorities are so skewed and non-grounded in reality to realize just what is important in life. If you don't like EA, STOP BUYING THEIR GAMES! Simple resolution for a small-time issue. Just more proof that a handful of gamers are, dare I say it, clueless idiots irredeemably lost in fantasy land. Man-children, perhaps?