Resident Evil Six. SIX. It’s a real mystery to me what criteria a franchise title has to have in order to get an official number after its name instead of an R word like Requiem or Revelations. Out of eighty or so Resident Evil games, only six of them get numbers, counting RE Zero. Who the hell knows?
The first thing wrong with this game is that in order to start or even just continue your campaign, you have to navigate through an endless slew of title and option screens and can only start the game by pressing the action button no less than eleven times from the initial game bootup. Remember back when you played N64? (of course not, you were probably three tops) You flip the black switch to on and then you’re playing videogames. Today, trying to play a videogame on a console is an event. It takes like two to five minutes from cold boot before you can control a character on screen. RE6 makes you pick a campaign, then a character, then difficulty settings, online multiplayer settings. STOP TRYING TO MAKE RESIDENT EVIL A MULTIPLAYER GAME. Multiplayer isn’t just there but it’s default set to on so every time I turn on the game, I have to turn multiplayer back off again as well as verify everything else. I already told you I wanted this shit the way I wanted it when I started the campaign. Why do I have to reenter it every fucking time I come back? And why does it even take so long the first time?
The game has a bad habit of controlling certain segments of the game. You’ll lose the ability to aim your gun and more importantly, the ability to run. Leon walks so fucking slow and I don’t understand why the game is forcing me to experience this. This mostly happens in the first part of the game, the time you’re trying to learn the controls but you’re not allowed to learn them. You’re only allowed to learn how to shoot your gun right before you have to shoot it. And that’s no exaggeration because the game has no manual. No manual in the box, not even a little card with some button callouts, essentially communicates to me that the game makers don’t give a fuck.
Ordinary zombies can take several gunshots to the head before actually dying. This really pisses me off. The rule is shoot a zombie in the head, they die. It’s not hard. You can roundhouse kick the head clean off of a zombie’s shoulders but your handgun bullets are like paintballs. Or the other thing happens where you shoot off the head and then random tentacles or appendages grow out of the neck for no rhyme or reason and the zombie keeps coming, leaving you wondering what the fucking point of pulling off headshots is. Seriously, half the time shooting them in the knee is probably just as effective.
You know what I really appreciated about Dead Space? Even while the ambushes were incredibly phoned in and obvious, (or at least so overused to the point of desensitization,) every time you came across a suspicious-looking corpse, which is probably just a necromorph playing dead in wait, you always had the option of taking potshots at it while it lays defenseless on the floor instead of walking past it. Then you laugh at it because you didn't fall for it’s ruse. RE6 will not let you kill a “sleeping” zombie. Not only that but it can’t even be hit by bullets. It’s like shooting at air or a hologram. Words can not describe how moronic and petty this is. I can see the zombie strategically placed in a choke point along my path. It’s obviously a trap but since I can’t shoot it, my only other option is to go up and wiggle my ass in it’s face until it attacks me. I’ll probably take a little bit of damage. Then I’ll kill it. Then I’ll be on my way to the next mandatory ambush. And in the end, the encounter isn't scary. It’s not surprising. It’s not even based on something that could realistically happen because of how controlled it is. It’s just handicapping you for being smart. It’s like the basket chase scene In Raiders of the Lost Ark where we think we are going to have a harrowing fight scene with a swordsman but Jones just shoots him instead, only the swordsman magically becomes immune to bullets for no good reason other than to force a fight scene. Good job, Capcom. You really got me good with that well played twist where the body is actually still alive. You totally forced me to not see it coming. Congrats.
There’s also a part in Leon’s scenario where you swim under water. (The swimming controls are awful.) There are suspended zombie bodies all around, some of which grab you. Again, you can’t avoid them, in fact you can’t even attack or defend yourself under water. You just have to wait for your partner to rescue you. Why in the hell can she do stuff but I can’t?
This is the only Resident Evil game, probably the only zombie game, I’ve ever played that actually depicts the chaos of a sudden zombie outbreak in a believable way, (for the most part.) You come across isolated groups of survivors or people just fleeing for their lives. Everything's on fire. Cars are crashing into things and exploding. Yes, you've seen all of this before but my point is that it’s all usually in cut scenes and is reduced to a mere movie. This is stuff that’s actively happening as you run around. It’s stuff you can interact with and stuff that can kill you if you’re not paying attention. I’m not sure why but the part where the missile explodes in the city and spreads a huge virus cloud is highly memorable. Driving slowly through the hazy streets in the armored personnel carrier around and over idling zombies somehow felt very real.
You can load three skills onto your character before continuing the game. They’re things like increase drop of specific ammo, increased damage resistance, increase damage to specific enemy and aim your fucking gun you fucking dumbass. Seriously, why do I have to spend points to buy that ability. Oh, the points… They’re experience points that come in the form of chess pieces of all things that you find in containers and dropped by dead enemies. Ignoring the fact that they’re chess pieces for some reason, I never understood this mechanic in general. You can FIND experience in a barrel. I understand getting experience from killing an enemy but then you technically have to pick up the chess piece in order to get the points. You can kill the enemy but get no EXPERIENCE until you pick up the random object it left behind. What sense does that make? Why don’t they just have the meter automatically go up when I kill something and not make me pick up irrelevant objects to manually initiate it? 
The cover system is clunky and too damn finicky, even with the onscreen pictographs. Actually I can say that for most games with cover. I have WAY more control and am less likely to die if I just stand around a corner or crouch down behind a wall without actually attaching myself to it with the in-game cover mechanic.
Toward the end of Chris’ story, I stopped being able to pick up ammo for some reason. I don’t know why. Was everything I came across ammo for a gun that I failed to pick up somewhere and that’s why I couldn't get it? I ended up doing a lot of running and knifing. I only had a couple of green herbs and a few bullets left by the time I got to the final boss. I basically killed him 75% with the knife. It was a pain in the ass.
Probably the most incredible thing about RE6 is the campaigns. There are four. Each campaign has two characters which you can choose to play as, (the other one is your mandatory partner.) During the story, you’ll come across the characters from the other campaigns and they’ll help you or you’ll help them or they’ll fuck you over if they’re Ada Wong. After I finished Leon’s story, I started Chris’ story and was blown away when I found that it was completely different from Leon’s. It is no exaggeration to say that they feel like two separate games. Different story arc, different enemies, different part of the world, different weapons, different bosses and even a different HUD. The best thing about this is that you have the option of two totally different experiences. If you like classic slow braindead zombies in the city kind of like RE2, then play as Leon. If you like some light military TPS with the fast mutants that have RPGs and can drive vehicles similar to RE5, then play as Chris. If you like being aggravated, play as Jake. If you like being an asshole, play as Ada.
If you look at the hundreds of thousands of Resident Evil games that exist, proportionally I haven’t played that many. (I think about six by my count.) But out of those, this is definitely the most fun one. When you finish a campaign and then reminisce about all the stuff you did to beat the game, you realize just how fantastical the whole thing was. You crash land a plane in the city, crash land a helicopter in the city, exploded a giant mutant fish while sliding down a waterfall, survived a city bombing and a bus falling off of a cliff, explored Indiana Jones death trap catacombs under a church, fought the shapeshifting final boss from Parasite Eve on a train, the side of a skyscraper and then killed him with lightning from the sky. It doesn't feel like you just finished one game. It feels like you just finished five. If John Woo and Quentin Tarantino co directed a zombie movie, it would look like this. General consensus seems to be that it sucks but I had fun.
