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Monday, April 22, 2013
Resident Evil 6
"I can't believe this is happening again. It's just like Raccoon."
Leon S. Kennedy's reference to the first town overrun by zombies in
Capcom's long-running survival horror series is pregnant with meaning.
At face value, it's the eye-rolling incredulity of a zombie-thwacking
protagonist thrown into the familiar peril of a sequel: 'This again?
Really?' But as Kennedy and his new partner-in-uniform Helena Harper
creep their way through an abandoned American university, its creaking
halls resounding with the thunderclaps and rude flashes of a nighttime
electrical storm, at times it does feel just like Raccoon.
Rabid dogs smash through glass panes while bug-eyed cadavers turn
their heads to glare back at you over rotten shoulders, just as if
you've wandered back into Spencer Mansion's woodworm-infested corridors.
The fixed camera angles and boat-like character steering of the series'
formative days have been consigned to history. Nevertheless, the
scenery in these early stages of Resident Evil 6 - from the set dressing
to the instant deaths to the quicktime events - is pure Shinji Mikami -
even if the gifted designer is long gone.
So, in this moment, Kennedy is also acting as Capcom's mouthpiece,
whispering reassurances in our ears. For all its respectable sales,
Resident Evil 5 found few lovers. And with the series lacking a
visionary to replace Mikami, the comment is part statement of intent,
part hopeful reassurance from the Japanese developer: We've still got
it. It's just like Raccoon.
And God, the effort they've gone to. Four expansive, intertwining
campaigns, each divided into five 60-odd minute-long chapters. A return
of the series' best-known protagonists, paired off into
co-op-facilitating duos. Scores of different zombie types to stomp and
dismember; hundreds of collectibles to gather; thousands of skill points
to harvest and funnel into an array of performance-enhancing upgrades -
the game's generous stuffing is packed tight.
There's even a seasoning of fashionable multiplayer invention layered
on top, the game momentarily pairing players of different campaigns at
key points where their stories cross paths. Then, complete a campaign
and you unlock a Left 4 Dead-style Agent Hunt mode, in which you can
dive into another player's game and hunt them as a zombie.
The storyline, in bulk at least, feels like four triple-A games
tacked together, each with its own distinct interface, each with its own
flavour, each riffing on a different aspect of Resident Evil's past.
Over its course you fly planes, dodge trains and drive automobiles. This
is Resident Evil on a seemingly infinite budget, no idea too expensive,
no whim beyond scope. The swollen statistics even spill out of the game
and into its creation, which called upon over 600 internal and external
staff to deliver it ahead of schedule.
It's a giant, cumbersome beast - possibly the largest and longest
action game in history - and its heft dares you to talk about anything
other than the sheer effort that went into its construction. It's an
Egyptian pyramid of a game (no doubt with the tired spirits of its
builders buried inside).
And yet when you get down to it, Resident Evil 6 is not much like Raccoon at all.
Leon's campaign is the closest we get to the series' survival
horror roots - albeit funnelled through Uncharted's linear corridor
structure and set-piecing du jour. His story sees you
bludgeoning your way through subways, scrambling over wire fences and
limping through burning streets. The game is still about the horror of
managing a scarcity of resources - never use a bullet when a sharp elbow
will do - but gone is the suitcase-rearranging item management (even if
the staccato rhythms of diving in and out of menus to prepare each shot
remain, thanks to the fiddly gun selection). Now you can carry as much
as you like and with a breakable crate every ten steps - not to mention
item drops from decapitated zombies - you're rarely at a loss for
ammunition.
The camera hovers over your shoulder and shooting demands precision.
Aim down the sights and the tight zoom affords accuracy at the cost of
peripheral vision: a delicate trade-off. Capcom generously includes a
variety of options for customising the feel of the game; for those who
find the camera twitchy and the objective point markers invasive, the
pace can be slowed, laser targeting introduced and the extraneous
head-up display switched off to create a more orthodox experience.
