Survival of Horror: Resident Evil 6
2012, I’ll never forget it…
It was the year Resident Evil fans were inundated with Capcom’s ideology of Westernization. The company had been lagging behind in the industry a bit, and chose to push forward hard with the idea of chasing Western gaming trends. At the time, co-op was a big thing, as were military shooters and other online multiplayer games. For their smaller release at the beginning of 2012, they put Resident Evil: Revelations on the 3DS. A month later, an outsourced four-player co-op shooter came out on Xbox 360 and PS3. Operation Raccoon City pushed hard into the military shooter genre, with players hopping into the boots of an elite Umbrella special forces team (and in DLC, the actual US Marines themselves).
None of this is speculation, by the way; Capcom themselves namedropped Call of Duty as an inspiration for these sweeping changes to their flagship franchise. Claiming they wanted “the millions of Call of Duty fans” to play Resident Evil, they molded their series to fit that accordingly. Operation Raccoon City sold 2 million copies, though the big money was sure to be their biggest Resident Evil title yet. This year, gamers would get three games in the franchise, with the gigantic Resident Evil 6 rearing its head in November of that year. Imagine the surprise of everyone after its reveal, then, when Capcom was so confident it was ready to go that they later pushed the release up by a month into October.
Resident Evil 6 promised “dramatic horror” as the world was falling apart to bioterror. There were three entire campaigns advertised into one game (there may be something else, but we’ll get to that!), with series mainstays Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield at the helm. A surprising return was none other than little Sherry Birkin from Resident Evil 2, now 26 and also working for the government. Granted, there was a period when everyone swore it was Ashley Graham from Resident Evil 4, but they were thankfully mistaken. Three campaigns, three characters. That all seems to match so far.
However, no. Three characters simply wouldn’t be enough. This was the biggest game in the series to date. All three campaigns were co-op, meaning we also had newcomers to put into Resident Evil 6. Joining Leon was Helena Harper, Piers Nivans worked under Chris, and Sherry is accompanied by Jake Muller. There we go, six characters for Resident Evil 6 — look, okay, I lied. There’s a fourth campaign and you play as Ada Wong (and later on, her imaginary friend Agent joins as a co-op partner). There we are. Seven. Seven main characters and four campaigns to play through.
Capcom wasn’t kidding about stuffing this game to the absolute gills with content. They promised Resident Evil 6 would be a package for Call of Duty fans as well as Resident Evil fans, despite those two series being almost irreconcilably different from one another. However, they used these multiple campaigns as proof of their work. The plan was thus: Leon’s campaign would be closer to older Resident Evil titles, Chris’s was more shooter-heavy like Resident Evil 5 and Jake’s campaign played more like Resident Evil 3, with a giant stalker enemy constantly on your tail. They aimed to please everyone with this landmark title.
The company was clearly confident in its sales, with their estimation being a whopping 7 million units sold by the end of the fiscal year. Resident Evil 6 released in October, and was immediately knocked down a peg to middling reviews in the 6–7 range. Capcom then adjusted their estimation to 6 million, only for the game to still miss that target. Despite Resident Evil 6 selling a staggering 4.5 million copies at launch and setting huge sales records for Capcom, it was still deemed an underperformer. Average word of mouth considerably damaged the game’s reputation and it became the black sheep of an illustrious franchise.
Eight years have passed since that horrendous incident…
Nowadays, Resident Evil 6 definitely has legs as until just recently, it was neck-and-neck with Resident Evil 5 for the best-selling title in the series. Another game has taken that throne, but that’s a story for another time. Today, the community stands divided on Resident Evil 6. Many people still claim that it’s a messy, jack-of-all-trades master-of-none slap in the face to the franchise. Others say that it’s an incredible action experience that was simply misunderstood at the time. I haven’t played through it in many, many years, so I guess it’s time for me to refresh my memory and see where I stand. Will I believe in the action dream, or is there simply no hope left?
Resident Evil 6 — October 12, 2012 (X360, PS3, PC, X1, PS4, NSW)
Version used for review: PC port, 2013 / PS4 remaster, 2016
WARNING: This review will spoil the entire game!
Story
“So… you’ve been caught up in this too. Hope you have the stomach for it.”
I need you to know ahead of time that I am trying to make this section as legible as possible. I’ll try to get through the main points with as little confusion as possible, because there are four campaigns’ worth of story to cover. Though, I guess the most apt way to say it is that there are about two campaigns’ worth of story stretched into four. Again, we’ll get to that in a bit. For now, strap in and hold on tight, because this story is insane.
Let’s begin Resident Evil 6 with sex. Sex is great. Everyone knows it, and almost everyone wants it. Once upon a time, there was a man that really wanted it. His name was Derek C. Simmons, the National Security Adviser for the US government. Derek had eyes for only one woman. He lusted after the slick spy Ada Wong, and attempted to court her several times. Ada coldly refused his advances, and it hurt Derek terribly. How dare this woman turn away such a Nice Guy™? This would not stand. If he wanted Ada Wong, he would have Ada Wong no matter what. Hurt then turned to anger and spite. It was on this dark and fateful day that the entire world would be imperiled by an incel who didn’t get the ass that he wanted so badly.
Toil and toil he did, using his position of power to leverage funds and staffing for horrible experiments. He had found a way to make his very own Ada Wong: Carla Radames. A young researcher infatuated with Simmons, she worked and tested hard to mimic the femme fatale. Finally, she developed a solution in the C-Virus. This virus could cause awful mutations, and it took many, many tries to perfect it. 12,235, to be exact! Derek killed over 12,000 women in pursuit of finding one worth his standards! Eventually, he decided to use Carla herself on the 12,235th experiment, betraying her since she had a close DNA match. Sure enough, it worked; the long blonde-haired Carla was put into a horrifying cocoon and was reborn as a perfect match for Ada Wong in every way, except for a mind that was totally blank.
Simmons molded her mind to make her love him, but eventually she remembered his betrayal and began to work in secret to destroy him. She eventually started the terrorist organization Neo-Umbrella, and things began to quickly spiral out of control from there. Around December 2012, she began giving out the C-Virus to freedom fighters in the fictional country of Edonia in eastern Europe, claiming it was a booster shot that would help them in their civil war. Sure enough, things turned ugly quickly, with the insect-inspired mutations causing even more havoc than before.
