Xbox Game Pass has this week added 7 new games to its already huuuge list of titles, taking the total amount of games to 119!
Added this week are;
Dead Island Definitive Edition
Resident Evil 6
F1 2015
The Flame in the Flood
Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition
Bards Gold
Monaco – Whats Yours is Mine
For those of you unfamiliar with the scheme, you pay £7.99 a month and have full access to download and play all the games featured in Game Pass. With the likes of the Gears of War and Bioshock series, Halo 5 and Mad Max it is great value for money!
Join Greg Giddens and Steve Peacock and for a new episode of the This is Xbox Podcast – episode 28 E3 Approaches.
In this episode the pair discuss Overwatch, recent reviews that have hit the TiX site, what they’d expect to see at E3, and they interview lead designer at Tuque Games, Kevin Neibert, about upcoming twin-stick coop shooter Livelock. (time stamp: 52.40) And of course the usual silly banter you’d expect.
Despite being panned by critics when it was originally released, Resident Evil 6 has been given the re-release treatment and has been enhanced for the Xbox One, featuring all previous DLC, a higher resolution and framerate, as well as a few additional tweaks. But can a game that was so strongly disliked claw back some goodwill from series fans with its slight upgrade?
It can, and indeed it should, Resident Evil 6 was unfairly panned back in 2012, and now, with its few enhancements and being so feature rich, it offers an even more attractive game for a reasonable price to those previous put off.
Resident Evil 6 is built around three different styles with its multiple campaigns. Leon’s campaign is more traditional, with a slower pace, eerier locations, and dealing with good old fashioned zombies and mutated creatures. Chris’ is action-based and deals with the parasites of Resident Evil 4 and 5. And Jake’s is more akin to Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, with frequent chases, a slower pace, and seemingly insurmountable odds. These three campaigns offer something for every player archetype from the Resident Evil spectrum, and with each campaign taking a good 5-7 hours to complete, you get a lot of content for your money. This does mean, however, that the tone is a bit schizophrenic. With each campaign contributing to an overall story, the different paces and experiences don’t meld as seamlessly as it would with an otherwise consistent setup.
Helping to better bridge the three main campaigns is the bonus Ada Wong adventure, which is significantly shorter than the other campaigns and largely visits crossover sections between them, but it ties everything together and fills in the majority of the plot holes. This campaign was a solo affair originally but now joins the ranks of the other campaigns with a coop option, where player 2 jumps in the boots of Agent, a generic soldier. Unfortunately it’s not the best implemented second player experience. In many ways it feels like Tails from Sonic 2, where the second player is largely irrelevant to the experience. You can’t interact with puzzles or the environment beyond the enemies, which is a disappointing and a dissatisfying experience.
The coop for the main campaigns remains the same as it did back in 2012, reducing the difficulty slightly despite some mild scaling. It’s also a great deal more entertaining playing alongside someone else. The convoluted and cheesy story is particularly difficult to swallow, but bringing another friend along helps a great deal. And indeed the story is the weakest part of Resident Evil 6, falling on clichés and suffering from poor writing. However, the ambition behind it is undeniable impressive.
The aforementioned multiple campaigns and dozens of hours of story is of impressive scale. The poor storytelling and attempt to try and please everyone threatens to undo the good but the grand plan behind it has a vestige of good intensions. The corny narrative will still appeal to die-hard Resident Evil fans, and seeing the large cast come together, many of which returning from previous titles, helps answer a few questions about what happened between those titles. And despite how well or badly you get on with the story, there’s still a great deal of fun to be had. The combat is satisfying and intense, the melee option allows you to punch and kick your way out of a pinch effectively as well as perform some excellent special attacks, and the highly detailed locations are interesting to explore with great variation. In fact, if you can stomach the inconsistent experience of the multiple campaigns the variety it offers proves a welcome change.
Unfortunately there are some fundamental problems that have crept in to this enhanced version. The quick time events still come out of nowhere, although they seem slightly more forgiving with the input timing as well as the checkpoint placement if you fail. The physics and collision detection is also fairly inconsistent and poor, making picking up items occasionally difficulty, or melee attacks completely miss their target. There are also a handful of badly designed sections in each campaign, whether it’s a chase sequence that is too punishing, or where the two characters are separated and overwhelmed with enemies, or where the environment collapses at too quick of a pace. These issues are still highly frustrating and typically crop up when checkpoints have been less generous.
