Developer: Slant Six Games / Capcom
Producer: Peter Doidge-Harrison
Directors: Andrew Santos, Tuomas PirinenEach Resident Evil game developed by Capcom after Mikami left became steadily less Resident Evil than the last, and this is the point where the series totally abandons every gameplay element typically associated with it in order to appeal to the Call of Duty crowd. Capcom decided it was a bright idea to outsource a RE title to Canadian developer Slant Six, who had previously developed only the SOCOM U.S. NAVY SEALs series. This 4-player 3rd person squad cover shooter is designed around a hypothetical alternate universe scenario which takes place during RE2/3 during the outbreak in Raccoon City. It’s designed around a battle between HUNK’s Umbrella Security Services and US Special Ops.
The generic 3rd person shooter elements that I lamented in Revelations have become the entire picture here, though thankfully in a somewhat more complex way. Essentially, this is a generic squad shooter wearing a Resident Evil skin, which I guess is unsurprising given who developed it. The campaign steps it up from RE5’s 2-player co-op to 4 player co-op. Part of the reason this game was so reviled is that there is a 7-mission campaign for each team, but only the USS campaign (which lasts around 3.5hrs if you hit the par time for each level) was included with the base game. The first mission of the Spec Ops campaign was included as a teaser, and the rest was sold separately in two 3-mission ‘Echo Six’ DLC packs, currently being sold for $10 each when not on sale. In order to get the full 14 mission game, you had to pay a lot of extra money, and since both DLC packs featured a lot of level recycling from the main game, people were quite mad (except for many console players, who received the DLC for free). The game was very blatantly chopped in half to sell in pieces, which is made especially clear by the fact that the final bullet-sponge boss doesn’t appear until the very end of the DLC (seriously, that might have been the most annoying bullet-spongey boss I’ve EVER encountered, but at least it wasn’t hard and I never died and had to try again). In total, the two campaigns took me around 11hrs, which each mission taking 20–50min.
The Umbrella’s Security Service campaign follows their attempts to ensure that all evidence of Umbrella’s involvement in the Raccoon City outbreak is erased. There are 6 different characters to pick from, all with dumb names and awful costumes. Each has a different role (assault, recon, medic, field scientist, demolition, surveillance) and accompanying special abilities which can be upgraded using XP gained from playing the game and collecting data items. I’m not sure why all of them and their main adversary are Russian — I guess it’s the old neoMcCarthyist make-all-the-bad-guys-Russian routine. It is fun to see events from the side of Umbrella’s henchmen, and it would also have been fun to see areas from RE2/3 recreated with much better graphics if not for the fact that they look oddly generic to the point that it’s easy to miss what they’re based on. The path through them is completely linear, which also makes recognition a bit more difficult. The game takes place in an alternate timeline, allowing the USS to encounter several characters from RE2 who never crossed paths with them in said game. I actually quite appreciate that this game is non-canon — it just feels like the right decision.
The Spec Ops campaign overlaps more with Resident Evil 3 for its first half, centering around meetings with Jill and the Nemesis. It’s weirdly hard to find this campaign in the game’s menus — rather than having it start right after the USS campaign like you’d expect, the only way to access it is through the ‘Free Play’ menu. The characters are just reskins of the USS roles, to the extent that whatever ability upgrades you purchased with XP for the USS characters carry over into the new campaign. By that same token, you fight hordes of USS soldiers (who, for some reason, never appeared in the actual USS campaign, unlike the Spec Ops soldiers appear all over this campaign). For some reason, the USS soldiers look pretty much identical to the Nazis from the new Wolfenstein games. As I mentioned before, the levels are largely reused from the Umbrella campaign, making this yet another Resident Evil game where the two campaigns cover the same ground with different characters. It’s a good bit more challenging than the USS campaign, though, particularly with respect to the boss battles. Mission 6 was especially challenging — it started out hard and never stopped escalating. I died something like 46 times across 50 minutes — it was a bit excessive. It ends with some prime sequel bait, but that never came to fruition despite the fact that this game is one of Capcom’s bestselling titles, perhaps due to the poor critical reception.