Away from tradition, your health bar is divided into notches and
you're knocked to the ground each time a section is emptied, where you
can slide around on your back shooting upwards at your attacker. Find
your health bar emptied completely and you must either wait for your
teammate to revive you, or blearily retire beneath a nearby desk or into
a cranny and pray no monster notices as you wait 30 seconds for your
health bar to repair.
Resident Evil's herb system, in which pot plants can be scavenged
and combined to create restorative pills, has been overhauled and
streamlined; you can gulp down pills with taps of a button during play.
At the close of each chapter you're awarded an array of medals for your
various in-game accomplishments, while any skill points you've accrued
can be spent on unlocking and equipping up to three abilities, improving
your melee strength, for example, or reducing the time it takes to
reload a weapon.
While the controls are consistent across all four of the campaigns,
it's during Leon's story that the game comes closest to the series'
zenith, Resident Evil 4, requiring the odd moment of crowd control as a
herd of zombies rounds on you. But when you peel back the exquisite
detail and set dressing, the level design offers little more than a long
winding ghost train of a corridor, robbing these flashes of their
potency: you can always just sprint to the next checkpoint. There's
rarely the space to become truly overwhelmed and the game lacks the
width for exploration off the beaten track.
This problem is compounded by the zombies themselves - known here as
the J'avo. Where the fourth game induces panic through a mob of
unpredictability - all sporadic bursts of speed and lunging sidestep
dodges - the J'avo do little to distinguish themselves from the cultural
throng of undead, while their AI behaviour demands little in the way of
strategy. There may be the occasional sprouting - a tentacle through
the neck here, a maggot-like arm protrusion there - but the horror is
over-familiar. There's none of the hick fear engendered by the red-eye
glare and pitchforks of Los Ganados. Even Resident Evil 5's African
monsters carried an edge of accidental racism. The J'avo are merely
offensively bland.
Leon's story is the strongest of the initial set. Chris Redfield's
campaign is categorically the worst, all sense of horror and pacing
removed (a violin glissando cannot accentuate terror if there's no
terror there in the first place) to leave a second-rate, third-person
sprint interrupted by endless shootouts with gun-toting grunts and
idiotic cut-scene dialogue. It's here that you find most of the game's
set-piece boss fights - both with hulking mutated beings and attack
choppers - but despite Redfield's newfound ability to duck and strafe,
this quarter of the game is a slog.
Jake Muller's campaign is a little improved, choosing Resident Evil
3 for its inspiration as you flee an Ustanak that bears more than a
passing resemblance to Nemesis, your pursuer in that game. But it rarely
delights, with awkward boss encounters that outstay their welcome and
tedious short-hop journeys to link those dramas. At least Sherry
Birkin's character is a welcome addition here, her vulnerability in
co-op adding a much-needed change in tone to a wider story that's as
dull as it is one-note.
But it's Ada Wong's campaign - unlocked only when you have completed
the first three - that brings the most diverse flavour. Hookshot in
hand, antagonist Wong's stealth creep through her chapters is punctuated
by a series of ingenious puzzles that offer reminders of just how much
the series has moved away from its roots in recent years. Her dry quips
are a welcome change after Kennedy's sulky observations, Redfield's
meathead tantrums and Muller's swagger and petulance, while it's
refreshing to play without an accomplice in tow to open each door or
hoist you onto every ledge. That Wong's campaign is tucked away at the
tail end of the game is a shame, as it counterbalances the
sub-mediocrity of Redfield's missions and the arch-blandness of Jake's.
Just like Raccoon, then? A tribute act to Resident Evil, this
generous homage nevertheless lacks authenticity, warmth and bite. It's inspired by rather than inspired - the damning truth that haunts every impersonator.
The game represents a tremendous amount of effort and investment
and, for those impressed by such things, Resident Evil 6 may delight.
But all the effort in the world won't make up for a lack of vision. This
game is blind to imagination and focus. Capcom's uncertainty about the
series' identity post-Mikami (and post-Uncharted) is hardcoded into its
structure: four campaigns offering different, flawed expressions of that
potential. And the inevitable price for this wavering is a lack of
coherence. Resident Evil 6 is an unwieldy tribute to the series' past,
an uneven expression of its present and an unwelcome indication of its
future.
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