Resident Evil 6 Preview: The Grisly Details

These days, gaming’s mega-franchises don’t really compete with each other – you’ll notice that the launch of Resident Evil 6 on October 2 carefully dodges both Assassin’s Creed 3 and the latest Call of Duty. Instead, they try to repeat and top their own history, which means Resident Evil is caught between two extremes – the original’s solitary horror, and the pulse-pounding reinvention of Resident Evil 4. Where the fifth game in the series havered, eventually plumping for ‘4 with co-op’ and satisfying few, the pitch for Resident Evil 6 is no less than this: it will be all things to all fans. A brief recap of what that means: three distinct single-player campaigns, each with their own style and theme that crossover at certain points, all playable with online co-op. To this add a newly-revealed fourth campaign starring Ada Wong, an unseen ‘Prelude’ campaign, and at least two competitive online modes, Agent Hunt and Mercenaries. Capcom staff are talking of a 50 hour campaign in total, a claim that needs to be taken with a big pinch of salt, but it’s a sign of the scale and scope of Resi 6 that such numbers are even vaguely plausible. The recent release of a demo, available to Dragon’s Dogma owners, did not make a good first impression. It was a poor showcase, composed of three brief snatches from the game that, out of context and badly-tuned, gave me the wrong kind of horror. Having just spent two days at Capcom’s Osaka HQ playing the more-or-less final build of the game, including a new online mode and across both Hard and Professional difficulty settings, such misgivings are scoured from my mind. Resi 6 may yet have one or two things to be concerned about, but be in no doubt that this is going to be an absolute monster. Read more…