Twelve for 2012: Video Games Part Four – Resident Evil 6

By Louis Rabinowitz on Monday, July 16th, 2012

It’s time for part four – the one with the zombies, rubbish hair, and more flipping zombies. Part four, Resident Evil 6!

Release date: October 2

Platform(s): Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Microsoft Windows PC

THE GOOD STUFF

Capcom (developers of the whole Resident Evil series) have promised a return to the atmospheric Amnesia: The Dark Descent-esque survival horror of the first couple of Resident Evil games, and from the reaction to game footage shown at Comic-Con this week and E3 back in early June, it looks like they’ve done a pretty good job of that. The scene was set in an underground subway tunnel, with Leon fighting his way through hordes of zombies (the undead do have a particularly unnatural affection for subway tunnels, don’t they?). If that isn’t old-school survival horror, I don’t know what is.

There’s certainly not a lack of content. Resident Evil 6 is confirmed to have at least three single-player campaigns, where players can play as old favourites Leon and Chris (for the first time, Leon and Chris’ campaign’s will overlap, leading to a first meeting for the two. Should be interesting), and new character Jake ‘Yoghurt’ Muller (I made up the yoghurt part, but I’m hoping Capcom will be smitten with my brilliance). There’s even hints of a fourth campaign centered around Ada Wong. the main femme fatale of both the games and movies. And there’s the three co-op campaigns (correct me if the co-op campaigns are just multiplayer versions of the single player campaign), which, in a mildly risky and troll inviting new step, see you face off against randomly picked internet players in certain scenes. It sounds good on paper, but probably not so great when someone hollers down the microphone that you cheated and they’re reporting you for being too good at the game. Shame on you.

THE BAD STUFF

Maybe it’s time to call it a day on the Resident Evil franchise. Since the franchise’s debut with uh… Resident Evil, it’s ballooned out into a main games series now including six entries, as well as several spin-offs, remasterings, ports, 3D conversions (sigh) expansion packs, a successful (well, financially anyway) movie series starring Milla Jovovich, which will include five movies once Retribution hits cinemas this September, a series of original novels, a comics series, guide books and of course, a sack-load of merchandise.

I’m still waiting for the LEGO Resident Evil set, though, followed by a LEGO Resident Evil video game. C’mon, it’d be hilarious! Sort of.

The series has already suffered from a dip in quality (called Resident Evil 5 – a bad omen for what’s going to be the direct sequel?) once, and it could end up tanking, and washing up on the beach of dead and bloated franchises. At least Sonic could finally have some quality company.

The playable demo for the game, released earlier this month on c0nsoles, universally disappointed, not due to the game having a slight lack of scale and ambition, but for lacking any original ideas and generally being a tad uninspired. At certain points you’re forced to tiptoe – you can’t even walk, and the plot is beginning to stretch a bit thin, with some weird continuity problems (you know, ‘plot amnesia’, where characters forget vital things that they learned in previous installments so they can learn them all over again for no apparent reason). With bad reviews two and a half months before the game hits stores, the signs aren’t looking great for Resident Evil 6…

Will it be good?

Maybe. I’m not quite sure on this one, with conflicting yes-and-no signs, but since the actual gameplay demo sunk like an exceptionally huge boulder, and that Resident Evil 5 was a bit ‘meh’, I’m going to give this one a tentative thumbs-down.

Will it succeed?

It’s going up against reliably successful juggernaut FIFA 13 in the same week, so it won’t come out unscathed from that, but it’ll probably make a decent amount of cash. It’s a Resident Evil game, after all.