One of these freedom fighters is Jake Muller, a man whose father abandoned his mom before he was born. He takes his booster shot, but unlike everyone else, he doesn’t mutate at all. In fact, he doesn’t feel much of anything! Here, he encounters national security agent Sherry Birkin, in her first appearance since Resident Evil 2. She explains that he has antibodies to combat the C-Virus and is being tasked by her boss, Derek C. Simmons, to escort him safely out of Edonia. Unfortunately, they have to contend with a hulking monster-man named Ustanak that seems laser-focused on killing Jake, so they do the smart thing and run like hell from it.
Meanwhile, the BSAA gets word of this bioterror outbreak and Chris Redfield is sent in with his squad to contain the mess. They run into Jake and Sherry, and Chris recognizes her through his sister Claire. After the four work together to take out two giant BOWs, Chris sets up one of the BSAA’s helicopters to help them escape to safety. From there, Chris and his squad continue into the city. They encounter who they assume to be Ada Wong and she throws out a little needle grenade, infecting everyone on the squad with the C-Virus except for Chris and his second-in-command, Piers Nivans. One of the mutated soldiers smashes Chris’s head badly, giving him a severe concussion as Piers helps him escape the battlefield.
Jake and Sherry are busy navigating an absolute warzone as their helicopter is besieged by Ustanak. They narrowly escape with their lives after fending it off, but they end up in the mountains after they crash. A piece of the helicopter is embedded in Sherry’s back, but she tells Jake to pull it out and it heals almost instantly as a result of her exposure to the G-Virus as a young girl in Resident Evil 2.
They eventually make their way through the mountains into some caves, where they fight off Ustanak with some heavy machinery. Finally, they escape into the open where Sherry says their rendezvous is waiting in the town visible from their vantage point. Unfortunately, Ustanak once again catches them off guard and they’re captured instead of killed, since Ada shows up to control the monster. She explains that Jake’s father is none other than Albert Wesker, whose powers he gained from the virus given to him by William Birkin gave him immunity to many, many infections. This is why the C-Virus didn’t affect him. “Ada” (in case you hadn’t figured it out by now) plans on using his antibodies to make the C-Virus even more potent, rather than making a cure like the US government wants to do. They’re both taken away to be experimented on.
Now we can fast-forward to June 2013 (yeah, I warned you that this was a long section!). Leon S. Kennedy, as the president’s right-hand man, has a meeting with the president, who reveals that he plans to come clean about the government’s involvement in the Raccoon City Incident at a dinner party in the unassuming city of Tall Oaks, during his visit to Ivy University. Simmons catches wind of this and realizes that he needs to keep the president silent. In his mind, an incident like Raccoon City shows the need for his position as National Security Adviser and admitting such heinous wrongdoings would make the country look weaker to other countries, possibly inviting attacks. Thus, he blackmails and threatens a Secret Service agent named Helena Harper to weaken security at the Tall Oaks event, which leads to a C-Virus outbreak that ends up killing the president and just about everyone in Tall Oaks except Leon and Helena.
Leon and Helena hurry through the city and eventually run into Ada, who explains that they’re up against what I can only describe as the Patriots from Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 before grappling off to her own mysterious devices. There’s a large and dangerous entity that Simmons is a part of, one whose toes you do not want to step on. Not to worry though, because The Family is mentioned menacingly several times, but their agents show up in two cutscenes in a helicopter and then never again. Leon and Helena vow to take out Simmons once Helena explains the situation to Leon, and they chase after him, with their informant at HQ, Ingrid Hunnigan, explaining that he’s boarding a private jet to China. They have Hunnigan fake their deaths (which amounts to absolutely nothing, by the way) and get them on a plane to the same location.
While this is happening, Chris is busy getting drunk at a bar six months after his devastating injury. He remembers nothing of Edonia, and is surprised when Piers and the rest of his BSAA team shows up to bring him back into the fold. Apparently, he had run off after being hospitalized for his head injury, and they only just recently tracked him down. Yes, since we’re throwing everything into this story, Chris is now hyper aggressive and has amnesia. They show him who he is and what’s going on in the world, as the fictional city of Lanshiang in China is also suffering a terrible bioterror attack by Neo-Umbrella. He agrees to go with them as their captain, despite still suffering severe amnesia, because that seems like a good idea.
Also at the same time, Jake and Sherry decide that now is the best time to escape their lab prison after six months of experiments. They dispatch many guards, and realize once they’re in the security room that they’re in China. Sherry manages to contact the government and is shocked to hear that they’re already in the area, so they head out into the giant city to meet up with Simmons. Unfortunately, Ustanak is still alive and well and goes after them yet again.
On the plane, Leon and Helena have to contend with a BOW that stowed away on board, releasing C-Virus gas and infecting the entire aircraft. They manage to toss the monster out the cargo bay hatch and Leon has to manually fly the plane with Hunnigan’s instructions, as the autopilot was damaged in the attack. Naturally, this is a vehicle and Leon’s history with vehicles is notoriously sketchy, so… of course he crashes the plane into the city of Lanshiang. Somehow, he and Helena manage to survive this as well.
Even more conveniently, as they escape the wreckage they run into Jake and Sherry! The four of them take down Ustanak once and for all (likely story) and explain their objectives. Leon informs Sherry that her boss is behind everything, and he basically admits it when they go to meet him. It’s here that a regular BOW comes in and infects Simmons with a powerful strain of the C-Virus that was concocted with Jake’s antibodies, per “Ada’s” orders. Leon and Helena go to stop him while Sherry and Jake try to escape, only to be captured within seconds of leaving and dragged off to, and I cannot stress this enough, a freaking gigantic underwater base. Oh yeah, we’re going there (eventually).
Meanwhile, Chris, in a blind rage over what “Ada” did to his men, chases her throughout the city with Piers, eventually running over Leon and butting heads with him about whether to bring her in as a witness to these crimes or kill her because she caused all this havoc. Leon talks him down from his rage and they separate under the promise that Chris and Piers will capture her, not kill her. She secretly takes a sample of the enhanced C-Virus once she’s cornered on a large aircraft carrier ship and explains that the ship is loaded with missiles that are set to fly and infect areas all around the world. She manages to finish this villain monologue right before The Family shows up to off her with a sniper shot to the chest. Chris is stunned, believing that Ada is dead as she falls over the edge of the carrier to the helipad several stories below. They realize how little time they have to act and find a jet on the carrier to pilot, doing everything they can to stop the launch. They manage to do so! …Except for one missile.
