Resident Evil 6

How far can cinematics get you when the gameplay sandwiched between them is so poorly paced, so utterly misconceived, so reliant on stick wriggles and button tapping? There's a place for contextual prompts and cinematic storytelling in video games, but Resident Evil 6 is a mishmash of elements put together without any sense of care or direction.

Resident Evil 6 is a big-budget disaster on the order of the Star Wars prequels, a sprawling production that clearly required so many individual talents to bring it into being, you can't help but wonder how the end result could have turned out so bad.

Leaves players with the shell of a blockbuster game. It blusters along with massive explosions and insane plot twists, but it lacks a fundamental understanding of why action games are fun. In the end, Resident Evil 6 resembles one of its grotesque mutations - bloated, out of control, and recklessly trying to consume everything around it.

Resident Evil 6 is one of those rare, almost unplayable games, with a control system that makes you want to beat your head against the wall. That's actually what you're supposed to do to the zombies, but good luck figuring out how.

Resident Evil 6 is a Michael Bay movie. There's really no more polite a way to put it. Stuffed to the gills with bombastic action segments, car chases, and relentless chaos, Capcom has abandoned any pretense of the survival horror genre and embraced a world of skin-deep Hollywood audacity. Listlessly wallowing in the depthless waters of homogeneity, Resident Evil 6 is a coward of a game, afraid to make its own individual mark in the industry and cravenly subscribing itself to every overplayed trope in the book.