Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Evil in Residence Returns!

I loved Resident Evil 4.  It was the first game I beat on the Wii, and I played through it multiple times.  I’d qualify multiple, give you a specific count, but I did it so many times, and it took so long each time, that I actually lost track.  I thought it was great, if flawed, and for three years of my life I knew its contours by heart.  Each sequence of quicktime events, each boss’ weakness and the best way to hit it.  I had it down pat.  The Resident Evil series, which I’d never been bothered to give a fraction of a shit about previously, had gotten its weird, pulsating claws in my brain.

Resident Evil 5 improved on every single aspect of Resident Evil 4.  The levels were more concrete, more diverse.   I actually liked my partner, liked having a partner.  The revamped inventory system and simplified shopping system were brilliant iterations, and cruising through levels, maxing out weapons, I passed by weeks of real-world time in that game, figuring out how to kill brown people infected with weird worm things as efficiently as possible.

My affection for the Resident Evil series is rooted in its play, not its absurd, beyond-Michael-Bay plotlines and stories.  The characters, the twists, the betrayals.  I could care less, but it would be a challenge for Capcom to make me care less.  So I came to Resident Evil 6 with no love for the storyline, for the world of Resident Evil.  I only care about the gameplay that made the previous games so great, the aiming and the meleeing and the hippin’ and hoppin’.  Thus I present the following paragraph as a disclaimer.

It would be accurate to subtitle Resident Evil 6 as “Resident Evil: Looks Like We’re Gonna Have to Juuuuump!”  It’s less a cogent engagement with theme or story and more a collection of action set pieces, strung together in such a way as to present underdeveloped characters with frequent opportunities to leap away from things.  These things vary: sometimes, they’re explosions.  Sometimes, they’re collapsing structures.  A few times, the paradigm shifts entirely and you’re leaping on to things.  Sometimes you leap on to things while leaping away from things.  I call these “Resident Evil two-fers,” or “double-disco-whammies,” depending on my mood.  To call the story Resident Evil’s cutscenes a story is perhaps technically accurate, but the elements that make stories interesting are wholly absent.  There’s no humanity or character or continuity or thought guiding Resident Evil’s narrative.  And why should there be?  Resident Evil is, in a sense, the last bastion of absolutely absurd shit in video games, the last series unabashedly proud of its bombastic bullshit.  The chapter I played through opened with me shooting the zombified President of the United States in his face.  Then it followed that scene up with another scene explaining that the President was actually my bestie, pre-face shooting.

So fuck Resident Evil’s story, except perhaps for the raw unabashed joy that you can get from describing it in a public place and watching eavesdroppers facial expressions shift.  Let’s talk about the play.

Resident Evil is a game about picking when and how to shoot things.  You balance movement and your ability to fire accurately (in previous iterations, you would balance movement with being able to fire your weapon at all).  You balance your ammunition supply and the current combat situation to determine your weapon choice.  That rifle is going to be great against a lone target, but you really don’t want to use it on that zombie horde.  Likewise, your pistol might be great in nearly every situation, but if you use it constantly you’ll be out of ammo in no time.  You’re constantly balancing a system of interlocking inventories with your current needs and desires.  Resident Evil 6 does a few things to simplify this, but for the most part they bugger it up.  Inventory management is a chore: moving items, dropping them, re-arranging them, is all but impossible to do under duress.  Checking your inventory requires going into a weirdly counterintuitive screen that doesn’t actually pause the game, so the weird scrolling and button mashing required to get items into your hands is all done on the clock, often while the threat you’re attempting to pick an item to deal with is bearing down on you.  Healing items have been refined, Capcom gets points for that.  You’re no longer herb hoarding all the time.  Instead, you’re going to want to combine your herbs and throw them into your herb case, which allows you to tailor the amount of healing you receive to the damage you’ve received.  It’s an elegantly simple solution to an old problem, one that does nothing to address the new problems of the clumsy inventory system.  Ammo for weapons cannot be dropped, so in order to free up the slot that one shotgun round is filling you’ll have to find a new home for your bullets.  It’s a mess.