Ammo is unified, which actually makes a great deal of sense here as you can only hold one weapon at a time and there are tons of different weapons (many of which feel pretty much the same to me — it’s already overkill, and for some reason they sold even MORE weapons as DLC). You or your teammates can become infected, at which point you need to use antiviral sprays on yourself or each other within a certain time window to prevent zombie transformation. As in RE5, first aid sprays affect all the teammates in a radius around you, and they also cure bleeding (life drain) in addition to low health. Green herbs, on the other hand, can’t be stored, must be consumed in the moment, and can’t be used on teammates. The team AI wasn’t the best I’ve encountered, but it’s certainly a hell of a lot more useful than the AI player in RE5, probably because there’s no inventory to manage. There are a couple mechanics that I only discovered towards the end of the game thanks to hints on loading screens, and I wish the game had done a better job of telling you they existed. I didn’t even get a chance to try using a zombie as a shield, as I only saw that hint right before the final boss (and I’m still not sure how to do it).
The monsters are what you’d expect at this point — zombies, fast crimson head zombies, lickers, hunters, tyrants, Nemesis, and a new ‘parasite’ that’s basically the head crab from Half-Life and provides the source material for the final boss. These monsters are generally fun to fight, but battling the human enemies is the opposite of fun. They’re oddly difficult to hit even when parts of them are exposed through cover, and they can kill you quite quickly. They’re more fun to battle later in the game, when you’ve purchased abilities that allow you to more effectively pit them against the infected enemies, or when a hoard of zombies and hunters is already facing a soldier group when you arrive at the scene.
The first chapter of the game (battling Spec Ops soldiers in Willian Birkin’s lab) is well and truly awful, and I was ready to write the game off right then and there. I was expecting the worst, but the game improved quickly and I actually had some fun, much to my surprise. There were some severely frustrating moments, to be sure, but the base gameplay was enjoyable. I think the claims that it’s the worst title in the series are severely hyperbolic, though I wouldn’t call it a good game. In context with wildly popular team-based zombie shooters like both Left 4 Dead games and Killing Floor, not to mention games like Dead Island and Dead Rising, it’s easy to see why people were so hard on it — if it had come out 5 years earlier, I think it would have seemed much more appealing. Coming out in 2012, it was the latest in a glut of trendy zombie action games, and it ranked near the bottom of the pile. It fares a bit better against recent titles from its own series, though — the gameplay here is much more complicated, chaotic and fun then the rudimentary shooter bits in Revelations. It’s much easier for me to enjoy this game for what it is than with RE5 and Revelations, as it doesn’t retain any of the RE gameplay tropes. It never pretends to be anything more than the dumb shooter it is, and thus refrains from hinting at a superior horror direction like the aforementioned titles (though at least it takes place at night… I’m looking at you, RE5).
The PC version of the game is quite broken, partially because it uses Games for Windows Live and thus requires a good bit of tweaking to get functional these days. As far as I can tell, the matchmaking never actually worked, and thus I was never able to try the PvP Versus mode, where the game’s two teams are pitted against each other in several different 8-player game modes. I played the entire game in single player (and it really says something that it was tolerable in that form, as I can’t say the same of any other RE co-op title including a few upcoming reviews), but it’s easy to imagine that this would have been decent fun as the multiplayer game it was designed to be. The PC port also just isn’t very well optimized, with frequent slowdowns despite its age. I can only imagine how badly this ran at launch and how much this disrupted the gameplay at the time. In short, it’s very easy to see why people were furious about this game when it came out, but now that it’s a bargain title and many of its issues have been mitigated (aside from getting it to run properly), it isn’t the absolute worst way you could spend your time.
RATING: 4/10 awful leather supersuits. Not as bad as you may have heard as long as you don’t expect a Resident Evil game or any originality.
[Originally posted in 2018]