Leon and Helena hop on a train, fighting a rapidly-mutating Simmons. They manage to finish him after very narrowly escaping death yet again, the train crashing as they jump from the roof into the river as they go over a bridge. They manage to escape to shore just as Chris contacts them to tell them Ada is dead. Leon learns of Sherry’s location from Hunnigan, who can somehow track her location when she’s in an underwater base a mile under the ocean behind tons of steel and machinery, despite being unable to track Leon in a subway tunnel earlier in the game… Anyway, Leon asks Chris to save them, before Helena notices something in the night sky.
The missile that Chris couldn’t stop flies over the city and detonates, spilling C-Virus gas in a giant cloud, immediately infecting a huge portion of the city. Leon and Helena escape the cloud and make their way toward the giant Quad Tower, a BSAA evacuation point, along the way discovering that Ada is still alive as she flies above them in a helicopter. They reach the tower, where they find that Simmons is actually still alive as well, and they engage him another time, with help from above as Ada joins the fight in her chopper.
Chris learns from Leon that Jake is Albert Wesker’s son as he and Piers head off in the jet toward the sea to reach the underwater base. The pair descend to find all manner of awful monsters within, and they fight through the base as they attempt to find Jake and Sherry. Eventually, they meet with the pair, who had escaped their cell and wreaked some havoc of their own on the base. They realize they’re in the largest room of the base, with a giant world-ending BOW incubating in the center. Unfortunately, Carla’s final trap was to release this monster into the ocean upon her death, so naturally it breaks free. Chris and Piers fight it while Jake and Sherry escape.
I promise you guys, we’re almost done. We’re so close to finishing Resident Evil 6. Jake and Sherry escape the room only to fight Ustanak above bubbling sea vents filled with lava. This fight finishes boring as sin if you’re Sherry, and becomes a totally kickass baller moment with Jake. After finally offing Ustanak once and for all, the pair escape the self-destructing base on a supply platform rocketing through an undersea tunnel toward the surface. They escape, Jake gets his antibodies to the government, and Sherry flies off back to America. Happy ending!
Back in China, Leon and Helena encounter Simmons again as they attempt to get to the roof of the Quad Tower, seeing that he’s fighting Ada on some platforms halfway up the buildings. Ada is knocked out by Simmons and Leon jumps over to her aid as Helena continues climbing to safety from their elevator cable. Ada wakes up after a moment, and the two of them take out Simmons yet again, this time once and all. Ada escapes to finish her own mission, entering the lab in the Quad Tower where her doppelganger was created and igniting everything, burning it to ashes so that nobody can follow the research. She then heads off to her next mission. Happy ending!
As Leon and Helena reach the rooftop, Simmons shows up yet again as a monstrous… fly. A building-sized monstrous fly. The pair use the power of a lightning rod to destroy him, and make it to a helicopter that Ada had left for them to escape with. Turns out Ada also left a nice parting gift, as Simmons attacks one last time but is met with two RPGs to the face. This finally, totally, honestly, for real, no joke, no messing around, finally kills him as he transforms back to his human form long while falling off the tower, landing in a spike on the center with his blood creating the most hamfisted allegory possible. Leon and Helena escape and Helena is absolved of all wrongdoing with regards to the president’s death because she was under duress. Happy ending!
Finally, Chris and Piers fight the giant BOW, called HAOS, in the underwater base as it thrashes around and starts destroying everything. As they fight, Piers’s arm is completely crushed by a piece of the base, and he sees one final option to save Chris, who’s being crushed to death by HAOS. He takes a nearby C-Virus syringe and injects his arm, severing it and letting it mutate into, and I once again cannot stress this enough, a lightning cannon arm. He helps Chris kill HAOS and as they make their escape, Chris promising to get him an antidote, Piers shoves him into the escape pod and shuts it. Chris fires off into the sea toward the surface as Piers stays behind, knowing he can’t let the C-Virus be out in the world as the base crumbles and explodes. Chris is then shown later on, leading another team of BSAA agents toward their next mission. Bitter ending!
We did it guys! We got through the summary of the plot! I cannot believe I managed to squeeze it into four pages on Google Drive, because I skipped a lot to fit it down like this. I know it’s hard to believe, but this is the short version. I wasn’t kidding when I said to strap in; this plot goes all sorts of places. It’s certainly ambitious to try and tackle so much at once, but I would be lying if I said it didn’t come at a severe cost to the overall quality of the end product.
The first problem that comes to mind is that Resident Evil 6 chews through plot devices like candy on Halloween. Faking deaths, double-crosses, clones and doppelgangers, a shocking four separate major outbreaks, sudden underwater bases, a freaking Illuminati stand-in and a virus that is so versatile that it breaks immersion way more than normal for the series. Resident Evil has always used viruses almost like magic, but the C-Virus can do about ten different things to ten different people, whatever the plot demands at any given time. So much is stuffed into Resident Evil 6 that despite having four full-sized campaigns, they still can’t give everything its proper time to be fleshed out.
As you might expect, there may be a few pacing issues with a game of this size, but Resident Evil 6 manages to fail even with lowered expectations. At times there are moments where you’re being rocketed through the plot at lightning speed whipping past important plot, and other times you’re dragging yourself to finish a chapter that never seems to end. They even have the gall to throw in a forced riding section where you sit in a Jeep seat for over two minutes while a BSAA soldier drives through infected city streets. It’s supposed to be an emotional, dramatic moment as you take in the destruction being caused by the C-Virus in China, but it comes off as unbelievably grating and insulting to my time and intelligence, as Capcom tries to bash me over the head with a mallet that has “YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD RIGHT NOW” plastered on it. Utter madness.
It becomes quickly apparent that they bit off more that they can chew and had to fill in gaps with something to make a game four campaigns long. For instance, HAOS shows up in the last 20 minutes of the game. It’s hilarious how obvious it is that Chris and Piers need a final boss for their campaign, so they had to write around that and make another world-ending catastrophe to fit in with the other two or three that Resident Evil 6 sprinkles into its plot. It’s absurd that they managed to make a game with four campaigns at all, but then they fill it with the most over-the-top nonsense in order to make sure every campaign feels properly dramatic with high stakes. When taken as a whole, you start to realize that this is actually insane and that this should never have happened in the first place. It cheapens everything else by having so many huge events in one title that take away from the importance of other major events.
