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Resident Evil Multiplayer… Why?
🕑 Added 2023-05-26 13:00:02 +0000 UTC
You know what's truly terrifying?
The prospect of a Multiplayer game being worse than Umbrella Corps.
Coming up on hosting Multiplayer lobbies of weird games for a year, Umbrella Corps easily ranks as the most bizarre, poorly made, and utterly obtuse game of player vs player content I experienced.
Part of what makes it so baffling is how, when you start, messing around with a bit of the offline "content" is that it doesn't seem so bad at first.
The game controls surprisingly well, even letting you pull satisfying moves that don't really exist in other games like maintaining a relatively high speed even while crawling to avoid enemies.
Yet it only took a handful of matches to see the cracks become chasms.
From the shoebox size levels, horrendous hit-detection, useless NPCs, blatantly inaccurate weaponry, head scratching game modes, unbalanced weapons, maybe the worst cover system in a video game, and, so, so much more!
I quickly came to the conclusion that Umbrella Corps deserved every ounce of mockery it received. Though… I can't lie and say I didn't have fun, in the same way I host Spec Ops Multiplayer once a year.
That is to say, I didn't think Resident Evil 6's post-launch Multiplayer modes, Siege, Predator, Survivors, and Onslaught, could possibly be worse…
Now, there's one mode which isn't, Onslaught, the simplest and smallest mode of the bunch, which probably explains why it works.
Essentially, it's just Resident Evil 6's excellent Mercenaries mode, only the combos you make cause more enemies to spawn in your opponents instance.
It's pretty gimmicky, and doesn't add a whole lot of depth to a mode that's plenty chaotic as is, but it's a fun little diversion where you can actively trash friends when you pull off a satisfying chain.
Nothing else is quite so… elegant.
Survivors is probably the most baffling of the bunch, because while the other two at least have a premise that on paper somebody could get behind, even in Resident Evil 6…
Survivor is just a bog standard PVP mode, in a game never designed for PVP.
So you've got people flopping down to the floor when hit by a .50 Sniper Rifle, but require three more shots to be put down, spin-kicks that send victims mach-5 into walls, and the option to spawn as a Zombie for seemingly no reason other than to an irritating nuisance.
It's fascinating to play a mode where you've experienced all the depth it has to offer in just two matches.
It only took one person starting with Piers' Anti-Material Rifle to realize exactly what you should be bringing to a fight, and exactly which spots on these PVE designed maps are the best to hideaway and make it impossible for anybody, human or zombie, to get within 5 miles of you.
All of the modes suffer from this, but Survivors more than anything else truly does feel like a prototype.
The kind of thing you'd see in a Dev Diary video from Capcom, as a pitch to their bosses made over the weekend to evoke an idea, rather than a genuine gameplay experience.
That, or an Amateur Mod on Nexus.
Predator meanwhile seems, almost prolific.
It’s a 1v5 mode, where it pits five regular players against the Ustanak from Jake's campaign. It's a concept we're very familiar with today, but was kind of bold in 2012, four years before the surprising popularity of Dead by Daylight, and three years before the surprising backlash of Evolve.
I'd love to get people who hated Evolve to play this…
You're not just using the same PVE maps from Mercenaries again, but shrunken down locked off versions of them, probably due to the Ustanak's inability to fit into parts of the map.
Not to say that he's suitable even in the adjusted maps, as his two main abilities, a Scorpion "GET OVER HERE" extendable claw, and an instant kill grab, aren't target based, but contextual.
None of us found a consistency to what makes the Ustanak hit or miss, you've just gotta swing and hope for the best, and when your hope's rewarded, it's likely come at the expense of the enemy, who was teleported back several feet to be put into the claw.
The best part of this mode though are the spawns, which in the case of one map, was about five feet from all the players.
The Ustanak is actually lighter than the players too, so his super speed is something nobody can do anything about… maybe that's why they made it almost impossible for him to hit anything…
No, that's giving far too much credit.
Finally, there's the "Siege" mode, pitting three players against three monsters in an attack and defend mode, where humans must protect a Civilian from certain death.
I say certain death, because maps are once again, blocked off and reduced in size, to the point where monsters spawn in parts of the map that are literally inaccessible to human players.
You can also order Civilians around as a human, which one the hand is cool, only on the other, if you're too busy, I don't know, being mauled by a monster, the Civilian will be standing almost exactly like Leon does when Helena's fed through a meat grinder.
It'd been a long, long time since I played a game where each mode kept getting progressively worse than the last, and unless you're able to convince five other idiots to boot up this game to play these modes like me… you've got nothing to do.
There's no bots to speak of, no adjustments to the modes, hell, it doesn't even let you host matches on different maps if even one person in the lobby doesn't have them unlocked.
It's bafflying to think these modes are still being charged for $4 CAD on Steam, because even if they came with the base game…
It's not worth it.
Then again, I can say the same for Umbrealla Corps, and it's still…
