Resident Evil 6

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Resident Evil 6
Imagine RE5 going Michael Bay style even further. This is the result.
Protagonist(s): Leon S. Kennedy Chris Redfield Jake Muller Ada Wong Genre(s): Third-person shooter Platform(s): PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 Xbox One Nintendo Switch Release Date: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 WW: October 2, 2012 JP: October 4, 2012 Microsoft Windows AU: March 21, 2013 WW: March 22, 2013 PlayStation 4, Xbox One WW: March 29, 2016 Nintendo Switch WW: October 29, 2019 Engine: MT Framework Developer(s): Capcom Publisher(s): Capcom Country: Japan Series: Resident Evil Predecessor: Resident Evil: Revelations Successor: Resident Evil: Revelations 2

Resident Evil 6 (known as Biohazard 6 in Japan) is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in October 2012 and later for Microsoft Windows in March 2013. It was released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016, and for the Nintendo Switch in 2019.

Plot

The plot takes place over a period of at least six months from December 2012 to June 2013, over fifteen years after the US Government's destruction of Raccoon City, and takes place in various places around the world.

Bad Qualities

1. Just like Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, it focuses too much on action (even more than Resident Evil 4 and 5) and not on horror.
2. The game has a lot of really dumb moments.
   • While crashing, Helena saves a dead pilot. Why?
   • You have to do a QTE where Leon is looking for car keys.
   • Leon and Helena take an infected girl with them. Which is dumb because she eventually dies and becomes a zombie which attacks them.
   • The final boss fight between Ustanak and Jake is a fist fight. Bare in mind, Ustanak is ten times larger than Jake.
   • Two hapless victims get killed while by waving and hollering in front of a security camera, this could've been avoided if one of them kept an eye out for zombies.
   • During Leon and Helena's escape from Tall Oaks, they find a survivor named Peter. After the ammo in his rifle runs out, Peter steals his girlfriend's handgun and goes outside to the streets by himself — and all because he thought he had a better chance of survival on his own instead of with a group of survivors inside a gun shop. Guess what happens.
   • During the "hide from Ustanak" portions of Jake and Sherry's campaign, one potential hiding spot is the dumpsters scattered around. Should both characters hide in the same dumpster, they'll randomly start bickering over who is touching whom. Mildly amusing, unless Ustanak is nearby, in which case he'll hear them talking and promptly kill them.
3. For whatever reason, the game has limited resources, which doesn't work since the game is more action packed then any other Resident Evil game. This is especially egregious when you consider that the previous games that were more action focused (Resident Evil 4 and Revelations) don't have this problem.
4. Another strange addition was a stamina meter, which feels arbitrary and only makes the game harder since you have to melee if you run out of ammo since there's limited resources.
5. While the game having high variety is a good thing, it makes the game seem like it has an identity crisis seeing as how it has elements of stealth, horror, third person shooting, driving, puzzles, and etc.
6. The skill system while itself isn't a bad idea, a lot of skills seemingly do nothing aside from the most obvious like how you can get more bars for stamina. There's also limitations. You can't equip more than 3 skills at a time unless you change the skill set which disables the previous equipped set.
7. The camera sometimes can't be controlled and is locked instead.
8. While the concept of the plot is interesting, the plot itself is bland, forgettable, and needlessly convoluted given the different period of events that occur throughout each campaign especially since so much happens out of order. It's also really dumb when you consider that all this started because Derek was rejected by Ada and tried to recreate Ada by cloning her.
9. The explanation for most of what's really going on is in the files as per tradition. However, you only get files for shooting hidden snake symbols, they're not in-universe documents your character finds lying around. You also have to quit out of the game entirely and read the documents from the main menu, so while you have very little to distract you from the action, you also don't know the whole story when you're running around.
   • Even worse is the stuff on RE.net that tells even more of the story. Jake's opinion of his dad and his treatment of Chris makes a lot more sense with that information.