This is to say nothing of the fact that, for as intimidating as everyone makes The Family sound, they literally show up twice to service the plot and then disappear from the entire series. Sorry for any upcoming spoilers, but they haven’t shown up once in the eight years since Resident Evil 6. Supposedly everything is run by this gigantic ultra-entity and the most we see from them is a dude with a sniper rifle in a helicopter a whopping two times. It’s utterly bonkers how much they tried to stuff into the game, but in the end it all fell apart.
Resident Evil 6’s story is both wasted potential and the product of being too ambitious. It adds way too much to take it seriously, it never fully fleshes out any of the plot threads it tries to open up, it ignores more interesting plotlines like letting the president come clean about Raccoon City, it twists itself in knots to accommodate four full-size campaigns and it just buckles under all that pressure. It’s a glorious barely-coherent mess that’s truly a sight to behold, but at the end of the day it’s still a barely-coherent mess.
Graphics
“All style, no substance. Typical.”
Capcom has always had a pedigree for squeezing every ounce of quality they can from any given platform. Resident Evil 2 was one of the PS1’s prettiest titles, and the Resident Evil remake is a stunner even to this day. Similarly, Resident Evil 5 proved to be one of the standout graphical titles of the Xbox 360 and PS3. With how big they wanted to go with Resident Evil 6, it’s not hard to understand that people expected even better graphics than the already-impressive previous title.
To that end, the ambition of so much content in one game proved to be a double-edged sword yet again. Some of Resident Evil 6 looks gorgeous, while some of it… doesn’t. To start off with the good, the main improvement over 5 is the character models. Every protagonist looks stunningly high quality, with tons of detail on each model. Using Chris as a reference point, it’s clear that the model quality is a step up from his appearance in 5, which was already a looker. Similarly, the monsters in the game are perhaps some of the most grotesque yet, with designs centered around the idea of the C-Virus giving people all kinds of mutations.
Legs fall apart and are replaced with gross grasshopper limbs. Heads pop and several giant bees fill the gap instead. A damaged enemy cocoons, and is reborn as a slithery, lightning-fast giant lizard that can shoot barbs out of its chest. There’s even a monster that becomes an insect swarm, with their “body” being a large insect at the heart of the swarm. There are many of these horrific transformations for many of Resident Evil 6’s enemies. They’re rather impressive, despite the overall gore level in the game being similar to the previous game, in that there really isn’t much.
Once again, they chose to do one version across the board instead of differing based on region, meaning things that should be brutally gory are not. For instance, there’s one scene where either the player or one of the enemy types in the game will be tossed into a meat grinder as part of a QTE. Regardless of who ends up getting carved into mincemeat, the effect looks almost cartoonish, with the model sinking into the grinder off-screen with hardly anything more than a couple small blood splatters like you’d see from gunshots coming from the bottom of the screen. You can also see it in the chainsaw enemy, because of course there’s a chainsaw enemy. It does the same thing as in Resident Evil 5: chops at your head, the game tries to focus the camera off you to give the impression that your character was beheaded as they fall to the floor, and often-times you can still see that your head is still very much attached with no blood spilling. It looks tacky.
On top of that, there are many textures in the game that simply don’t look very good. These are usually environment textures which look okay at a distance, but even coming remotely close to them, you can see how low-quality they are. I have to imagine this was a budget issue, as you go to many places throughout Resident Evil 6’s four campaigns. Designing unique textures for one campaign is a lot of work, but four? It’s absurd. They needed textures for snowy mountains, a college campus, a submarine, a giant Chinese city, a small American town, an underwater base, an aircraft carrier, catacombs beneath the earth, and more. Suddenly, that lab in Jake’s campaign makes a lot more sense…
When you think of it in these terms, it’s kind of a surprise that Resident Evil 6 looks as good as it does. I’ve seen people go back and forth on if 5 or 6 looks better, and I’ve found myself having to flip-flop once or twice myself. Resident Evil 6 isn’t a straight upgrade from 5 for what I feel are obvious budgetary reasons, but overall I think the game looks good. I will say that it’s not nearly as impressive coming from 5, but that’s because that game set such a high bar to follow.
That said, Resident Evil 6 is more of a lateral move in terms of graphics. If you step back and take it as a whole, the game looks pretty good, especially the characters and enemies looking fantastic. However, you don’t need a magnifying glass to see where the game stretches itself thin, with some very low-quality textures in almost every environment you visit. The lack of gore is still underwhelming, but I suppose not unexpected after the last game. It would be nice to get some of that back. As it stands, much like the rest of the game, Resident Evil 6’s presentation remains an interesting mix of good and extremely questionable.
Sound
“This stuff doing anything for you yet?”
In the tradition of Resident Evil 6 bloating up with a huge budget, that extends even to this category. Capcom chose to get some of the top talent in the industry to do voice work for this game. When I say “some”, however, I mean “most”. The voice cast this time around is downright nuts!
Matt Mercer, Roger Craig Smith, Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, Eden Riegel, Yuri Lowenthal… The list of industry talent is enormous. That’s not even everyone, those are just some of the VAs with established pedigree! Matt Mercer voices a stoic, level-headed Leon, Laura Bailey as the bitterly angry Helena Harper, Roger Craig Smith reprising his role as Chris from Resident Evil 5 and Revelations, Troy Baker as the rebellious Jake Muller, Eden Riegel as a kind and trusting Sherry Birkin, and Yuri Lowenthal as one of Chris’s BSAA soldiers, Finn Macauley. Everyone brings their A-game to the table and it works out great.
You may have noticed that I left out a few characters. That’s because there are several lesser-known voices to add to the list. Piers Nivans is voiced by Christopher Emerson, who has done next to no voice work in games outside of Resident Evil 6. Despite this, the actor pumps lots of hard work into playing the young second-in-command. He nails the personality of someone hot-headed and short-tempered, looking to his captain to guide him but realizing his captain is out of control. Instead of being led, he has to temper himself, becoming the leader and the voice of reason for Chris, and Emerson pulls it off beautifully.
