Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil has always been revered for it's use of horror, heck it was one of the titles that brought the term "survival horror" to the table as a genre, and looking now, there is many a title that has followed in their footsteps. But in recent years, Resident Evil looks to have forgotten its routes, what made it such a beloved franchise, and moved more into action. Resident Evil 6 comes into play to "appeal to old and new fans alike" with horror elements and that which would appeal to an ever growing market of action fans. This is where the problems start.

The game splits itself into 3(4 when you beat the first three) campaigns, focusing on everyones favourite, Leon kennedy, back to deal with an outbreak starting in Tall Oaks, Chris Redfield, having lost his memory due to events 6 months prior to where the game focuses, and Jake Muller, a mercenary who turns out to be immune to the C-virus(i like to call his campaign Sherrys mode, since Sherry Birkin feels far more important) and is being safeguarded so an antidote can be made. Everything slowly comes to focus on a city in china where all hell breaks loose, but each feature different styles of play and atmosphere that they still feel a little unique. The stories aren't bad, and do have some pretty interesting and sad moments in them, so it isn't my main concern(though the characters do at times make it more annoying to follow). My main concern, is how each storyline is designed.
Leons campaign tries to bring back the feel of RE2, heck you could say RE in general, and for the first 3 chapters, captures it well. Heck, they stand out to me as the strongest chapters of the game. They capture a decent amount of atmosphere you used to get, and you face zombies(you know, those beasts that RE are famous for) instead of the J'avos in the rest of it. It is lost though later into it, but Leon is easily the best character in this. Helena is ok, but that's about as best a comment you can get. Leon is easily the best campaign of the game.
Chris' mode goes pure action, probably where the "attracting the CoD audience" comment came into play from Capcom, and feels tacked on. It has no feel of RE, bar chris being there. Chris and his partner Piers are bland, uninteresting characters that feel thrown in purely to get a reunion of the originals back in one game and someone to kick chris back into action. They probably tried to capture the idea of it not all being about horror, and now becoming slightly more military-like with it starting to go wide-spread, but maybe they tried that too much. It does have it's moments sometimes, like for example mid-way you have to deal with an invisible snake, no doubt a reference to the original mansion and the snake there, and it killing off chris' squad one by one from the shadows, but outside of that, i struggle to name any other memorable segments.
Jakes(Sherrys) mode is the most experimental, and as such the hardest to really judge. At first, i thought they where trying to go stealthy with it, but by the time you hit the later chapters, you realise, this feels like a movie. It's not bad, but again, it doesn't have any real horror in it. It does have a RE3 throwback in the form of Ustanak though. He refuses to die and has his sights set on Jake throughout. Very Nemesis against Stars-like. Stealth is there too, and it isn't bad, but you can just charge in for the most part too. They both aren't bad characters either, but still lacking a certain...something.

So what's the problem with all this? Instead of trying to focus on one or two things, Capcom tried to do too much. Of the three, you have an attempt at horror, an attempt at action and an attempt at making a movie-like style section. Sure they had a big team to work on this, but it's too much. I feel that, in trying to appeal to so many markets at once, they've shot themselves in the foot and are essentially pushing away more crowds than bringing in. I won't mention much on the 4th campaign, as you do need to unlock it, but it does host the freakiest boss of the entire game. A small consolation prize, you could say.

