As noted here and elsewhere, today marks the release of 2 probable GOTY contenders, XCOM Enemy Within and Dishonored, which means that any plans I might have made to finish Resident Evil 6 will most likely be put on hold for the foreseeable future. I’m sure no one will mind/notice.
That being said, I played one more chapter of the Chris/Piers storyline last night, putting me at 2 chapters into each story. I had to fight a boss that I’d already beaten (in Jake’s story), but even though I now had a much better idea of what the hell I was supposed to do, I still had a very difficult time doing it.
Part of the problem, as you’ve surely heard by now, is that each storyline has its own gameplay style/focus. Leon’s story is classic Resident Evil – slow, methodical exploration of scary-looking buildings. Jake’s story involves a lot of running, jumping and obstacle avoidance. And the Chris/Piers story is mostly combat-focused – Chris is a machine-gunning heavy, and Piers is a sniper. That each story has its own style is fine, I suppose, but why then is each story bogged down by the same contrivances?
Specifically, Chris/Piers start each mission with very little ammunition. This is a classic staple of the Resident Evil experience, but in this particular case it is literally nonsensical. Considering that Chris and Piers are military personnel, why the fuck are they chronically low on ammo? How would they expect to win any battles or kill any monsters without bullets? (I am reminded of a similar complaint during a pivotal scene in the movie Aliens – “What are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?”)
Indeed, if Piers is the sniper, why does he almost never have any sniper ammunition, especially considering that his other weapon is a piece of shit machine gun that requires at least 5 headshots just to slow an enemy down? This makes absolutely no sense, and consequently leads to extreme frustration; I spend most of my time running around kicking dudes to death just to save my ammunition (even though I have not yet sufficiently leveled up my sniping skills so that it would make much of a difference – Piers jerks his scope around as if he’d drank 8 cups of espresso before heading out into the field, making long-distance sniping comically impossible). In a way, I suppose it actually helps that the J’Avo – the mutated insurgents in the Chris/Piers storyline – display some of the least impressive AI I’ve ever seen in a game this side of 1998; they either stand in place, oblivious, or they run right past me. (However, their snipers are better than Oswald, those fucking assholes.)
So, to get back to the top of this post – I’d already beaten this boss as Jake, who doesn’t have that much ammunition to begin with. But I figured Chris and Piers, being military dudes with powerful guns, would be able to take the B.O.W.s down with a little more finesse. No such luck; I had to do the same exact shit in the exact same way, still receiving no apparent feedback as to how I was progressing – and this time, without being able to rely on my weapons. What’s the point? I didn’t learn anything in the 2nd encounter that I hadn’t already learned in the 1st, except that I had a better idea of who Chris and Piers were (though I didn’t need to replay the boss to learn that stuff).
I’m starting to wonder, now, why I’m so determined to see this game through to the end; the more I think about it, the angrier I get.
Shouts From The Couch 