Similarly, Courtenay Taylor was a lesser-known name for a while in the gaming space. She had done voices for cartoons and other smaller projects, but 2012 was a big hit for her. She voiced Ada Wong not once, not twice, but three times in one year. Despite having to replace the legendary Sally Cahill as the lady in red, Courtenay took it in stride. She voiced Ada in Operation Raccoon City, then later in the CG movie Resident Evil: Damnation and finally Ada and Carla in Resident Evil 6. Needless to say, she got a lot of practice with the voice in a short time.
Courtenay does one of the best jobs, in my opinion. It’s impossible to match the soft, sultry voice that Cahill provided for years. That said, Courtenay brings her own spin to the role, voicing Ada as a little more snarky while keeping some of her smooth, lower voice to create a blend that still feels like it fits the spy very well. Additionally, she gets to push her limits and experiment as Carla, who has the same voice but with a far more unhinged personality.
It’s great hearing the contrast between the two characters despite them looking identical. Carla speaks with insidious intent, and it gets even more entertaining when she supposedly dies in front of Chris and starts to mutate in Ada’s climactic battle with her. Her mind is completely gone by this point, believing that she’s the real Ada Wong, and it feels like they just let Courtenay go crazy in the recording booth to fantastic effect. Hearing the normally-suave voice cracking and shrieking about how “hell will rise and chaos will reign” has a great disturbing effect on the player. I take it back; I’ve now convinced myself that Courtenay Taylor does the best work in Resident Evil 6.
As for the music itself, there’s still quite a lot to love here. Since there simply must be as much packed in as possible, it really feels like there was unique music for most of the four campaigns. They all follow a musical leitmotif focused on a grand feeling of adventure and danger, the main instrument group being the strings. I like to think that it’s made that way to be reminiscent of spiderwebs, a central visual theme of the logo and some of the menus, but I don’t actually believe that’s the case. Ah well, I suppose my own headcanon will have to do.
This main theme is a great intro for when you start up Resident Evil 6, with a quick-paced undertone that instills the feeling of swiftly-impending danger. Meanwhile, the melody cautiously builds and swells, like it’s trying to be contained and failing to do so, as the strings continue to get more intense until the second crescendo, louder and more intense than the first. It’s also got variations for each of the four campaigns as you select them, giving a different flavor of the theme to match the tone of each story. Very nice touch.
“Tall Oaks’ Streets” is exactly what you might expect. As Leon and Helena ascend from the subway tunnel to the city streets, this starts playing as a scene of complete chaos spills forward. People running in the streets, narrowly avoiding more than one car crash, fire everywhere, monsters biting at their heels as they navigate some of the most treacherous city streets imaginable. The constant low-key piano sets a nefarious vibe to the situation, rising and falling twangs from strings exuding a sense of madness and distortion with the catastrophic downfall of Tall Oaks.
“Rasklapanje” is the name of a disgusting monster that simply will not die. It’s a slimy, slithering mess in a vaguely humanoid form, that squeals and whines as it tries to impregnate you with more of itself. It’s accompanied by a similarly-insidious theme, with otherworldly synthesizers and constant, erratic strings being played and plucked to give off a decidedly unnerving effect. It’s a short piece, but one that gets across the monster’s vibe immediately!
When you have mere minutes to stop an apocalyptic disaster, it may sound a lot like “Missile Countdown” in your head. Chris and Piers are on a mission to prevent a missile filled with C-Virus gas from launching into China, and Piers is fighting his way toward the controls while Chris provides air support in a jet. The two have pitifully little time to save the world, and the countdown is backed by pulse-pounding drums and bass strings, with violins letting out sharp notes and the brass letting out mournful wails in the distance. It helps you feel the pressure of the world’s safety on your shoulders to keep you moving at all costs.
At the climax of Ada’s campaign and near Leon and Helena’s, the three must contend with a vicious common foe in Derek Simmons, the man who wanted Ada so badly that he cloned her. By now, he’s mutated into a beastly creature that still attempts to control and command her, but naturally she’ll have none of it. As they fight on precarious skywalks hundreds of feet above ground, the main theme of Resident Evil 6 is used and manipulated to sound even more sinister, with more intense brass to indicate a stronger foe and higher stakes. It’s a great leitmotif, and I love that the entire game uses it across four campaigns!
Gameplay
“Keep that trigger finger ready. Never know what’s around the next corner.”
I don’t even know if I have the willpower to write this entire section. The story drained so much of my life force, and I fear that this is going to be worse. There is a mind-numbing amount of content to push through here. Let’s go through it together, just like each campaign in Resident Evil 6! Things are always more fun with a partner!
When I say it’ll be worse, I don’t mean due to the game mechanics themselves. Resident Evil 6, in its purest form, has some of the best movement and combat mechanics I’ve ever had the pleasure of using in an action game. It honestly feels like they thought of everything here. If you play it like a normal third person shooter, you are simply going to be doing it wrong; if anything, could benefit from a style meter a la Devil May Cry.
In addition to your usual aiming, moving and shooting, there are tons of options available to you. You can sprint, dodge roll, duck, dip down, dive in three directions, dodge forward on the ground with a powerslide, jump on your back, scurry backwards, roll on the ground to avoid enemies, and that’s just for movement. That’s right, players: the 5 D’s of dodgeball are finally put to use here. Controlling a character is smooth and it feels great to just move around. When it comes to combat, things only get better.
Despite labeling itself as “dramatic horror”, Resident Evil 6 plays more like a character action game at times. Each character has one or two unique weapons to them, and then your arsenal grows over time as you find weapons in each chapter. In addition to the usual pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, the protagonists come equipped with some crazy weapons and skills. I do like the idea of making everyone have something that only they can use, making replays a bit more interesting than if everyone could have all the same stuff.
Leon’s unique weapon is that he has two pistols so he can fight akimbo. Helena gets the Hydra, somehow making a triple-barrel shotgun a government-issued weapon. Chris is balanced, with a pistol, assault rifle and knife. Piers gets the Anti-Materiel Rifle, a monstrous sniper rifle with tons of power. Sherry uses a brutal stun baton that she can charge up for huge damage. Jake uses hand-to-hand combat. Finally, Ada has her trusty crossbow, which can use regular or explosive bolts. It helps keep things fresh no matter who you’re playing as.
