» Review: Resident Evil 6

The president is a zombie and the virus goes global in Resident Evil 6, the latest in a long string of games in the horror/survival franchise.

The game throws you immediately into the fray with a short chapter meant to set the tone of the game. Playing as Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance agent Leon S. Kennedy, you must save your injured partner Helena Harper while a teeming mass of virus-infected try to kill you.

After that’s completed, players can choose between three crisscrossing storylines. Each branch offers two playable characters – either alone with a computer partner or locally through splitscreen or through Xbox Live online. A player can drop into another player’s game during the action, if the ability has been enabled by the host player.

The choices are between Chris Redfield, Jake Muller and Kennedy and their partners (Sherry Birkin, Piers Nivan, Harper). Many of those names will be instantly familiar to fans, with a couple of new faces. In fact, with this many past characters from other RE games, this game feels a little like a high school reunion.

Each storyline offers a very slightly different gameplay experience. Chris and Piers play as a heavily-armed assault team. Jake and Sherry are a little more hand-to-hand, with a more limited arsenal, while Chris and Helena offer a more balanced approach to the action.

Gameplay involves traversing areas while opening doors, gathering health and ammunition and often engaging in quicktime events – pressing certain buttons or rotating thumbsticks in concert with prompts on the screen. For instance, escaping from a zombie’s grasp or dealing death blows to larger enemies.

Whichever you choose to play initially, you will cross paths with the other teams during the course of the game. Players encounter enemies infected with the C-virus, which transforms them into zombie-like creatures, with some retaining the ability to fire weapons. Some of the higher-level bosses sprout appendages and morph into a variety of killing machines.

Many of the characteristics of the game harken back to earlier RE games – gathering herbs to mix for healing, somewhat lengthy cutscenes and the inability to run while firing a weapon. But fans of the series have generally come to accept these idiosyncrasies.

On the other hand, this iteration seems to focus more on high-intensity action than the creepy dread that many of the earlier offerings exuded. Oftentimes, instead of pitting the heroes against a small number of very deadly combatants, the game seems to think “the more the merrier,” throwing dozens of enemies and reducing the dramatic tension normally associated with the series.

During gameplay, you can find skill points that can later be exchanged for upgrades (faster reload, quicker recovery from injury, etc.) Unfortunately, this pursuit of points can often cause the game to degrade into nothing more than a “break the boxes” games, looking for points.

The only multiplayer options are for cooperative play, either two people playing on the same console or online. Online includes the ability to “drop into” a game.

Offering three separate storylines is a nice option, but the game is set up so that only one path can be played at a time. It would have been more interesting to be able to alternate between story paths during the course of the game, but that can’t be done – at least while using only one gamertag. Setting up separate gamertags for each storyline works, but is a problem for both in the acquisition of achievements and in allowing online play, since each gamertag would have to have an Xbox Live account to allow another player to join.

Resident Evil 6 at times plays more like an action flick than the traditional survival horror roots of the series that has been around since 1996. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but could hurt it with diehard fans. There are moments, though, when the game screams Resident Evil. A good example is an intense cat-and-mouse episode with Jake and Sherry and a subterranean behemoth bringing instant death.

Resident Evil 6 isn’t the strongest chapter in the RE book, but it is leaps and bounds over Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City released earlier this year. There are points in the game that are pure fun. Unfortunately, there are even more that are just a lot of grinding through waves of enemies.

Platform: PlayStation3, Xbox 360

Manufacturer: Capcom

Rating: Mature

Score: 7.5 chilies