10. A lot of the slower scenes of the game, despite having good atmosphere, are very bland and boring especially in the first level of Leon's campaign since you mostly just walk slowly through hallways while following some guy for what feels like 10 minutes.
11. The 6 logo design isn't liked by some fans. A common joke made about it is "A person sucking a giraffe's penis".
12. The game doesn't do a good job at teaching the player the mechanics. What's even worse is that there are extremely useful mechanics that aren't taught to the player at any point. This was discovered by a user on Neogaf. This includes:
    • Auto-mix herbs and insta-load pills: In this game, you mix herbs into pills, which are then dispensed Tic-Tac-style. The number of times you tap, the number of pills you use, each pill restoring a slice of health, effectively allowing you to manage your health bar by bar. This shortcut instantly combines any herbs in your inventory, red herbs included, and loads the pills into your case, rather than you having to do each step manually.
    • Paint targets for AI partner: A red marker will appear over it and that enemy will become the sole target of your AI partner, which is useful since your AI partner is virtually indestructible outside of rare one-hit boss kills, and your partner also has unlimited ammo.
    • Rapidly regain stamina: Take cover or lie prone: RE6 is NOT a cover shooter. Like Vanquish, you're playing it wrong if you're hiding behind cover rather than advancing the fight, throwing yourself into the fray to unleash a flurry of melee moves. That being said, your dedicated melee button is governed by a stamina meter (also like Vanquish): kick and punch too much, and you'll grow tired and hit like a sissy. THIS is when you take cover: slide to the nearest wall to instantly snap to cover, and wait a moment while your stamina bar replenishes in a matter of mere seconds. Very useful! Alternatively, you can lie prone to quickly regain stamina.
    • Dazing enemies: Elbow backwards, OR aim for the head, OR melee twice.
    • Sliding: Dash with Action button (X on PS3), then hit L1 to slide. To spin 180 degrees mid-slide, pull back while sliding. To shoot while sliding, tap R1: Sliding is a brilliant new mechanic that frankly makes the previous REs feel stiff by comparison. You can do a 180-degree turn while sliding by pulling back on the analog stick, and you can fire (or swipe) to daze and kill while sliding toward or under enemies. Sliding into enemies can also trip them. You can even slide past a pack of enemies, drop remote bombs as you slide by, and then detonate them as you roll back to your feet.
    • Rolling while standing: Aim then tap the Action button and left or right to roll in that direction. Release L1 mid-roll to stand, or continue to hold L1 to lie on the ground. On the ground, tap left and right to roll: Each enemy J'avo has three or four different mutations per limb, as well as their heads and torsos, and these mutations can stack, which means enemies have a LOT of ways to attack you. Sometimes, when swarmed in tight spaces, you'll want to roll out of the way of an incoming attack -- also good for confusing hordes of zombies as they try to track you. Aiming and then tapping the Action button and left or right will throw you rolling in that direction; releasing L1 the moment you hit the ground will cause you to immediately barrel-roll to your feet. Likewise with throwing yourself backwards away from enemies, or rolling forward (with respective directional taps of the analog). If you don't release L1, you'll stay on your back on the ground, at which point you can tap left or right to roll on the ground (as though you're on fire and trying to put yourself out). You can literally circle attacking enemies this way!
    • Dodging: Aim and hit the Action button while standing: This quick crouching animation allows you to duck under many enemy attacks. It's near-instantaneous, though, meaning you must use it the moment it's needed. If you hit a direction right after dodging, you can cancel the dodge into a roll/dive in that direction. Very useful if you need to get out of the way really quick.
    • Running attacks: Dash and then melee attack: This combination can result in a shoulder-check or other attack animation that if nothing else staggers or trips up enemies - ideal for breaking enemy lines during a hasty escape.
    • Quick shot: Press the aim and shoot button at the same time when near an enemy; tap repeatedly to attack multiple nearby targets: This is another brilliant mechanic, absolutely vital for crowd control in Mercs. When near an enemy, even if the enemy is standing out of sight behind you, hit L1 and R1 to instantly turn, target and shoot the enemy. Subsequent taps will unleash additional quick shots, each consuming a bar of your stamina meter.
