An attempt to combine the gameplay of several previous RE games, "Resident Evil 6" ends up delivering an overall subpar experience.

Resident Evil 6 is a survival-action game where the player fights waves of the undead, either of the classic zombie variety or of a more mobile gun-toting variety. There are three campaigns in the game, each with a pair of playable characters. The first, starring RE4's Leon Kennedy, is focused more on the classic zombies. The second, starring RE5's Chris Redfield, features the newer RE5-style zombies. The third, featuring RE2's Sherry Birkin, combines the new-zombies of RE5 with a more escape-based form of gameplay. In terms of controls, all three are the same, but their content is different.

RE6 uses an over-the-shoulder camera, sometimes called a "second person" camera, of the type used in the previous two games. However, compared to those games, the controls are much looser and less responsive even with tweaking. There's a whole new set of actions like rolling and diving to use, but actually making use of them is surprisingly difficult and the movement transitions are slow enough that it isn't actually that helpful. Fighting the old-style zombies isn't that bad, since they're also pretty slow and rely on melee attacks, but the new-style zombies are a huge pain. This is exacerbated by the fact that even when fighting gun-toting enemies, your ammo supply is still incredibly limited - during Chris' campaign, I was fighting alongside soldiers and tanks and still somehow ran out of ammo every five seconds.

RE6 is one of the only RE games where there's no option to really upgrade your weapons at all; even finding new weapons is only done like once or twice a campaign, giving little incentive to explore. Even the "money" you can grab is instead "skill points", used to buy limited skill upgrades. This sounds like a small complaint, but it makes the game feel far more static. RE4 and RE5 had a neat treasure-hunting aspect where you'd find jewels and trinkets lying around and hawk them for cash to buy weapon upgrades. Here, it's essentially trivial and irrelevant.

The game's graphics are okay from a technical perspective, but not great. The game looks about as good as the previous game, with no real sense of improvement. This alone wouldn't be that bad, but the changes to the lighting and effects tend to worsen, rather than improve, the gameplay. It's hard to see what's going on and the camera angle especially limits your ability to see where enemies are coming from or where you're going. Add to this the unintuitive control scheme and numerous bugs and glitches, and the game is just a mess to play

Overall, RE6 is a total failure from a gameplay perspective, stripping away almost everything fun about the previous games. While it might be tolerable for a bit (Leon's campaign in particular was at least playable, if not GOOD), most of the game is just not worth spending money on.

Rating: 3/10.

I purchased this game with my own funds in order to do this review.