Ustanak, the Nemesis of RE6

So how is the gameplay? Mostly ok. However it's become yet another title in the "must have QTEs aplenty" concern. It's also linear in a bad way. All resi has been fairly linear, but this hasn't got rooms to the side to look into for extra bits, it's more corridor shooter-like. finish this area, see if there is an emblem(files, which you read in the special features section), move on, rinse repeat. You also have a lot of forced sections, running away, QTEs, you name it. It detracts a lot, and it's something quite obviously no-one has learned from yet. Do not force us into QTEs, or situations. Heck the prologue suffered from the same idiocy as Gaiden 3 did. "press back on the control stick, walk forward, press left, walk forward". Sure, it's a prologue, but let us look about. Removing freedom is not something you should EVER do in a title, period. Controls are reasonable too, though they neglect to mention a lot in the instruction manual. You really need to look online for a lot of the control shortcuts(protip: Hitting RB & X (R1 + square for you PS3 guys)on the 360 controller automatically creates tablets from herbs if you have them available), a bad move overall. But again, the moves feel like they are deliberately trying to make it more action like. You run as normal now, need to tilt the control stick slightly to walk. You now dash instead when you hold A(X). Also, i highly recommend you switch the targeting reticule if you do intend to play RE6, the default is pretty abysmal, change it to laser sight and you should be fine.
There is no weapon upgrades this time, no weapon progression either, something i quite liked from RE4 and 5. Instead, everything focuses on skills. Some are what you'd expect, firepower boosts, defense boosts, more critical damage. Others are aimed at making the game easier(and for a couple, harder) for some, getting tablets when your ally helps you up, better accuracy, or you can remove your targetting reticule as well for a damage boost. It's not a bad setup, all things considered.
For those that enjoy it, the one thing that hasn't really gone and been hit bad at all is Mercenaries. It feels like it used to, you against the clock to kill everything you can(this time with a limit, which makes for some good score attacks) whilst collecting time and bonus multipliers. It's still exactly as it was which i'm glad to see. You can equip a single skill for it as well, which may unbalance it a little i find, but not as badly as i first feared. Time bonuses can give more time, longer bonus multiplier, kind of thing. You can switch between them mid-game, but it does mean you could drop your combo, something you need to watch for.

You will spend a fair bit of time crawling and jumping to the ground

I'm yet to try online, and to be honest, i'm tempted not to try it full stop. If you even set it to consider xbox live or anything, you can't pause the game, even if noone else is in your game. I recommend you set it to offline so you can(why that's not default is anyones guess). Co-op is available in mercs and agent hunter(i'm yet to try) as well both, local and online. Local co-op is horrible, it doesn't even take up a full screen. When my brother and i tried it on the PS3 at home(a 40" TV), it left a lot of black bars/blocks all over the screen and these small wee screens for you playing. Whoever considered this a good option needs to be slapped. There was one other segment which annoyed me. The details you get from the files(unlocked by emblems) is not all there. You need a residentevil.net account linked to your XBL or PSN account to get every detail, and you can only get them on the website. Whatever happened to having everything in the game already?

My opinions here may not seem to suggest it's an entirely bad game, and for the most part, it's not terrible, but it's not good either. What makes Resident Evil.....Resident Evil? This should be obvious. Survival horror. That fear of going up against the unknown, watching your ammo, a dark atmosphere, etc. This doesn't happen here. Sure, there is this more global style fear of things happening...but it doesn't capture anything i remember and loved. Maybe i should approach this as the new way forward as capcom are trying to say it needed to go, but it doesn't work. It doesn't give me what i want from the RE franchise. Why can't they make a game ala Revelations? That captures the fear of another "raccoon city" style even, yet keeps the atmosphere and fear alive? Why do we need the Call of Duty fanbase to help us move forward? The design choices just don't add up for me, and i don't think they ever will. They have taken what resident evil once was, put it into 3 chapters, and made a title that may as well have a different name on it. It might even do better if it did. But because it tries to expand the world of a fan favourite, it has done nothing but hurt itself. Perhaps capcom will take from this and go back to what it once was, or they might try and use this as a way to say "out with the old, in with the new" and move in a direction which will do nothing but push away it's core player-base. All i can say is, if this is a sign for things to come, i fear for the franchise, not because it's going to make bad games, but because it no longer is Resident Evil.