Beyond the large arsenal, the combat mechanics itself are very complex for a third person shooter. For starters, the expansive melee system from Resident Evil 5 returns and Capcom has refined it even further. First and foremost, you have a dedicated melee button. You can do a weak melee to stun the enemy, then press it again to stagger them for a real melee attack. Everyone gets a bunch of unique melees depending on where they shoot an enemy, but there are also a bunch of animations for special situational melees, such as pulling an axe out of an enemy and killing them with it. This can happen with lots of items, such as with knives, pipes, glass bottles and more. Everyone also gets their own strong melee like the team melee attacks from 5, called a coup de grace. There are also many unique animations for counterattacks.
Oh, right, did I forget to mention that there are now counters in Resident Evil 6? If you time a melee prompt just right with certain attacks, you can do all manner of attacks. Some are a simple duck and shoulder bash to do some damage, but they can get as elaborate as an instakill on certain enemies. For instance, the creepy super-zombie that leaps at you and does tons of damage if it hits you. If you time a counter just right, you’ll grab him out of the air and use his momentum to throw him into the ground, then curbstomp his weak-point heart without wasting a bullet.
I haven’t even touched on the health and stamina systems yet either. Unlike the EKG of older games or the health bar of previous Resident Evil games, each character has a health bar consisting of six squares. Certain attacks will only partially damage one square, and over time without additional damage it can fill back up. Once a square is gone, you can’t recover that health without an herbal tablet. Instead of an aerosol or herbal mixture, you can mix herbs together and they come out as tablets you keep in a case. You can store up to 17 tablets in your case at any given time, and you can pop pills to heal one square per tablet.
In addition, Resident Evil 6 introduces the franchise’s first stamina system. While you have a dedicated melee button, you can’t just spam melee attacks. You have to be mindful of the stamina bar under your health bar, as that’s what limits your ability to do actions. There are several different ways to drain stamina, such as by using melee attacks, doing a ground-slide, or performing a quick-shot with your weapon equipped; you can use a chunk of stamina to automatically lock onto the nearest enemy and fire in a pinch. It’s a great tool for safety so you don’t get bit from behind.
Your stamina bar refills automatically over time. If your stamina bar runs out, however, your character will be unable to sprint and will be out of breath until the bar refills completely to the top. You’ll be unable to do any melees or counterattacks, which leaves you pretty vulnerable. Thankfully, another little tip that I don’t recall ever being told about in-game is that in addition to tablets restoring health, one tablet completely refills your stamina bar instantly. Keep that in mind, kids: if you’re going to be doing physical activity, make sure to pop pills regularly!
If you’re reading all this and wondering why the game has such a divisive reception, then I have some distressing news. This all sounds really cool, and it is. The base mechanics for Resident Evil 6 are awesome. There are two main things that get in their way, however, and both of them are egregiously bad. First is the complete lack of tutorials. All the cool slides and melees? All the neat diving and countering? If you’re lucky, you might see something about them on a loading screen. Otherwise, the game never bothers to explain anything to the player in-game. I would never have learned about half the actions you can make in the game if people hadn’t told me.
In fact, I’ll let you know these two nuggets right now, because I know they made my life so much easier and instantly increased my enjoyment of the game. Pressing Right Bumper + X (or R1 + Square) will automatically combine the strongest herb combo in your inventory and add them to your tablet case, negating the need to open the awful inventory and manually mix them and add them. Also, you may notice that if you lose a bar of health sometimes, you’ll slowly and dramatically fall to the ground for a solid second or two, then have to get up slowly. It’s especially noticeable when guns get involved and you spend way too much time flopping on the ground like a fish. I’m here to tell you to hold that A or Cross button as you stumble, and you’ll instead do a roll right back to your feet so you can get back in the action. You, my friends, are welcome.
It’s sad, because it’s an entirely preventable problem. A simple text box somewhere in the game while you’re moving through an area is all it takes to inform players. You don’t even have to set up any specific scenario for it! Instead, they’re relegated to luck-of-the-draw loading screen blurbs, if they even make it into the game at all. As such, most people played it like a bog-standard third person shooter, making no use of mechanics they had no idea even existed in the first place. Resident Evil 6 should have been lauded for its deep combat and movement, but Capcom kept all of it a buried treasure for some reason.
That said, tutorial boxes wouldn’t have solved everything. There’s a second, much more disruptive problem that seeps into the entire main game. I mentioned how brutal the story pacing can be to slog through, and this feeds into the gameplay too. The campaigns of Resident Evil 6 are cobbled together so poorly that you hardly ever get time to use your movement and combat skills to their fullest. Each campaign comes riddled with many of the same problems, each one building on another and eventually becoming too much baggage for the game to handle.
To begin, the frequency in which Resident Evil 6 restricts or removes player control is nothing short of infuriating. It feels like you can’t move five steps without the camera jerking control from the player and focusing on something in the environment that you’re supposed to interact with. It’s not just cutscenes, either; several times I was in a heated firefight and aiming at a monster’s head, only for the game to swing my camera around 180º to focus on some other event but while everything was still in-game, often leading to me being grabbed or bitten without any recourse whatsoever since I couldn’t see what I was just shooting at. You lose camera control so often that I sometimes feel like I spend more time watching characters stare at objects than playing the damn game.
While that may be the most outwardly upsetting part, for me there are much worse aspects to Resident Evil 6. The level design of the entire game is nonsensical at best, and I promise that this is me being nice. There was hardly a single environment where I said “This isn’t complete bullshit and makes sense.” Ivy University’s campus is a complete mess, with a hallway to a building splitting a football field and tennis court. The one main campus entrance is a spiral street with enough space for only one car to get through. The plane that Leon and Helena use to get to China is one of the most absurdly-crafted modes of transportation I’ve ever seen, so much so that a friend of mine posited that he thought it must’ve been a train at some point. It makes perfect sense with the size of the chairs, the private rooms, and oh yeah, the offices on the commercial airliner.
