Resident Evil 6 review Big, bloated, and oddly beautiful, RE6 is the most ambitious Resident Evil yet.

• Resident Evil 6 Review Xbox One
• Resident Evil 6 Review Ign
• Resident Evil 6 Review
• Resident Evil 6 Reviews Metacritic

Bigger than ever, but not better. By Undone by its ambitious attempt to pack four game experiences into one, suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. At times it very much embraces its old school heritage, pitting its heroes against horrific creatures in the darkest, filthiest locales imaginable. Tension is palpable thanks to production values that reach new heights for the franchise.

Yet it simultaneously attempts to be the largest, most action-packed entry in its history, betraying the aforementioned strengths. Lengthy firefights, driving sequences and other ill-conceived ideas grind the game's incredible moments to a halt. The result is something erratic and never sure of itself, delivering brilliance one moment and something far less interesting the next. At the heart of Resident Evil 6 are the game’s four campaigns and seven lead characters. Rather than weaving these characters and stories along a singular campaign, Capcom diffuses them across four individual threads, each with its own beginning and end. This singular choice defines everything about this game, highlighting both its greatest accomplishments and remarkable shortcomings. Resident Evil 6’s over-the-top world is built piece-by-piece through its four storylines, which cleverly integrate with each other.

Resident Evil 6 Review Xbox One

Questions aren’t necessarily answered until the entire plot emerges through different perspectives, and the realization that the game’s designers deliberately held something back to unleash it during a later campaign makes the effort of pushing through four individual campaigns worth it. It’s remarkable to enter a scene, realize its place in the larger timeline, and get a payoff for something that was merely hinted at during an entirely different character arc.

There’s a cumulative narrative effect that occurs here, one that wouldn’t be possible if Capcom chose a different path. “ Resident Evil 6’s over-the-top world is fundamentally built through its many storylines, which cleverly integrate with each other. Every storyline in this game, through a combination of great environments, great enemies and a carefully cultivated sense of wide-eyed, B-movie horror, has situations so memorable that they’ll be seared into your brain. It’s hard to forget the first time you’re crushed by the relentless, beastly Ustanak, or watch a creature spew out C-virus gas in a crowded area, turning dozens of trapped human survivors into flesh-eating zombies. These moments come frequently, often serving as vivid, gory reminders of the game’s tense storytelling prowess. Yet the layered narrative sometimes works against the gameplay. As the campaigns cross paths, the game forces players to replay sequences - including some lengthy encounters that really ought to be played once and only once.

There is nothing gained from this repetition, as the only story revelations come from cutscenes and dialogue - not in-game action. Neverwinter nights cd key generator. A game that thrives on the stacked benefit of multiple perspectives manages to forget how that negatively impacts the actual experience of playing through encounters repeatedly.

Resident Evil 6 Review Ign

The heart of RE6's problems is action that just feels unrefined. Is a big-budget disaster on the order of the Star Wars prequels, a sprawling production that clearly required so many individual talents to bring it into being, you can't help but wonder how the end result could have turned out so bad.

Resident Evil 6 Review

Resident Evil 6 Reviews Metacritic

Then again, the game tries to be so many things to so many different people, the image of a many-headed hydra thrashing violently beyond the control of its developers comes readily to mind. There are a few fleeting moments of greatness in Resident Evil 6, but you'll likely spend so much time with your head in your hands that you'll probably just miss them all. Whatever else could be improved upon in this game is moot, since its fundamentals as a third-person action game are just plain badly implemented. After the great last couple of installments in the core Resident Evil franchise, it's astounding that the basic act of playing RE6 doesn't feel at least as good as it did in those games. On the surface, RE6 is made up of the same third-person shooting, button-prompt-driven melee combat, and inventory management, though it goes further in the direction of similar Western action games that focus on moving and shooting in tandem, largely at the expense of the series' traditionally deliberate style of gameplay. But it doesn't go far enough to produce a satisfying game of singular intent.