    • Quick recover: Mash the Action button when knocked down, or hold back and tap the Action button and you'll roll backwards back to your feet, instantly back in the fight.
    • Counters: If you see an enemy beginning its attack animation, like a zombie raising a wrench, and hit the melee button the instant before the enemy strikes, you will obliterate that enemy with a super-flashy counter attack. The screen will flash and you'll hear a sharp "ZING!" to indicate you did a counter.
13. While the game does look good, there are many areas that have low quality textures. Some are so bad they look like .jpg images, which the game attempts to cover up by hiding them in very dark places.
    • It was also found out to be toned down as RE 5 uses DirectX 10 while RE 6 uses DirectX 9 (though, DirectX 10 was removed from Steam version of RE5 due to stability issues) and you can't even enable or disable either ambient occlusion or anisotropic filtering.
14. It's too over the top for a Resident Evil game with a lot of action movie clichés and "jumping the shark" moments like explosions and characters surviving attacks that would normally kill someone due to plot armor.
15. Agent, who is the co-op partner for Ada and doesn't exist in the plot, is badly designed in Ada's campaign. He can't open doors, interact with most items, and automatically teleports to Ada's side when a key event happens.
16. Even though campaigns connecting to each other is a good thing, in some cases, it causes the player to fight the same bosses and watch the same cutscenes (with slight differences) again.
17. While most of the boss fights are okay, the helicopter boss fight in Jake's campaign takes too long due to having to wait for the helicopter to get into view.
18. The inventory system is a massive downgrade from the previous Resident Evil games for various reasons.
    • For one, it's very clunky to navigate due to the horizontal and vertical layout, which makes switching between weapons tedious since the inventory is done in real time.
    • The player can't share items with their partners (they can via split-screen) nor can they drop items from their inventory like in Resident Evil 0, and there's no item box or storage system from Resident Evil 5. So the only way to free up space is to discard items.
19. The stealth suffers from Rogue Warrior syndrome as enemies can't hear characters' footsteps (for the most part) and the "silent" takedowns make more noise than they should.
20. The puzzles are very easy since most don't take much effort to figure them out and their essentially one step away from being solved.
21. Recycling:
    • Most of Leon's campaign uses settings and plot elements very familiar to longtime fans of the franchise. Among other things, he ends up in a city filled with zombies, to the point where he even meets a cop on his first day and goes to a gunshop to stay safe, and ends up in a mansion with its own dark secrets. Said mansion features several underground catacombs.
    • The same can be said of the other campaigns, to a degree. The game recycles the angry, brooding, vengeance-driven Chris from Resident Evil 5 during the majority of his chapters. Jake and Sherry's campaign can be seen as a retake on Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (with Ustanak filling in for Nemesis). Ada's campaign is much like her Resident Evil 4 campaign, as she tails the rest of the cast and fills in details as she goes along.
22. There are no unlockable weapons nor costumes unlike other main Resident Evil games. In fact, there is only ONE costume unlocked for each character and you can only equip them when playing Mercenaries.
23. Plot Holes:
    • During Leon's campaign, when Leon and Helena hop onto the helicopter, the pilot is found dead. It's never shown how he died.
    • The prologue shows Leon dragging a severely wounded Helena. When the same scene is revisited in Leon's and Ada's campaign, Helena is combat-ready.
24. Artificial Difficulty: There are some levels where your character is forced to run from something, usually an invincible enemy or an environmental hazard such as an explosion. During those parts, the camera often changes angles instead of normally following behind your character. This usually isn't a problem, but the camera can abruptly change its position, meaning that during one part, pressing right makes your character run to the right, then the camera suddenly changes position, causing pressing right to make your character run left instead, right back into the thing you were trying to avoid, resulting in an instant death.
