Resident Evil 6

 This game wasn't nearly as bad as I was led to believe. Much to my surprise, it was actually a lot of fun!

I played this on PC, through Steam.

Does it have issues? Yes, absolutely.

The story is somewhat incomprehensible at first (if only because I started with the Chris campaign, but I'll get to that later) meaning I was constantly being thrown into situations without much context. The other games weren't necessarily narrative marvels, but they were at least pretty straightforward and easy to follow. This game opts for a multi-viewpoint foray that reminded me of Sonic '06 or the fourth season of Arrested Development. A compelling idea, in theory, but one that I've never really seen pulled off well.

Seeing these two together onscreen was pretty cool, I'll admit.

I do like the setup, as unfortunate as the execution may have been. A return to the multiple protagonists of RE1/2 would be great and the idea of these different routes happening concurrently, and thus all being canon, is appealing. Chris having his military adventure while Leon has his 24-esque political conspiracy while Jake has his Umbrella(like) lab escapades while Ada does her spy stuff, it's a good setup for a story that encompasses just about everything that makes Resident Evil Resident Evil. By the end of it you have a relatively coherent story, but the path to get there is pretty messy.

As I mentioned earlier, I started with Chris's campaign, then played Leon's, then Jake's, and finally Ada's. Chris fulfills your standard meathead role with his story though, as I mentioned, it throws you in without much context and was a bit hard to follow. The later campaigns were much easier to parse, if only because I had a solid footing thanks to having seen some of the events before. The plot itself is... fairly wacky and a bit off-the-rails, but it's just an escalation of the kind of stuff we'd already been seeing with earlier games. Watching part of the US and part of China get infected and destroyed seems perfectly reasonable after something like Terra Grigia.

The situation is pretty dire.

With the narrative out of the way, let's get to the combat. It's good. Real good. It feels like an evolution of RE5, which itself was building on RE4, so the moment to moment gameplay is constantly punctuated with headshots and sick melee attacks. The melee takedowns are particularly impressive because the camera goes full force on them and the sound effects for enemy kills make every one satisfying.

There are also a number of one-off setpieces.

Each campaign follows two characters, with Leon and (new character) Helena, Chris and (new character) Piers, (new character) Jake and Sherry, and Ada and (non-character) Agent. Agent is an odd case, because Ada's campaign seems like it was designed with single-player in mind and had co-op tacked on late in development, so her co-op buddy isn't present in cutscenes and frequently teleports around to keep up with Ada. It's pretty funny. Co-op in general is pretty entertaining, as me and my co-op partner(s) had a lot of fun spamming the various callouts.

Pictured: Agent giving Ada some motivation.

That's not to say the gameplay is perfect. It's significantly simplified when compared to RE4 and 5, with no inventory management between partners to speak of, and a barebones inventory system in general. Managing your inventory has always been a part of Resident Evil so it's a real shame that this game's streamlined approach took away something so core to this franchise's identity.

I've included my records screen as of the end of my fourth campaign below as I don't want to attach the twenty stage-complete summaries the game showed me as I went along.

I got mostly B-ranks and A-ranks

In summary, I really enjoyed this game. It's got its faults, sure, but it's a fun action game and it's a pretty natural evolution of what came before. I totally understand why people at the time disliked it but with hindsight, and the knowledge that RE would eventually return to its horror roots, I think this game gets too much hate. It's a good time! I genuinely hope RE9 takes some cues from this and pulls from its cast of characters again.

To close this off, I'm not usually a very crass person but I can't ignore the elephant in the room. Or the giraffe. It's impossible for me to look at the logo and not see someone and a giraffe in a, um, compromising position.

Just... look at it!