You get the general idea. The fact is that game doesn’t see fit to respect the player on any level. Sadly, cheap death isn’t a one time thing in Resident Evil 6. After all, I told you that these developers sat down and had a meeting to make the game difficult using cheap deaths! If you’ve playing as Jake or Sherry then you’d know that there is one segment of the game where you’re driving a snowmobile. While driving a snowmobile – which sucks by the way because the camera is so horrendous – there’s an avalanche that’s advancing on you. Driving carefully and quickly is the key, however, that’s impossible. The crappy camera angle, the lack of visibility due to a blizzard, and janky controls makes it difficult to commandeer a snowmobile properly. So what exactly is the problem with this scenario? There’s one part while driving where an avalanche comes out of nowhere and essentially sweeps you to your death. It sucks because you don’t see it coming, at all.
That’s not the end of deaths by cheapness when driving the snowmobile. One particular section force the player to navigate across moving sections an iceberg. This aggravating part comes out of nowhere and hits you like a truck. It’s impossible to navigate the place on your first time through forcing you to do trial and error at least two times, possibly up to five. It’s crazy and insane as to why the developers would do such a thing. Enforcing such a cheap method where the challenge isn’t even existent in the game. Rather, they will resort to some false sense of challenge making players feel horrible about what just happened. Numerous times I thought to myself, “That was unfair,” or “This is ridiculous.”
Resident Evil 6 is a game that sort of keeps on giving – bad gifts. Of course, there are other ways to die in an annoying and cheap fashion. Running through a dark subway full of zombies is a cool idea. In fact, it’s one of the more awesome aspects of the game because of how atmospheric and moody it is. It’s spectacular. Suddenly you hear a train approaching your position and you hug the wall to not get run over. Guess what, that doesn’t save you! If you’re on your first playthrough you’ll realize that in order to dodge the train, you have to successfully pass a QTE. The problem is that it pops up and disappears so fast that it’s impossible to know on your first time. Now you’re looking at a screen that says “You are Dead” leaving you feeling you just got played by the game. Sucks, right?
Having a cheap death is inherently bad because it tells me that a game is too lazy or lacks creativity to provide some meaningful way of bringing upon your doom. Sure one or two cheap deaths is fine and I can understand that. However, the amount of times that I died in Resident Evil 6 due to something idiotic like a rampaging truck borders on frustrating and mind-numbingly painful. It’s aggravating to know that the developers are actively working against you so you don’t enjoy the game on any level. Needless to say, Resident Evil 6 isn’t very player friendly, but I don’t really need to say that to you. I’m sure you feel the same if you’ve played it.
As I seek to make my way out of the building infested with zombies, I realize that the outside is no different than the inside. Raging fires to the left and right of me with a hoard of zombies roaming everywhere. Suddenly, I hear a loud scream crying out for help. I turn my character left and right trying to find out where it came from. Seeing a crowd of people fighting off zombies that are close to surrounding them, I make my way as fast as I can to aid them with Helena quickly following behind me.
Clearing out as many zombies as I can in front of me with my trust pistol, I finally made my way to the group. There was no way the group could make it out alive with the amount of zombies that were swarming towards us, in addition to the stronger mutated zombies. As I hopelessly fend off the unending zerg rush, I hear a loud honking. The next second I am lying on the ground and a text pops up: “You are Dead.”
I was pretty shocked as my jaws dropped, wondering exactly how my character died. I clicked continue to resume my session in Resident Evil 6 hoping that to figure out if I was supposed to do a button prompt or something special. Surprisingly, I died again attempting to save the group and fight off against the zombie hoard. I was absolutely baffled as to how I died twice in a row. I don’t consider myself a bad gamer by any means. In fact, I pride myself as a great gamer usually never dying in games and when I do, I can finish the task at hand in usually three tries or less.
So what exactly happened? Well, apparently, there’s a truck that barges into the area and if you’re not in a certain section of the map, you’ll die instantly. Of course, the game doesn’t really let you know that there’s a car coming. This becomes even more frustrating as you realize that you have to kill zombies or be killed by them so this kind of preoccupies you from doing anything else. I would describe the predicament I was in as the following: a cheap death.
The reason I call it a cheap death is because rather than relying on making the game difficult so you die, the game opts to create scenarios where you don’t die from a challenge but something situational and out of nowhere. These deaths almost feel like they exist just for the sake of providing artificial difficulty. It’s almost as if the designers sat down in a table and had the following discussion.
“Listen, we can’t have the game being too easy. Players have to die from time to time, you know?”
“Yeah! I totally get you! How do we do that though? Hm….”
“I know, we can put a car that’ll run over the player and it’s impossible to know that it’s coming if you’re playing for the first time! Brilliant idea, right?”
“Yeah!”