25. Siege, Onslaught, Predator and Survivors modes are still sold by money.
    • The online exclusive modes still have balance issues, especially Survivors.
26. The two new characters Jake and Helena aren't given much characterization nor do they feel like actual characters.
    • Jake acts like cartoonish bad boy who thinks he's cooler than most people.
    • Helena's role seems to be purely to be a second player during Leon's campaign. Her only real connection to the game being that Derek just so happened to have used her sister as a test subject for the C-virus that she conviently remembers.
27. False Advertising: Trailers and ads implied global catastrophes were occurring and that the protagonists were trying to save the world from global infections. In-game, only three cities at the most are made uninhabitable by the end and the worldwide infection is stopped before it began.
    • Edited cutscenes in trailers made it appear that Jake, Sherry, Leon, and Helena were all in the city as it was hit by a virus-laden missile while Chris tries to get them out.
      • However, in the first chapter, Sherry explicitly tells Jake that global bioterror attacks are happening and they "needed a vaccine yesterday."
28. The vehicle controls feel slippery, especially when driving, as it feels like the car is driving on ice.
29. The boss battle in the ship chapter of Ada's campaign requires a lot of ammunition, and would be unwinnable if you don't have enough. There are blobs on the walls which drop ammo if you shoot or kick them. There is no in-game explanation for this.
30. While the AI is substantially improved over RE5's, given that it has both infinite health and ammo (except in certain circumstances, such as an incoming ambulance which can kill the AI partner), your partner can still be found lacking. It sometimes takes much longer than necessary to reach gates with the player, sometimes outright ignores the player while they are in a downed state, and fails to reliably rescue the player during certain set-pieces.
31. Most of the bosses are forgettable since they feel like a bunch of generic science experiments gone wrong and not monstrous creatures with designs akin to body horror like Nemesis or Burkin aside from Simmons.
    • The worst offender of this is Ustanak who is just a worse version of Nemesis.
32. A lot of the combat can get pretty repetitive after a while and its even worse when fighting enemies with weapons as it plays more like a generic third-person shooter (this is especially apparent in Chris' campaign).
    • However, it appears the game is aware of this as there are many turret, vehicle, and running segments sprinkled in every campaign. These also become repetitive as well since there are far too many of them.
33. The game's tone is inconsistent. It constantly switches back and forth between solemn and serious to balls-to-the-wall action. This also affects the pacing of the game.
34. Speaking of the pacing, there are many times where the game will abruptly cut to a flashback which can ruin scenes.
35. Padding: There are sections in each campaign that require the player to search for three objects, which just feels like a way to artifical extend the length of each campaign.
    • Making these segments worse is when a monster steals one of the items in Ada's campaign leading you to have to search around for the monster, which seems like an attempt to stretch the level even longer. In Jake's campaign, you have to do the same, but there's a part where you have to climb up a mountain with a slippery surface while snipers try to gun you down and getting hit causes you to slide all the way back down to where you started.
36. The game doesn't have much in terms of replay value mainly because of how long and repetitive most of the levels are.
37. The Rasklapanje sections are pretty annoying. They behave similar to Regenerators from Resident Evil 4. They can't be killed with firearms and their body parts will attack you if they are removed from their body meaning that you have to constantly deal with multiple smaller enemies that keep jumping towards you.
38. Derek Simmons is a forgettable antagonist since he behaves more like a generic evil scientist, than he does a menacing villain that's cunning, intelligent, and dangerous like Wesker.
39. Pandering: Leon's campaign seems designed to satiate the fans who complained about the overt focus on action in the series, and puts a little more focus on resource management, and uses familiar concepts and settings from previous games. The enemy fought most in the campaign, zombies, possibly supports this.