Capcoms Captivate 2012 - leaks + speculation

Captivate, Capcoms own style of press conferences/showing off of new titles and so on has been taking place recently, and has been set to finish as of today. Needless to say, this is when all the details start flying, but it came as a surprise that Sony leaked a good few pieces onto the web sooner than originally planned. So instead of waiting until we get all the details, i'll throw in what i know of the 3-4 that have been detailed so far. Let's get started

Resident Evil 6

The not-so-surprising surprise announcement back in January of the continuation for Resident Evil hit the ground running with a new trailer, which if you are fast enough, you can still watch over on ShopTo with a ton of story details. As a quick summary, Sherry Birkin and "Wesker Junior" are the third duo of Main characters in the story, as we all called ages ago, Chris looks weird, Ada seems to be one of the people running this new set of events going on, or so it seems. The Virus is now known as the C-Virus, and there is a lot to do with spawning things, clones and i dunno what. A lot takes place in china, leon and his partner fake their deaths at some point, and yeah. And before we forget, it actually changed the release date. We can now expect to see Resident Evil 6 on the 2nd of October this year. Quite a surprise, obviously they are further along in production than they had expected, and hopefully, this'll make up for the absolutely abysmal Operation Raccoon City released last month. I'm going to do a post later on resident evil speculation, since there is a lot you can cover with it, but i'll leave the details there for now.

Lost Planet 3

The biggest surprise, and i don't mean this in a good way, was Lost Planet 3. There is nothing much to see with the trailer, bar the fact that you may actually get a named protagonist this time round, whether it's any relation to the first game at all, who knows, but god, why are they making this? Consider it this way, Lost Planet 2 had absolutely terrible sales, it wasn't well received by anyone either, so why would capcom go and decide that this was a good investment? Surely this will only end with them making a loss? Or is there going to be a big game changer thrown in somewhere? I dunno, i'll wait for the full official embargo of details later on today.

If you want to see the trailer, you can find it here.

DmC - Devil May Cry

DmCs trailer showed very little in terms of combat, though it did at least show some, unlike the other two trailers released today. It more or less showed off the point of the TV show looking for Dante, and some demons. It has style, i won't deny it, but i still can't get used to the look of Dante. I just hope the gameplay makes up for it, and they can make the story at least link into him becoming the proper Dante.

Again, the trailer is found over here

Other than these three, not much else has been fired out. The patch for Street Fighter x Tekken is due out today, and that's about it. As soon as we get hit by the full details, i'll add them into another blog post later.

Resident Evil Revelations and the Circle Pad Pro

Having finished Resident Evil Revelations about a couple of weeks ago, blitzing the raid mode and so on with both the Circle Pad Pro(the latest addition to the 3DS), i thought it a good time to give my thoughts on how the game plays, which control scheme i prefer, and of course, how well the Circle Pad Pro(CPP from here on) works. So let's start with Revelations.

Resident Evil Revelations is yet another addition to the ever growing Resident Evil franchise, which Capcom themselves has said, would bring back horror to the series. This was a huge statement for them to make, specially considering how both 4 and 5 had put less emphasis on it, 5 more so than 4 obviously. So it wouldn't be too surprising to say i was a little sceptical about it all. not only that, but how would the game work control wise? Thankfully, both of these where answered well.

Horror, or rather, Survival horror was always what the series was best known for, and with this, it certainly brings them back to the genre, even if just a bit. The atmosphere for the majority of the setting, which is an abandoned ship named the Queen Zenobia, is that of what you probably remember of the first game. A, what appears to be, ship in which there is noone left alive and you are left there to investigate and survive your time there. And it feels like it too. You get feeling of hesitance at some points within the game of, what will be round here, and will something jump out of nowhere. There is even a point late into the game in which the lights flicker a lot, and it leaves you thinking, will something just appear suddenly or not. That is what i was after, finally giving me the sense of horror again. That's not to say there was tonnes, there is points in the game in which you play as Chris/Jessica and Keith/Quint in other settings which focus more on action and combat than it does your survivability. In those sections, there is just no sense of fear given to you. The ship sections do though, not always to the same extent, but there is something there, an element in the background maybe, which is a step in the right direction. One can only hope Capcom keep to this with Resident Evil 6.