Outside of the campaigns is a plethora of online, solo and coop modes, many of which were added to the based game as DLC back in 2012. These offer you the classic Mercenary modes, where you take on waves of enemies against the clock, as well as several other modes, such as playing as the Nemesis-type creature from Jake’s campaign, Ustanak, and taking on groups of players. Furthermore, the online crossover and enemy encounter feature returns, allowing you to team up with other players in the main campaign during sections that crossover, and allowing players to invade other people’s games as a monster. It’s certainly a neat way to interact with the campaign, however, it can affect the stability of your online coop session.
Resident Evil 6 is a blast when played cooperatively, and if you’re a fan of the on-going story and the characters involved it can prove just as much fun played solo. There are certainly issues with it, technical ones such as the collision detections and level design, and narrative problems, but if you avoided it originally because you just weren’t sure it was worth the asking price, for £15.99 you can now own the definitive edition.
Join Greg Giddens and Steve Peacock and for a new episode of the This is Xbox Podcast – episode 26 BvS…I Mean Videogames. In this episode the pair discuss Quantum Break, Resident Evil 6 and Arkham Knight briefly, before falling down the rabbit hole of Batman Vs Superman, and of course the usual silly banter you’d expect.
Today, Capcom announced that they will be releasing the fourth, fifth and sixth Resident Evil games on the next gen consoles.
Excitingly, the three games will also feature all DLC ever made for them.
Releasing one at a time for £15.99 each they will start with Resident Evil 6 which will land on March 29th. Resident Evil 5 will launch in the Summer, with Resident Evil 4 later this autumn.
Quite why they’re releasing them in reverse order is anyone’s guess.
5 Great Capcom games at 1 Special Price – and it’s heading to Xbox 360 on August 10th this year… well for Canada at least since the Canadian EB Games website listed it this week! As of yet we’re unsure if this is a worldwide bundle, keep an eye at your favourite retailers around launch unless we deliver the news sooner!
The amazing Capcom Essentials at retail includes:
Devil May Cry 4
9 out of 10 – Game Informer
8.7 out of 10, Editors’ Choice Award – IGN.com
“All the characters, attacks, bosses, and levels look amazing.” – Game Trailers
“…action fans are going to get one incredible experience with this game…” – IGN.com
Dead Rising 2
9.5 out of 10, Platinum Award – Game Informer
8.5 out of 10 – GameSpot
“…a great sequel to one of the most original open-world games available.” – GameSpot
“…Dead Rising 2 is definitely a winner.” – IGN.com
Super Street Fighter IV
5 out of 5 stars – Giant Bomb
9.5 out of 10 – Destructoid
“…a thoughtfully compiled and thoroughly addictive package that reminds you precisely why the series is still king of the streets.” – GameSpot
Resident Evil 6
8.8 out of 10, Editors’ Choice Award – GameTrailers.com
8.75 out of 10 – Silver Award – Game Informer
“…RE6 is the best-looking RE game to date. Make no mistake, it’s the goriest, and among the most disturbing horror games in recent memory” – CNET
“…an absolute blast from start to finish.” – PlayStation Universe
MegaMan 10
8.5 out of 10 – IGN.com
8.75 out of 10, Silver Award – Game Informer
“Mega Man 10 is easily a better game than 90% of what we play on a yearly basis” – IGN.com
Do you remember Resident Evil 6? No me neither, mainly because I have tried to put it out of my mind and not think about it. Being a Resident Evil fan, which I am sure you are too (you are reading a Resident Evil review after all), then you like me probably disapproved of the attempt made by Capcom of moving the franchise away from survival horror to all out action. Yuck. If I want a zombie action game, I will play Call of Duty thank you very much. So how could they possibly make it up to us? Well the 3DS Revelations title did well, what about that? Great idea! And as such we have a port from 3DS to console and PC, with the aim of reconnecting the franchise with its roots and upset fan base.