Good Qualities

1. The game introduces a number of action orientated mechanics that work really well and can make the gameplay a little more fun. These mechanics that accommodate the more action oriented gameplay like dodging, sliding, and quickshots.
2. The game is somewhat forgiving.
   • Messing up certain Quick Time Events enough times and the game will just silently accept whatever input the player makes so long as it was pressed at the right time. Amateur difficulty automatically completes every event without needing player input.
   • The above is further remedied by the option to automatically complete all QTEs that are part of a cutscene or scripted event, allowing one to pass particularly difficult sections without even lifting a finger. Of course, this precludes the prompts to break out of an enemy's grasp during normal gameplay.
   • The boss battle in the ship chapter of Ada's campaign requires a lot of ammunition, and would be unwinnable if you don't have enough. There are blobs on the walls which drop ammo if you shoot or kick them.
3. The melee system is also improved from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5. Lots of variety in them as well as counter attacks that feel so satisfying to use and dodging can be performed at anytime without having to perform a QTE.
4. Good controls that allows for full 360 analog movement.
5. The concept of someone trying to prevent the truth behind Raccoon City going public is pretty interesting, just not well executed.
6. While most of the arcs aren't good Chris' arc is the most interesting as Chris is shell-shocked after losing a whole team of BSAA agents who has all but given up on fighting bio-terrorism. While this was controversial, it's actually a pretty realistic outcome for the character! Think about it, Chris has:
   • Seen almost his entire team in S.T.A.R.S be massacred in the Arklay incident.
   • Lost who knows how many friends from the RPD and amongst the population of Raccoon City to the T-Virus outbreak.
   • Nearly lost his little sister when she had been caught up in things like post-outbreak Raccoon City and was taken prisoner by Umbrella.
   • Lost who knows how many fellow BSAA agents during the Terragrigia incident.
   • Thought he had lost his longtime partner, Jill Valentine, in a fight with Wesker.
7. Lots of returning characters. Leon, Chris, Sherry (who's grown up and trained to kick ass) and Ada return.
8. 4 different campaigns and they all play differently.
9. Co-op makes a return from Resident Evil 5 and the partner AI is greatly improved for single-player gamers: They now have infinite ammunition, help you quicker when you are attacked, can switch weapons whenever they want if needed and the player can order more commands to them.
10. Good amount of enemy variety and enemy designs.
11. While most of the bosses are forgettable, some of them are decent, especially Simmons' mutated forms.
12. The ending of Chris' campaign where Piers sacrifices himself is really well-done.
13. The voice acting is decent.
14. Despite some of the low quality textures. The graphics of this game look gorgeous. The color palette is solid with good lighting and the character models were highly detailed for 2012 standards.
15. While Helena and Jake are lackluster. Piers is a decent character who actually tries to help Chris overcome his PTSD.
16. Mercenaries mode return. There's even another Mercenaries mode called "Mercenaries No Mercy" that has soundtrack and characters from Left 4 Dead 2. The differences are the player needs to kill 300 monster to complete the map instead of 150.
17. Agent Hunt mode that allows players to play as a monster and hunt down the other players. The monster variety that can be played is pretty high.
18. Zombies finally return to a main Resident Evil game after them being missing for seven years.
19. Siege, Onslaught, Predator and Survivors modes; while having balance issues, are greatly improved over Resident Evil 5's online exclusive modes.

Reception

Resident Evil 6 overall received mixed to positive reviews, with Japanese publishers being much more favorable.

The game is considered as the most polarizing Resident Evil game of all time from the community, with others considering it as a good game, and others as a bad game due of the mentioned Bad Qualities.

Nerrel criticized the game's low resources, lack of communication as to how to play the game, and it slow segments calling them "boring and drawn-out". However, he did praise the action mechanics calling them "smooth and flashy".

Trivia

• The game is banned by the Ministry of Culture of China for "damaging and threatening the serenity of the nation", due to the game features a plot around the Chinese bio-terrorists wrecking havoc in the city of Shanghai.

Game Tips

• An excellent guide written for the game can be found here.
• Video about disabling some of the QTEs in Resident Evil 6.

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