Hell, even in Tall Oaks there’s all kinds of weirdness. There’s a house you have to cut through in order to get out to the city streets. I swear to you I am not exaggerating when I say that this house consists of one entryway, a living room, and a hallway leading out the back door. That’s it. There are no doors leading to other rooms. No kitchen, no bathroom, no bedrooms, no closets, nothing. There was such little care given to the level design here that I almost question if some of these were tossed together last minute to get the player from point A to B. The alternative to time or budget constraints would be that they made these decisions consciously, which I have a hard time believing. That said, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Also in Tall Oaks, did you know about the ancient medieval ruins in America? What’s that, I hear you saying? “The first foreign colonizers were here long after the medieval period”? Oh, well maybe someone should tell Capcom that. Underneath the city is an utterly gargantuan series of catacombs that stretches for miles underground. They seem to be as wide as the city itself, too. After descending down into the caves for, again, what appears to be several miles, they reach a giant cave reservoir with bridges and such. Here they encounter a gigantic mutated shark, which somehow survives and goes up through said miles of cave systems as its hunting grounds. Right before this sequence, Leon and Helena also manage to survive well over a full minute completely submerged while struggling to escape the monster’s jaws and traveling at what seems like highway speeds down a tunnel.
After finally killing the monster, they get spit out of a cliff face and into a lake, safely away from Tall Oaks. However, they appear to only just be right outside of town, despite the fact that logically they should be at the base of a mountain and Tall Oaks should be, again, several miles higher up. It would appear that someone took architecture lessons from the guys who built the historical society and prison in Silent Hill 2.
The team clearly just had an idea in mind to have cool setpiece moments, and then they chose to build environments from that. They wanted a cool boss fight on top of a train, so they made the C-Virus do whatever they wanted to Simmons to make him transform into a lion with a gatling gun on his back. They wanted a crazy escape sequence on a ship, so the C-Virus turns Carla into a giant blob monstrosity that tries to crush Ada to death. I mentioned before that Chris and Piers needed a final boss, so they wrote in a world-ending jellyfish man to be a final gameplay sequence. They wanted a fistfight with Ustanak over a pit of lava, so Jake and Sherry had to be written to lose their guns so Jake wouldn’t be able to shoot him. Everything about all the setpieces in this game screams to me “We wanted these moments at the expense of everything else”.
Because this game loves to waste your time, let’s talk about vehicle segments. Despite there being segments on Jeeps, motorcycles, snowmobiles and more, not a single one of these moments controls well. The game pushes you to accelerate as much as possible to avoid dying, and yet when doing so, turning becomes almost impossible. I died occasionally in Resident Evil 6, but I would attribute 90% of my deaths to the atrocious vehicle segments. Often they will poorly telegraph your path or any oncoming obstacles, turning each one into a frustrating trial-and-error most of the time. I can think of three vehicle segments offhand and each one is utter garbage.
If it sounds like they tried to fit too much into the game, they did. I talked about the pacing of the story, but that’s a problem here too. So much of Resident Evil 6 is unnecessary fat that isn’t fun to play and should’ve been trimmed. If it doesn’t serve the plot but it’s fun to play through, then I would say keep it. As it stands, though, hear me out: Cut Leon chapters 1–3, make Chris only chapters 2 and 4, Jake’s campaign loses chapter 2, and Ada’s loses chapter 1. Then, work the narrative around that instead. It’s not perfect, but I get a feeling most people who have played Resident Evil 6 would agree that I just envisioned a much better game. Sometimes, less is more.
Throughout all this madness, you may remember that we’re talking about how Resident Evil 6 took aspects from other games in the series and amped them up to 11. I’m sad to say that QTEs are no exception. In addition to contextual prompts for attacks and such, there are an unholy amount of QTEs to contend with. You will have to press X at certain times, you’ll rotate your stick constantly, you’ll have to mash A so much that your controller might break. There are some especially unintuitive climbing sections where you have to alternate pressing your shoulder buttons to proceed, but the visual is so bad that I tend to do it wrong even though I know what I’m supposed to actually do. It was so bad, in fact, that Capcom had to patch in an option for QTE assistance. This option is meant for Amateur difficulty, but is now usable for all difficulties. It skips QTEs in the story that would kill you if you failed them, and it makes certain ones like that climbing one easier (one shoulder button instead of alternating them). If that isn’t an admission that they screwed up, I don’t know what is.
It’s a shame that the game ends up with all these gameplay hangups, because beneath them all, Resident Evil 6 is incredibly fun to play. I think that Capcom really threw the baby out with the bathwater here, because we’ve not seen these mechanics in another game from them since. The combat is exhilarating when you actually get to do it, but the game tries its hardest to make sure that never happens. If only there were some way to get all the story out of the way and only focus on that combat… Hey, I have an idea!
Extras/Replay Value
“If she wants a game, she’ll get one. With the real Ada Wong. Let’s see who comes in first.”
What if we got all the story out of the way and only focused on the combat? The one solid gold thing in Resident Evil 6 should get its time to shine, and at the very least, Capcom had the same idea. The Mercenaries minigame returns in Resident Evil 6 and instead of having to unlock it, you can access it from the moment you start the game. If I’m being honest, I think this is a really good choice on Capcom’s end, because it would be hard to recommend beating all the campaigns just for what I consider to be the very best part of this game.
Yes, I said that and I mean it. Capcom spent millions upon millions of dollars with, at the time, their biggest development team ever. They built four campaigns, they stuffed the game to the gills with every idea they could fit onto the margins of the notebook. Despite all that, the best part of Resident Evil 6 is when the development team tossed that all aside and got out of their own way to let the player go crazy.
Much like any other Mercenaries, this one is also a high score attack minigame. For regular Mercenaries, you have to kill 150 enemies with as much time left on the clock as possible while keeping the combo active. This will net you the best score. As in Resident Evil 5, you get an extra five seconds on the clock for each melee kill. However, each coup de grace adds seven seconds to the timer and is usually a shorter animation but requiring more setup. Counterattacks that kill are worth ten seconds on the timer, making the melee system rewarding in different ways.
There are many different maps to fight on, along with many characters. Leon, Helena, Chris, Piers, Jake, Sherry and Ada all have a default loadout, and a loadout for their alternate EX1 costumes. You can also play as Carla and Agent, each with their own unique loadouts as well. You can also unlock EX2 outfits, which are recolors of the EX1 outfits with the same loadout, but neat all the same. However, the best bonus outfits are the EX3 outfits that you can unlock. These are the low-poly models for characters from the PS1 games, as well as newly-made ones for the characters who didn’t appear back then. What an awesome addition!