Jill exploring the many mysteries of the ship

Now for the gameplay. Resident Evil has always been known for standing still when aiming and shooting, but for the first time in the series(not including Mercenaries 3D), you can move and shoot. This may seem like a small detail, but it's pretty big in terms of this series. However, when using the original control scheme, without the CPP, you have to hold both shoulder buttons to be able to move, and you can't alter your aim at the same time. This is a little hit and miss for me, but it makes sense with the controls you are given. Hold R and hit Y to fire, B to reload and x for subweapon(with/without R), you get the idea. This is ok for the most part, but it gets a little more stressful later in the game when you have more enemies flying out at you, specially with Raid mode. Thankfully, there is an alternative you can use in the CPP. It is £15 so it's a bit of an investment for use in just one game at present. However, the extra circle pad, and three extra shoulder buttons is fantastic. You can aim and move as you would in most third person shooters with this setup, the keybindings you get as normal are comfortable and it doesn't take too long to get used to. It also helps those of you who found the 3DS to be too small to handle as well. I'll do a small post on the CPP itself later, but for the purpose of Revelations, it's a big hit. You can also switch between third person and first person perspectives in aiming, third person being the one i'd recommend. The rest of the games system is very much what you've come to expect. Move aim shoot kill zombie-like things. But this time, enemies do not drop ammo and herbs, you need to find some about, or use your scanner which for stories sake, is to identify what these things are and the virus used, to find items in the environment. Scanning enough enemies awards you with a single green herb as well. asides from that, you can control a lot of the reloading and item switching via the touch screen, and that is also the only way you can access your inventroy and map.

Environments look nice both with/without 3D

Story and 3D. Now the story is very much what we've come to expect from Resident Evil now they've moved passed the Raccoon City events. The BSAA have been called in to investigate this abandoned ship which was where Chris/Jessicas last known co-ordinates where set to. This leads into a decently paced, yet perhaps slightly obvious road in which you try to find out who did it, and who is behind everything. It does bring in new characters to the team, so if you are getting tired of seeing Jill sandwiches and that guy Chris, then this helps, as well as a new look into the BSAA and who they are. The characters themselves do enough to carry the story, and does bring into question some things about Chris and Jills relationship and what kind of level it is at, not by their interactions so much as their interactions with their partners in it, but there isn't much else to say for them. What was more interesting was the new look into the BSAA and rival organisations and how, despite being on the same side, they have completely different mind-sets into how to deal with these biohazards and those affected by them. It could maybe have done with a few more twists and turns here and there, but it was certainly solid.

The 3D itself is probably the most comfortable i've seen in a 3DS game to date. I played about 3/4s of the game before i had realised i had never turned off the 3D once. It's a little more uncomfortable when set to strong and obviously more so with Strongest. Do things appear to work better with it? Yes, to an extent. You do get that feeling of things being a bit closer than they are to you and further away, and it doesn't really drop the frame rate either which is a bonus. The only times that hits you really is when you go between certain sections of the game, though they thankfully keep you in small rooms when they do that loading, as to not affect your general gameplay for the rest of the game.

Finally, there is achievements in the game if you are one of those who likes them. They unlock things in the game like the Raid mode, which is a co-op/multiplayer mode or single player, if you prefer that, in which you play through the sequences of the game in a mission mode style of play. Going against different times and killing everything you can while taking as few hits as possible so that you can get the best rank you can. The streetpass works for this by giving you extra missons with unique unlockables for weapons and custom parts which gives it that extra re-playability value. And you level up as well, which helps as the enemies themselves level up with difficulty and progression. You need to finish the first three chapters for this at first and you get Jill/Chris/Parker to play as at first, but you get more as you play both modes.

So overall. I was extremely happy with this game, and still am. I got my moneys worth with this and the CPP. I keep pushing on with the Raid mode and my hard difficulty playthrough, completing every misson i can buying weapons and levelling up as much as i can to get those achievements and unlockables. I'd recommend anyone who is a fan of the series, or in general looking for games on the 3DS to play to get this. Well worth the pick-up.