RETRO – We will finally learn the answer to The Cranberry’s famous song’s eternal question as we pop out hordes of zombie’s head one by one in the next episode to the Resident Evil’s series. In Resident Evil 6 Lean S. Kennedy, the cop turned special agent, Chris Redfield the paramilitary, special commando type of guy, and some hot chicks with guns returns to fight the infected zombies which hunger for our brains and our torrent bandwidth.

I know it’s quite a shock to Resident Evil aficionados, but I never really liked the RE series until Resident Evil 4. The first game was quite silly in my opinion, with an archaic system even for its own time, back in 1996 with the others getting even sillier. True to be told, I played it first on PC and never saw the PS1 version, and while Resident Evil 1 was so-so on PC, the other ports of RE2 and 3 were just horrible – even more, then the zombies which appeared in the game.

Leon for resident! Uhm… I mean president!

Then Resident Evil 4 came out, and it changed everything… While it wasn’t as scary as the first three games, it succeeded in every other department. The awesome shooting system, the excellent storyline, the new kind of aggressive “zombies” (there weren’t the same kind of undead as the ones before) the cool graphics for GameCube and the whole package was just perfect with Leon S. Kennedy as the sympathetic hero of the game. So it wasn’t a surprise, which Resident Evil 5 was a step backward. It was still a pretty good game, but couldn’t live up to its predecessor for many reasons. And now we have Resident Evil 6 here…

President Evil!

A story of Resident Evil 6 takes part in 3 different solo or coop campaigns of three main heroes: Leon, Chris, and Jake. Jake is a new character: he is a mercenary of the Edonian Liberation Army and son of late bio-terrorist, Albert Wesker. The storyline is quite good, which shows the vast superiority of the games over the movies again.

There are lots of surprises, sudden betrayals, unlikely friendships, so once again it’s not just supporting some shootings against the zombies. Leon for example has to kill the President of the United States in a dramatic scene (which was shown in the trailer of the game, so no spolier here.) The sexy Ada Wong, (who also appeared in the latest RE movie) is starring again in this game, so we can have some nostalgic feeling of Resident Evil 4 resurging.

The main problem with the branching missions is that we have to play through the same gameplays elements (levels, some bosses, etc.) sometimes, which feels kind of boring for the first time, and downright irritating the second. Not all those parts to replay are annoying, but unfortunately, a large part of them is and if you want to understand the whole story through different hero’s eyes the game forces you to do so by playing all the campaigns.

Shoot that zombie and plant vs zombies!

However, the one thing, which didn’t changed at all is the gameplay itself, which feels now a little old. It’s basically again man and woman against zombies, which is fine, the archaic game mechanics can get tiresome after a while. Besides the sometimes monotone zombie killings, we have some quick time based action scenes here (Uncharted feeling FTW), which are sometimes fine, sometimes feels a little out of place, and sometimes they are just plain annoying.

While the action besides those timed scenes is quite the same as always, we have some basic experience leveling system, which isn’t interesting to be honest. Gameplay wise we still have our companion who helps us (who can be either taken by the computer or human friend), but it has to be mentioned that she or he is less skilled this time, so too we cannot “trick” the game to kill its zombies instead of us this time.

As for the health packs, it’s the same story of plants, which have to be combined to make some medicinal drugs. Frankly, I am getting tired of green and red plants in a zombie killer game – who had this bright idea in the first time?!

Rotten aesthetics

The graphics of the game are kind of nice, but don’t expect to surpass the last game. The graphical department did a good job with Leon though: he looks older, and more rugged, than in RE4. The zombies look ugly, but that’s okay: they are zombies. Seriously, the zombies are quite well done as well: they are disgusting as hell, and animated as in any latest zombie movies. The areas themselves won’t really wow you however honestly they looked better in Resident Evil 5. Also we have some big explosion effects, which are nice, but generally speaking graphics are not the strongest part of the game.

A mixed bag

Resident Evil is a big rollercoaster of some truly terrifying and sometimes even awesome moments, with tense fights against zombies, and shocking, Hollywood-like action scenes but its unfortunately also somewhat marred by some tedious repetition and annoying quick time games. The branching stories are quite good; still, it’s a pity that it forces you to go through the same annoying parts. Still I would recommend the game absolutely to the fans of the series, and those who just want play a decent action horror game with interesting story, and truly fearful or chilling moments, should give it a go.

-BadSector- (2012)