These same loadouts extend to The Mercenaries No Mercy version of the minigame, which doubles the necessary number of kills to win while making enemies much more numerous and aggressive. In a strange twist of events, the PC version of Resident Evil 6 has a crossover with Left 4 Dead 2, meaning in the No Mercy version of The Mercenaries, you can play as that game’s four protagonists. It’s surreal seeing Nick, Coach, Rochelle and Ellis alongside the heroes of Resident Evil 6, but it’s cool nonetheless.
Another fairly neat innovation for the series was the introduction of Agent Hunt. If players enable this option in their campaign setup, you can actually end up connecting to their game. You then take over control of one of the games various monsters, and you try to impede the protagonists as much as possible. It’s a nice concept, if a little under-baked (gee, haven’t heard that in this review yet).
Somewhat related to Agent Hunt is the campaign intersection. This should normally be in the gameplay section, but I just couldn’t find a better place to put it. Crossover events are one thing I wish Capcom hadn’t jettisoned out into the vacuum of space, because they’re extremely cool. At certain points of each campaign, you can link up with other players at the same intersection point in the load menu for some three or four-player co-op. For instance, players can all fight the giant creature in Edonia as Chris, Piers, Jake and Sherry. Someone playing Ada’s campaign can help Leon and Helena take down Deborah in the Leon campaign. Are these interactions superfluous? Almost certainly. That said, it was still one thing I wish Capcom had experimented with more, because it’s incredibly fun to sync up with other players to take down bosses and other challenges.
Later on in its life, Capcom pushed out some DLC for Resident Evil 6 focused entirely on its multiplayer. They added several new modes to the mix, all of which range from “eh” to “fun, but nobody plays it anymore”. These modes are Predator, Onslaught, Survivors and Siege. These modes are, of course, included in later releases of Resident Evil 6.
Survivors is a holdover from the Versus DLC offered in Resident Evil 5. Up to six players will go into a map with a small loadout exclusive to their character of choice. The objective is to find stronger weapons in the environment and kill other players for points. The last person standing wins, or the one with the highest score if time runs out. Unlike 5, however, people don’t just constantly respawn on death. Instead, they inhabit an enemy around the map and must kill another player in order to respawn as their character. It adds a layer of depth, but I admit I didn’t really get to play this much… ever.
Second up is Siege. One of the better multiplayer modes in my opinion, Siege pits three BSAA agents against three enemies. The BSAA team must defend another BSAA agent until extraction, while enemies try to stop the escape. Agents can pick up weapons to use against the horde, and enemies can summon powerful monsters via special crystals they can break in the environment. Additionally, Agents can break time crystals to shorten extraction time. If they extract, the BSAA team wins. If the enemy team kills their target, they win instead. This one is intense, but as I said, nobody really plays much anymore.
We also have Predator to play with. This mode pulls six people together, and makes one of them into the powerful Ustanak. It’s pretty straightforward; players try to kill the Ustanak, and Ustanak tries to kill players. Ustanak can swap between two arm mods to aid in his assault, while players will find weapons to fight him around the map like normal. The main difference here is that Ustanak can actually destroy the weapons for human players as he comes across them, making it even more harrowing to fight him. Each player gets a round as the Ustanak, and the highest score wins at the end. This mode was alright, but I think I like Siege more thus far.
Finally, Onslaught mode rounds out the additional content. This is a two-player-only mode where you’re separated from your opponent. The objective this time is to rack up kills as fast as possible, as you send enemies to the other player’s side as you kill them. Getting a 30-kill combo will send all of those monsters over at once, turning this game mode into something of a Mercenaries-themed Tetris match. You can send enemies before the 30-kill threshold by taunting, which will increase your Offense gauge the more enemies you send. Your Offense gauge will boost your damage to enemies as it rises to a maximum of 300%, but getting hit will lower it and doing a full 30 combo will deplete it entirely. Melee kills will also boost your Offense gauge in this mode. If a player dies, the other player wins. Otherwise, the highest score at the end of the timer will win. I really like this mode, and thankfully it’s the easiest to get someone to play with since it’s only two-player!
As with just about everything else in Resident Evil 6, Capcom shoved as much as they could into the game with its various extras. Between the many costumes, the neat retro models, the many multiplayer modes and especially the expansive Mercenaries mode, it’s downright impressive. Unlike just about everything else in Resident Evil 6, a majority of this content is actually really fun to play, as the combat gets to shine its brightest with nothing else standing in its way. It’s a strange situation, but at least they got something completely right for once.
Conclusion
“We’re beyond sympathy at this point. We’re beyond humanity.”
I admit it feels weird to say that the best part of Resident Evil 6 is a minigame, but that’s simply the truth for me. It’s clear that the company was struggling with this game and that they tried to appeal to too many people at once. In attempting to court the Call of Duty crowd, they ended up in a strange limbo.
Resident Evil 6 is not at all the type of action that Call of Duty fans like, and I wish they had just unchained it from that. They had the recipe for a magnificent action shooter and then chose to take steps back to try and also appease the more survival horror-attuned fans of older Resident Evil titles. It’s painfully obvious how thinly the company stretched itself when developing the game, and now all I can see is wasted potential.
I do not believe that Resident Evil 6 is a terrible game, for what it’s worth. It has extremely high highs, but when it fails, it does so in fashion that borders on offensive to a gamer’s sensibilities. That said, it’s not a game I ever truly enjoy by myself, and when I play the campaign with others it’s often just for occasions like this. It doesn’t help, again, that the highest peaks of the game are found in a score attack bonus mode. I don’t fault anyone for telling me how much they dislike the game, since one would usually expect the kind of quality The Mercenaries displays in the actual campaign itself.
It looks pretty good, it sounds great with all that talent, and the game’s mechanics are downright astounding with their depth. Sadly, this comes in a package deal with atrocious writing, no tutorials whatsoever, and a game that is deathly afraid to let you have full autonomy for more than a minute at a time. It reminds me of the Earthquake ride at Universal Studios that I rode as a child; Capcom wants you to have a blast and go crazy in an apocalyptic nightmare, but you’re locked onto a single track which constantly commands your attention to setpieces, and you have to keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times.