Admittedly, some of these problems might come from the fact that I’m playing the game with mouse and keyboard.  Resident Evil 5 did an amazing job simplifying the inventory system, largely by using a menu that used the image and tactile nature of the inputs you played the game with.  Resident Evil 5’s inventory mapped perfectly to an X-Box controller, and its quick-select system was brilliant.  Those guns you frequently use, those healing items you want to bust out in mid fight?  Move them to the compass points in your inventory and then access them with the D-Pad.  Inventory clutter?  Largely avoided with an elegantly simple solution.  Resident Evil 6 goes the other route, by generating multiple interlocking menus accessed through different mousewheel applications.  If you want to cycle through your guns, you’ll have to spin your mousewheel.  Want to select a health spray, an incendiary grenade, or a remote bomb (Quick aside, who the fuck decided that the remote bomb was a fun gameplay mechanic?  Never before have I had to sacrifice so much health for so little damage during boss fights.)?  You’ll have to hold down shift while spinning the mouse wheel.  Hands off the number keys on the keyboard, the traditional means of selecting objects; those have been bound to a set of dodging movements, though you’d only know if you were lucky enough to trigger a tooltip, or if you penetrated the input-selection menu deep enough to find the controller bindings, and you’re lucky enough to actually find the binding in question you’re looking for.  The end result is clutter: lots and lots of clutter in your inventory, with no real method to manage it.  It feels loose, and, given how massive a part of the series and this title inventory management is, like a step backwards after two excellent iterations on how Resident Evil lets characters keep track of their gear.

The “loose” label becomes even more appropriate when one considers the way combat plays.  Resident Evil 6’s movement controls are wonky, and while you can eventually adjust to them, even after you’ve done so you’ll still often find yourself hit by an enemy not because you made a mistake, but because the game didn’t quite register your input correctly, directing your auto-seeking melee attack outside of the enemy’s hitbox, or switching your automatic melee target to a character just past the one you’re attacking.  Especially in the early levels of the chapter I played through, I found myself dying and then walking away to do other things in my apartment, just to let my frustration vent.  I had to leave the game on, by the by, because of the check-point set-up, which does not, on its face, distinguish between check-points that allow you to return to play after the game has been shut down and check-points that allow you to respawn if you die.  Sometimes these are one and the same, but not all the time.  In fact, they’re different often enough that, unless you’ve just seen a cutscene, you shouldn’t assume you’ll be able to turn off the game without having to replay the entire segment you just finished slogging through.

Again, this isn’t necessarily a problem in a game with quick, intuitive and easy to navigate levels.  But Resident Evil 6 doesn’t have any of that shit.  Its levels are a mess of design aesthetics, simultaneously insisting on and problematizing exploration.  And these levels, these simultaneously linear and digressive levels, each take at least an hour to play through.  Quite often more.  Resident Evil 6 is fine for binge play, if you possess the constitution, but if you’re an adult, with a job or a kid or pets or a social life, it’s not a great fit.  The levels take too long, there’s no clear framework for when they can reliability be re-entered and, while there’s ostensibly a pause feature I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to pause the game.  I used the buttons the config menu told me to use, rebound them and used the rebound buttons.  No dice.  Perhaps there’s an option, buried in one of the game’s many dense, counterintuitive menus.  Cute design idea, making the cell phone a menu vector, terrible implementation though.

Despite all this, Resident Evil still plays pretty tightly.  Shooting zombies in the face is fun, and all of the overwhelming dumb and clutter that the game is so preoccupied with doesn’t do much to hurt the core gameplay mechanic of “killing weird looking monsters.”  It’s self-involved, and I can’t say I’d recommend Resident Evil 6 to people whose lives prevent them from playing a game for two hours straight at a time.  I also can’t say I’d recommend it over Resident Evil 5, which remains my gold standard for the series.  I think I’d even rank it below Resident Evil 4, mostly because of the strange way the progression system for weapons has been retouched as an overarching character experience system.  I’d like to spend more time playing the game before I comment on that.

But the core elements of play, the shooting and fighting, they’re all pretty much intact.  And if you don’t care about the story in Resident Evil games (and really, you shouldn’t) and you’re willing to put up with bullshit to get your game on (again, odds are you’re willing to if you’re thinking about picking up this title) then by all means, try Resident Evil 6.  It’s not the worst thing you’ll play.  It is, however, a step back in a series that seemed to be doing so well for itself as it moved forward.  I found it a little disappointing, even when the gameplay felt satisfying.