Resident Evil 6 Xbox One

Despite it seeming as though Resident Evil 6 released only yesterday, it’s easy to forget that it has actually been nearly four years since it hit store shelves in October of 2012. Originally released to rather mixed reviews but massive sales, some of the highest in the entire series actually, the series’ latest numbered installment has been resurrected for the new generation of gaming consoles as part of Capcom’s latest streak of remastering older titles, which began with 2015’s Resident Evil REmastered.

If you’re looking for the best possible way to experience Resident Evil 6 on console, this is it. Locked at a beautiful 60fps and 1080p, Resident Evil 6 has never looked better. Sadly, this really isn’t saying all that much. Resident Evil 6 was never an especially amazing looking game, with muddy textures and flat environments, RE6 was easily the worst looking numbered title in the series to date, counting age of the other titles and things like that. The character models themselves actually look surprisingly great on Xbox One and PS4, with a whole new level of detail visible in the character’s skin and clothing, you can now easily see texturing on Leon’s blue shirt and the gritty pallor to an infected’s skin. Unfortunately, this compounds the issue with the game’s ugly environments, which seem to have had almost nothing at all done to them, and look noticeably worse compared to the sharper character models. RE6‘s cinematic direction oddly focused in on a lot of close-up shots of things that just don’t look that great. In the first hour or so of Leon’s campaign, there’s a section where Leon has to search a police car for keys and then drive a short distance, which has the camera sat in the back seat of the automobile. Again, Leon and Helena look great, clothing with a realistic pebbling to their textures and hair shining in the light– but the car’s interior looks almost as if it’s from an entirely different console generation, with the steering wheel looking almost like a cardboard cut out, and the door has an ugly dark pixelation around its edges.

If you’re looking to earn new achievements and trophies in RE6, get ready for some dejavu, as the list is identical to the original game, which is a huge shame, especially since that means there still isn’t any real reward for beating the game on it’s hard-core, No Hope difficulty level (which was patched in a few weeks after the original release). There are a number of cool images Xbox One users can use as backgrounds for their dashboard at least, neat little mash-ups of the main characters standing and looking grim, or fighting of packs of J’avo. PS4 users get the same Trophy icons from before. This isn’t a huge surprise I guess, although it makes me a little worried for this fall’s port of Resident Evil 4, since the previous PS3/Xbox 360 release had terrible achievements/trophies, only 12 of them and almost all of them were for just beating the game and an easter egg. As someone who prides themselves on how thoroughly I’ve kicked RE4‘s ass, it sucks to still not have anything available for bragging rights. Hopefully the port of that will have a revamped list.

If you aren’t familiar with Resident Evil 6‘s story, you’re in for a tangled web that’s going to take a little while to explain here. Taking place around four years after the Kijuju, Africa epidemic of Resident Evil 5, the world has become a breeding ground for bio-terror, and a full-blown military conflict has spread across the globe. Terrorists the world over in countries such as the Eastern Slav Republic, Edonia, and even stateside in Harvardville, U.S.A. have resorted to bio-organic-weapons to fight their battles, which has brought in the full might of the Bio-Terrorism Security Assessment Alliance, or B.S.A.A. for short. Evil has gone global, and it is showing no signs of stopping. Being one of the longest, and most complex experiences in the Resident Evil franchise, the story was broken up into four parts- each being helmed by a Resident Evil alumni and joined by an entirely new cooperative partner.

Overall, this “remaster” is more port than anything else, and while the 60fps visuals are awesome and a welcome treat that I honestly wasn’t expecting, RE6 is still RE6, and still pretty damn ugly to boot. I will stand by the fact that these versions really are the best versions available on console, but they pale in comparison to the PC version from four years ago, which also included full mod support and Left 4 Dead 2 characters and monsters. The best part of this package is it’s price tag, 20$ is more than worth it if you haven’t gotten to try this one yet, or if you want to go back to a title you no longer own- but honestly, if you have RE6 on PS3 or Xbox 360, there really isn’t any reason to get this version save for maybe getting the chance to play the online for a bit again, since the last-gen multiplayer is essentially dead save for a few games full of people just rolling around on the floor and looking at Sherry’s school girl outfit crawl under things over and over again.