LOS ANGELES – "That's not Resident Evil."
Capcom probably gets this a lot. If you're an old-school fan of the plodding games that started the "survival horror" craze, you probably don't feel like the fast-paced shooting action of recent Resident Evil games is truly what you want. But the run-and-gun slaughterhouse action of Resident Evil 5 made it the single biggest-selling game in the series. So any reversion to the classic gameplay style would mean a separate, possibly larger contingent of fans complaining that the Resident Evil they enjoyed is missing. Whoops.
Resident Evil 6, to be released on Oct. 2 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, seems to be making an attempt to be all things to all people. It's going to have three separate single-player campaigns, each of which stars a different character and each of which, at least based on the E3 demo, plays quite differently. Playing as Leon Kennedy, Resident Evil 6 feels like a slow-paced traditional horror game with an emphasis on exploration and fighting a small number of enemies. But if you decide to play as Chris Redfield, the demo section is an all-out guns-blazing action film. New character Jake Muller would seem to be the wild card – his entire demo sequence is a single boss fight, so it's tough to know what his levels might play like when he's not fighting a major enemy.
Leon's sequence feels very much like the 3DS Resident Evil: Revelations game brought to the big screen. After an event featuring the POTUS goes terribly awry, Leon skulks through the ruined event space looking for survivors. He runs into a man desperately searching for his daughter. You don't do much killing of anything – at least, not until everybody else turns into a zombie and you have to shoot your way out of an elevator. But soon after that, the demo winds to a close. If you're on the E3 show floor and you pick the Leon demo, you'll get a lot of story but not much gameplay.
Chris' action-packed sequence finds him running across the roofs of buildings, trying desperately to fight off hordes of zombies and make his way to a rendezvous point. You'll get more acquainted here with dodging out of the way of attacks and switching between all your various sorts of weaponry.
Jake's sequence is the most unique. You begin by running away from a monster – the characters are running towards the camera, so you have to dodge things as they come into your field of view – and once that brief sequence is over you have to fight the monster inside an enclosed room. Eventually I figured out that climbing up to the catwalks on the room's second level and shooting at exploding barrels when the monster was near them was the way to go, meaning that the fight was much more about strategic, location-based attacks than just emptying the clip of my machine gun.
Can a trifurcated game please everyone? On the one hand, it would seem to be a potentially viable solution to a difficult problem: The first Resident Evil and the latest one are such profoundly different experiences that making a single game that is seen as a proper follow-up by fans of both might be impossible. At the same time, players usually enjoy going through one epic single-player game rather than three short ones. Perhaps the more concise nature of each of the three stories will help the designers whittle the game down into just the most interesting parts. Or perhaps it will feel too thin. In that case, trying to please everyone might end up pleasing no one at all.
