Resident Evil 6

In a daring break with convention, Resident Evil 6 rejects every aesthetic and mechanical inroad made by previous instalments to concentrate on being the blandest possible cover-shoot clunker. Gone are the days of short, well-crafted bulletin play, replaced by yawning, seemingly endless stages lousy with miserly checkpointing and mind-numbing quick time failure prompts. Resident Evil 6 is misunderstanding and incompetence at every level. Capcom have replaced genuine ideas and thrills with the video game equivalent of buzzwords. Popular, financially successful games are strip mined for play concepts, then hopelessly mangled by Capcom's chronic indecision. Is Resident Evil 6 an action game or a horror game? Two and a half campaigns down, I still can't tell.

Interaction tends towards action concepts. Extended, entrenched shoot-outs sit alongside minimal input cinematic interludes, but the execution is belligerent. Instant kill avoiding button prompts pass in incomprehensible blurs. Camera control, and even character control, is routinely wrestled away from the player until you're not sure what you're looking at. Really Capcom, if you're going to steal Uncharted's calamity sprints, wouldn't it also be worth knocking off their (mostly) clear destinations, and relaxed input demands? Resident Evil 6 either expects players to be permanently scanning the screen to be instantly ready to tap out subliminal commands, or it's okay with them dying constantly. Bluntly, this is play utterly antithetical to the core appeal of the Resident Evil franchise - survival horror, with an emphasis on survival.

Resident Evil 4 mixed up the slow-burn formula of the PlayStation instalments, placing a larger importance on forcing advantage through action, but the survival component remained. Item management was integral to progress, as was wise use of the world's in-game treasure economy. Do you upgrade your pistol's reload speed, or do you pony up for a rocket propelled grenade launcher for the next boss? Players were given carte blanche; they could customise, and thereby influence, their interaction almost to their heart's content. In doing this Capcom created a balance between player expectation and their ability to accomplish. Resident Evil 6 is nothing like this.

Weapons are fixed by character and sub-campaign. They also cannot be customised. There are Call of Duty style perks, but you can only simultaneously equip three out of the dozens available. A 'complete', fully upgraded character is always out of reach. Your health ration is obscured by a pharmacy mechanic that wants seven inputs before you can get yourself back in the pink. That's seven inputs, real-time, whilst frantically trying to escape from enemies. Characters themselves exist in deep-focus, three-quarter close-ups that make the tight, shack geometry of Chris's campaign frequently unreadable. Cheap shots are everywhere, most noticeably in Leon's campaign were possum zombies cannot be melted until they've been allowed to attack you. If they connect, they sap player energy to inches even on Normal difficulty. Health items are next to non-existent - you're lucky if you find one full heal per hour and a half, multi-boss chapter. Resident Evil 6 is irritation at every turn.

If you attempt to play Resident Evil 6 on the terms dictated by the rest of the series you'll spend your days limping between encounters, pressing your player character up against every inch of the environment, desperately trying to locate a herb. You're much better off killing yourself and forcing a checkpoint restart to refresh your meagre health allowance. That's the issue. This is a game so poorly conceived that it's wiser to break narrative and suicide your avatar than bravely muddle on. The core problem then of Resident Evil 6 is that it doesn't mind if you die. It's actually anti-survival. We've somehow gotten to a point were skill, or even just a desire to play with a game on the terms that its genre would seem to dictate, isn't even a positive, it's actually a hindrance. Slugged through several checkpoints on fume health? You're playing the game incorrectly. The game hasn't been designed for the experience you're trying to have. Instead, it's been balanced for an idea truly horrific to any game player - repetition. Failure isn't a negative in Resident Evil 6, it's part of the routine. A by design bullet point on a white board in Osaka. The majestic, genre defining Resident Evil 4 sanded down into a benign, mulchy time-waster. You don't survive in Resident Evil 6, you simply play it until it ends.