Six years ago today, Resident Evil 6 lurched onto consoles and made far more money than it did fans. This sloppy gung-ho mess largely feels disconnected from the atmosphere and style of what Resident Evil should be, but there is a diamond in the rough.
Split into separate campaigns with different character duos, all telling their sides to the same overall story in slightly different ways, Resident Evil 6 should, on paper, be a grand continuation of the melodramatic survival horror series. Unfortunately, Capcom leaned far too heavily into the false idea that players didn’t much care for horror games anymore and action was where the money was.
The second part of that idea was certainly true (Resident Evil 5 and 6 are the most financially successful entries in the entire series), but that needn’t have come at the expense of the horror for Resident Evil 6, especially when one of its campaigns consistently shows how the game is best when it balances the two.
Leon’s campaign felt like the only enjoyable part of Resident Evil 6 back in 2012. At the time it was simply because the others were such action-heavy retreads with a higher emphasis on shooting the hell out of everything in sight (and punching things in the vague shape they called a face for good measure). The easiest comparison between the campaigns is that while the majority were like being in a war against the bio-terrors, Leon’s journey, despite his experience, is sheer survival.
After a brief flash-forward, we get plonked straight into the middle of the latest outbreak where Leon has had to re-kill the reanimated corpse of his good pal and boss, The President of the United States of America. Leon and fellow agent Helena Harper must now escape from the grounds and seek out those responsible.
The opening area keeps much of the action claustrophobic. Dark hallways and small hordes of the shuffling undead are a regular sight during this time, which evokes Leon’s earliest adventures from 1998. It’s a shame when it does deviate a bit and head into underground caverns and labs and different flavors of virus monster are unleashed (even if that in itself is a pleasingly familiar progression), but the adventure does also head to the streets and does a damn fine job of showcasing the chaos and ragtag survival of a group of relative strangers.
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It’s during this stage that Leon’s campaign shows its hand as a pleasing Greatest Hits package of classic Resi moments married to its less pleasant modern stylings. There’s a siege in a building that echoes the one from Resident Evil 4, with Leon, Helena, and some survivors going floor to floor, keeping the undead at bay as they stumble towards the building in numbers. It’s intense and importantly, it feels like pure survival horror, even in co-op. You’re never left to feel comfortable with your surroundings. A zombie can easily creep up on you unseen and set off a chain reaction of panic (especially with friendly fire turned on) that sees all your best-laid plans crumble to dust.
Looking back on how promising that segment felt six years ago before knowing quite how disappointing much of what followed would be is bittersweet. Arguably the game never quite reaches that high again (the plane section is interesting up until we get a rather drab retread of the aerial boss battle from Resident Evil Code: Veronica) and Leon’s campaign veers off into the same muddy waters as the other campaigns towards the end.
But those first few hours as you head through a campus, the burning streets, and a graveyard are still a pleasure for Resi fans turned off by the action-heavy direction the series was embracing otherwise. Leon’s weary snark makes a welcome return and fits nicely in the bloody, campy absurdity of everything going on around him. As with Resident Evil 4, Leon could easily be an 80’s John Carpenter lead.
Seeing the course-correct Resident Evil 7 made means Resident Evil 6‘s sting is lessened somewhat now and it’s that bit easier to appreciate what it did right, and most of that is in Leon’s campaign.