Since I did my last writeup about Resident Evil the original game on PS1 I started thinking about what my favorite game franchises of all time are and Resident Evil is definitely one of them. The only reason why I bought at GameCube back during the 3-way console wars of the late 90's was because Resident Evil 4 was released on GC months before it came out on other systems. That game was awesome and made the purchase of the Nintendo system pretty damn worthwhile.
In fact, I have enjoyed almost all of the Resident Evil mainstream games and that is what made "6" such a massive disappointment for me. I don't understand what Capcom was thinking when they decided to go a completely different direction with this game when all the ones that had released prior to it followed the same, extremely popular way the game "flowed." Were they trying to reinvent the bicycle or get ahead of what they perceived changing trends in gaming to be? It doesn't make much sense because this installment was a massive departure from their tried and true way that all of their games functioned.
While I didn't pick this game up on the day of release I was a relatively early adopter of the game. By the time I got my hands on a copy there was already a lot of badmouthing of the game but I thought to myself "how bad can it really be?"
Well it turns out that it can and was very bad.
one thing that hit me right from the start is that you were faced with an incoming horde of many enemies. Sure, RE 4 did this right at the start of that game and it was pretty surprising, but you quickly learned that you are not actually meant to kill all of the villagers that are attacking you in that instance or the one that also happens later. In RE6 you are expected to kill all of them and completely unlike all the other RE games that had come before, it was really easy to take down an individual zombie. Basically, it just didn't make much sense.
I know that I am not alone in this, but one thing they introduced into this game that rarely made an appearance in any of the previous games was loads of Quick Time Events. Sure they had a few of them here and there in previous games but RE6 was absolutely loaded with them. It seemed like every time you turned a corner there was some sort of quick hitting of buttons that appeared on screen and while this is fun every now and then, I think most people agree that this is just kind of boring game design... maybe even lazy.
Resident Evil always kind of had it's own thing going on but in this game it just felt generic for the first time ever. It was just like every other linear FPS game that was already a dime a dozen. One of my favorite gaming websites called Destructoid referred to the game as being "basically a Michael Bay movie" and in my mind that is a perfect way to sum up what is going on here.
They attempted to make this game somewhat co-op necessary where a certain path would be blocked until another character activated a switch in some other place but this wasn't inventive at all and was just a pain in the ass to perform. The co-op puzzles were even worse.
I was one of those people that quite enjoyed the wandering around of a mansion or tunnel system where certain parts of it only became an option once you had a certain key or item necessary to proceed to multiple new areas but in RE6 this was just one "room" of rushing enemies followed by another different looking but still basically the same thing around the next corner. It has been referred to as a "slogfest" and yeah, that's basically what it is.
Has this been released as a standalone title rather than part of the legacy that is Resident Evil games, it probably would have gotten a lot less flak but Capcom set the bar really high with these games so the fans were basically pissed off.
There was IMO too many enemies at any given time and this was made even more annoying that some of the common zombies would mutate into "crimson heads" that would jump some crazy distance too quickly for you to even target them and take entirely too many hits for you to actually enjoy engaging them. I got to the point where I was actually avoiding combat because if they turned crimson, it was just an annoyingly long battle to get rid of them. It was easier and more fun to simply avoid the slow moving zombies than it was to risk turning them into an enemy type that was honestly, too fast given the controls.
What made most of the other Resident Evil games great was the pacing. A feeling that the area that you are in was a bit "too quiet" and you knew that eventually this was going to lead up to something really scary happening and for an unexpected battle to happen such as when the dogs would smash through the windows or the spiders would drop from the ceiling. In RE6 there's just constant explosions with a horde of incoming enemies and once you clear that the same exact thing just happens again, and again, and again until eventually the game is over.
RE6 was a mess of a game and I think it deserves all of the bad press that it gets. The game still sold really well as one would expect but for me, this release made me temporarily lose faith in the franchise the way that Square-Enix lost me with recent Final Fantasy games.
When Capcom returned to their "traditional style" in Biohazard I was hesitant to even buy that game because I no longer had confidence that they could make high quality games anymore. Thankfully, Capcom returned to their roots and apparently learned their lesson, hopefully to never do something so bold and stupid again in the future.
It was many years ago that I was duped into a $50 mistake that was this game, but it still stays on my mind all this time later. While I don't remember exactly, I think this was the first RE game that I didn't finish it not because it was too difficult, but because I found it extremely boring and repetitive with very little in the way of the usual surprises that I had grown to love from Capcom.