Has any game franchise done more with less than Resident Evil? It started as a somewhat interesting survival horror game on the PlayStation, complete with clunky controls and a Capcom trademarked story that was both hilariously convoluted and embarrassingly simple. From there it spawned a bunch of mediocre sequels and spin offs, peaked briefly with Resident Evil 4, before quickly devolving into the convoluted mess that is Resident Evil 6. The newest installment tries to be a mixture of both the original game and the more modern third person shooters of today, and ends up being the worst of every world.
The basic premise of Resident Evil 6 is that there are 4 separate campaigns to play through, allowing you to see the zombie apocolypse of the month from 4 different viewpoints. That's the theory anyway. In practice, the campaigns are all so short that about half the cutscenes in the game are shared between them. Another thing that sounded much better in theory was making the campaigns have a different feel, i.e. one being a more traditional survival horror, one being a more traditional third person shooter, etc. In practice, however, there is basically no difference between them all. Long time series mainstays such as Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, and Jill Valentine make their usual appearances. The most interesting character is Ada Wong, who hovers around all the other characters like Batman, protecting them when they find themselves in yet another perilous situation. Her campaign is supposed to tie all the stories together, but really all that happens is you reach the end, press a button, and get talked at for 5 minutes.
If the impenetrable story didn't already turn you off of Resident Evil 6, the gameplay certainly will. All the characters are so stiff to try and steer around the levels, frequently continuing to move even after you let go of the thumbstick. After all their years of zombie hunting they still haven't grasped the concept of moving while aiming, and there is a laughably poor attempt at a cover system. Capcom keeps these things in Resident Evil games for tradition I suppose, but games intentionally ignoring good design choices in favor of tradition just makes them all the more frustrating. This all happens, of course, when the game begrudgingly allows you to actually play it. Control is taken from the player so often so that the camera can pan to something the game is so proud of, or so that characters can talk at you over your headset, or so the game can throw one of it's hundreds of quick time events at you, that the actual time spent playing Resident Evil 6 is probably close to about 3 hours.
The quick time events deserve special mention, as they often come completely out of nowhere, and flash on the screen for about a quarter of a second. They really couldn't be implemented any worse. And if all this wasn't bad enough, the game thinks that ramping up the stakes is to simply throw the same giant monsters at you about 5 different times, often after you've convincingly killed them previously. The characters never seem to learn to completely obliterate a monster after they've downed it, always being content to just continue on their way. They never seem surprised or concerned when the same baddie later confronts them for the umpeenth time however, and if they're not concerned about it I just don't see why I should be either.
The best games are made when player and game co-exist harmoniously. The game allows the player to freely explore it's worlds, and the player uses the tools given to enjoy the journey. Resident Evil 6 hates it's players. During the brief moments when it remembers it's a game and not some cheaply made horror/comedy film, it gives players stiff and dated gameplay to fight the same monsters over and over and over again. The only way Resident Evil 6 is even remotely worth playing is in co-op mode with a friend, that way you can both laugh at the sheer awfulness of it all. Trying to play it solo will do nothing more than bring you to tears.