Resident Evil 6 Review

The ambition is real and the execution is a pileup. Four intertwined campaigns should have been a structural triumph, letting the same catastrophe read differently depending on whose shoes you are in, and instead each one is diluted by the demand that it also contain a helicopter chase, a driving level and a stealth section. Leon's chapters flirt with the old dread for about an hour before the game panics and hands him a motorcycle.

Chris gets a mediocre cover shooter. Jake gets a boulder. The quick time prompts are relentless to the point of parody, arriving during cutscenes, during walking, during conversation, and failing one usually means watching the whole scene again. The camera sits too close, the melee is genuinely good and buried under everything else, and the mercenaries mode is where the mechanics finally cohere, which says something unkind about the campaigns. It is the most expensive thing in the series and the least sure of what it is.