I beat Resident Evil 4 Remake the other day (It's great.) and had the immediate urge to play more RE. Four choices presented themselves to me:
- Start a NG+
- Buy it on PC (I played on Xbox) and start a new game there with
nudevery normal mods - Play Resident Evil 2 Remake, which I've never played but I know is a universally beloved game
- Play Resident Evil 6, which I've never played but I know is a universally maligned game
A lot of really great choices and one filled with a lot of pain.
Anyway, I've beaten the Chris campaign of Resident Evil 6 and let me tell you: that is a fucking dumb videogame. In some ways, I mean that very charitably. There's a lot of goofy writing which feels like the zenith of whatever tone they started going for with 5. The action set-pieces are like, Uncharted-level batshit but with 10% of the budget. It's charming as a time capsule of how ambitious developers wanted to be in whatever means were on the table for them. We got a lot of weird shit back in the PS2 days for it, too. We don't really get much of that anymore, so it's always fun to experience no matter the quality it manifests at.
In most ways though, I mean dumb in a kind of bad way. The gunplay, for being peers in its era with Dead Space 2, sure sucks a ton of ass. The FOV is pulled in mad close so a lot of indoor sequences feel very disorienting and overall there's a clunkiness to the controls that feels like a consequence of biting off more than they could chew with the level/combat design. There's also a whole lotta "guys who shoot back at you" and unless it's a guy with a crossbow or some weird medieval shit I gotta say, it fucking sucks in a Resident Evil game.
There's also no merchant or shop or anything? There's barely an inventory and there's no gun upgrades or selling of things. You get 'skill points' that you trade in for equippable perks at the end of every chapter. It's bizarre. Completely at odds with what anyone would want going into a Resident Evil game.
I did at least enjoy where the story ends up at. Piers is such a nobody-kinda sidekick and giving him an impactful role to play in the campaign for basically the last 30 minutes is really funny but it also totally works. I'm also deeply in love with Leon and Chris' rapport in this. Gay shit. Gay warrior shit. Gay warriors respecting each other. It's also really fun to see how much 7 & 8 really are Resident Evil games like... where Chris ends up at the end of this makes perfect sense for where he ends up after. It's a great setup! I just wasn't expecting it given how much the newer games, while still clearly continuations of the series, feel like an extremely hard reboot (and course correction from this exiled child of a game).
Anyway, at least I got what I understand to be the worst campaign of the four out of the way. I'm having a decent time so far if only because I get to view it through the lens of what it is now instead of what it was the moment it released.