Every Resident Evil game cannot be considered complete without those moments of fear, anxiety, suspense, pressure, and relief, and Revelations delivers them all in plenty. There is nothing like being in the middle of the ocean on a tightly confined cruise ship with infected monsters seeking blood. With each turn down or a corridor or opening of a door you always be thinking to yourself about what could be waiting for you there. With all my gaming sessions, I turn down the lights, crank up the surround system and settle down for a few hours of escapism. With Resident Evil games it’s never long before the lights are switched back on again… Revelations was no exception.
Revelations pits the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA) against the bio-organic weapons (BOW) terrorist group Veltro, which is destined to release the T-Abyss virus into the world. The BSAA loses contact with its agent Chris Redfield and his partner Jessica while they are on a mission in the Mediterranean Sea aboard the cruise ship Queen Zenobia. It sends Jill Valentine and her partner Parker to investigate, but when they arrive they find that they’ve been set-up … and that the ship has been infected with the T-Abyss virus. When word reached Chris that Jill is stranded, he drops his actual mission and goes off to find her. Each of the game’s episodes transitions between the storylines of the lead and side characters, and uses flashbacks to fill in the back story and toss in some plot twists as well. The game pulls this off beautifully, adding a lot of depth to the story and insight into how the characters got to where they are in the story. If by chance any of this confuses you, the game provides a handy recap at the beginning of each episode to help keep you on point. I really like this feature and other developers should take a hint and model after it.
A sign of a good Resident Evil game is when you find yourself checking every nook and cranny just to make sure you have killed everything, only to find that all of a sudden out from the depths of an elevator shaft or air duct comes a slimy eight foot monster reaching out to lend you a hand. While I was surprised by, and at times felt some of the pressure of, too many enemies, I quickly realized that they tend to be rather dumb and sluggish and that I could just run away. This seems to be a reoccurring theme throughout the game. Maybe it’s because our perception of how an infected bio-organic weapon (or old fashioned zombie) should behave? Anyway… what is consistent throughout all Resident Evil games is the sense of anxiety when blowing through a ton of ammo and feeling like you are on the verge of not having enough, when low and behold the ammo gods bless you with more. One of the new ways the game has you searching for ammo and health outside of the usual opening of lockers and smashing of boxes is by using the Genesis. The Genesis is a scanner that detects items around the environment that wouldn’t normally be seen with the naked eye. The scanner can also be used on the enemy, and with each successful scan you accumulate a percentage number; when the numbers total up to 100% you are rewarded with a health potion.
Another thing that remains the same and adds familiarity to the game is the end of level grading. The grading criteria consists of accuracy, time to complete, and number of deaths. The higher the grade the more BP the player receives, with BP being the in game currency used to purchase weapons, costumes, and weapon customizations for Raid Mode. Raid Mode is a single or co-op mini game which reuses the campaign stages and throws in a variety of enemies. Similar to the campaign you are graded on accuracy, enemies killed, damage done and time the stage was complete to earn BP currency. Raid Mode can be beat by a cheat however, as I unwillingly found out. I started a new game on level 1 and a level 1 character. In jumps a level 56 player, runs through the ship, kills everything in sight with single shots and ends the level before I can catch up. The scores roll in and I achieve a perfect score with bucket loads of BP. Some players may consider this good news. I don’t. I feel cheated.
Resident Evil games have never focused on replay value, not in recent times anytime. Revelations is no different in this respect. The campaign will keep you busy for 12-20 hours and then Raid will keep you going for a few hours after. Don’t expect countless Easter eggs and hidden items to go back and find. Don’t let this stop you from heading out and picking this game up though. Capcom did well with porting this from 3DS. Especially after the disaster that was 6. If you have a 3DS and you’ve played it already, then there isn’t really much new here for you. However for everyone else, Capcom have done you a favour and provided a riveting addition to this multi-million pound franchise.
You all know I live horror games. You know I love zombies. Although there aren’t ‘zombies’ in this as such, put down State of Decay and pick this up for a few hours. You’ll enjoy it.
It has already been revealed that Chris Redfield heads to China during the course of the game but it has now been confirmed that the main location in China will be a fictitious coastal town called Lanshiang. To set the record straight on the time-frame, Resident Evil 6 takes place in 2013. Continue reading Resident Evil 6 – New Game Information Revealed→
