Resident Evil 6

A while ago, I looked at all the games I owned on the Xbox 360 that could not be played on Xbox One. I was starting to get paranoid about the fact that eventually, service is going to stop for the 360 and therefore any non-Backward Compatible games would be lost to me. In addition, it got me thinking about online achievements that have a reliance on third party servers and therefore this could have a higher risk of discontinued achievements.

This resulted in me starting Resident Evil 6 as it’s both non-BC and has online achievements and my only unstarted game that required more than two players to get all the achievements. Anyway, all of the multiplayer achievements are in the game’s DLC so that will be covered later.

Resident Evil 6 has received some negative criticism over the years and now, having played it the whole way through, I can’t see why. Certainly not to the extent I’ve seen. The game consists of 4 campaigns where you play as Leon (or Helena), Chris (or Piers), Jake (or Sherry) and Ada Wong (by herself). The campaigns are essentially one story, just told from the different view points to give a full impression of what’s going on from all angles. Although by the end, I didn’t feel any more enlightened as to what happened than I did when I finished Leon’s campaign.

A quick note on the game itself. It’s not one of those pick up and play games. Most chapters take around an hour to complete, sometimes longer, and the in-game checkpoints were very unreliable as a ‘stop and turn it off’ reference. I didn’t make this mistake twice though and only sat down to play when I had enough time to complete a chapter.

Gameplay wise, it’s the same style as Resident Evil 5; third-person, over the shoulder view point. What’s quite handy is that you can change shoulders by pressing a button which gives an advantage when sneaking through corridors. The characters, however, handle like shit and they all seem to have the turning circle of a truck. The unhelpful controls become ever more apparent during Chris’ campaign when you are tasked with running away from some giant mutant thing. The whole running and jumping becomes an episode in frustration when the smallest mistake results in instant death.

Thinking back to the criticism the game received, it may have something to do with the fact that it’s not a survival horror that the series is synonymous with. It’s more of a run and gun, especially Chris and Jake’s campaigns. They did make it fair though by creating a bunch of new zombies called Javo that can shoot guns. Weird but whatever.

Looks wise, it sums up the graphical gaming trend of the times as it’s horrible bland, grey and brown all over with the only colour being Ada’s red coat. Musically, it’s your standard Japanese faire made cool for the Westerners. There’s nothing wrong with this and even the menu music in the multiplayer didn’t become boring even after…. A lot of hours.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 70 Achievements

With a list of 70 achievements, this takes some time, mainly because of what I’ve mentioned above about the chapter completion times. Essentially you are looking at 20 hours just to play through the story. On any difficulty, this will net 21 achievements (all chapters and prologue) and there is one achievement for each difficulty level you complete the game on. There are 4 for Amateur, Normal, Veteran and Professional. Thankfully there isn’t an achievement for completing the game on the apply named No Hope difficulty. On all the lower difficulties, you can unlock skills to give you infinite ammo for all the guns you get. What I did was complete the game on amateur, then complete the last part of every chapter on professional with an infinite ammo shotgun. Combined with maxed out defence and firepower upgrades, it made most bits a breeze.

Aside from completing the levels, there are additional achievements tied to completing certain actions in certain parts of the game. None of these were too difficult once you have played through the game once and know what’s required for each.

In addition to the event-specific achievements, there are two others tied to the in-game collectibles. There are 4 serpent medals in each level of the game, making 80 to collect overall. Some of these are obvious, but others you need a laser-scoped sniper rifle to see, let alone know where they are.

Outside of these, there are several slightly grindy achievements, the worst one being for unlocking all the skills that level up. Essentially, this boils down to running the same sections of chapters over and over again to maximise skill point pick-ups. This is not the most fun you can have with the game.

There is also another achievement for collecting 150 different medals from all the different game modes, however this is made a ton easier with the multiplayer DLC as they are cumulative over all DLC game modes, as well as the campaign.

Unnecessary Multiplayer in Downloadable Content

There are four DLC packs for the game, each one containing a slightly different variation of versus modes and each carrying 5 achievements a piece. I say these are pointless because any mode that requires other people to play with you has a shelf life before people move on to other things and, let’s be honest, Resident Evil wasn’t exactly a franchise crying out for multiplayer.

In terms of achievements, most of them are straight forward and only require two players. The survivors game mode has two that require a third player, but they are both really quick and can be earned simultaneously.

The rest of the 20 DLC achievements don’t require anything complicated however, with just two people, they do take a while. Predator Mode is the quickest as the highest requirement is to get 50 kills. Then it’s Survivors which requires 100 kills. After that it’s probably Onslaught where the big one requires you to chain combos and send enemies to your opponent’s map for them to survive against. The achievement requires you to send 2,000 enemies and even if you do well with stringing together combos, this still takes a while.

The last mode is the longest though. Siege mode requires you to kill 100 BSAA agents and 100 players. This is similar to the Survivors one, only it takes longer because each match consists of 2 rounds and only one where you can get agent and BSAA kills so there is a whole half a match that does nothing towards this achievement. You do have to kill creatures, but this comes miles before the agent kills so it’s almost redundant.

Despite the grindiness of the online component, I enjoyed the main game of Resident Evil 6. Achievements wise, it takes a while but it’s not the worst grind out there and it feels like a rewarding completion once the whole thing is done. It’s certainly not discouraged me from playing the rest of the franchise and the next step looks like Resident Evil 4. The only question is when.