Or what it should’ve been.
It's a essentially a lets have the cake and eat it too situation. Where fake Ada does literally everything evil, while real Ada gets to keep her mystery. It's an interesting idea, and there are parts of it I do like. The problem is they make her too dam mysterious and odd. Re2 Ada is a mercenary human and understandable, while RE6 Ada is basically solid snake. The entire opening of her campaign is literally metal gear solid lite. She also doesn't lose her cool and is very flippant about everything. It would be easy to say she doesn't give a shit about the chaos, but there is one interesting instance in her campaign where she saves civilians and goes full Rambo at the end.
It would be interesting to see how she fits in RE8 if they put her back in as DLC.
So after finishing RE6 I can say I did enjoy it. Playing it in order with that steam guide was the correct decision. As otherwise I think this game is something of a narrative clusterfuck if you attempt to fully complete each campaign one at a time. I kinda understand why they did it, so multiplayer cross-play between the sections could happen, but as interesting and cool as the system is, its insanely impractical. You've got 50 seconds to find a second team of 2 people playing at the exact same moment and time synced up. It's not happening and the segments themselves feel a little underwhelming at times despite the effort involved. Aside from Leon and Jake's crossover segment.
The campaigns all start out wonky and throw you into the plot face first, but they end up a lot better around the midway point or so when you get a shit ton of guns to play with. Leon is the most consistently good of the bunch, as he goes up against all the zombie type enemy's and they are fun to fight. Chris spends a lot of time fighting gun zombies and I feel like this one needed the most work put into it. It gets better, but the first 2 chapters are light on ammo and that's unacceptable for what is billed as the action campaign of the game. Jake's started out average. I remember his was billed as the one most like "Nemesis" but there's a surprisingly large amount of time where your not running from this guy. Ada's.... kinda follows the opposite approach, It starts out REALLY strong and even has a couple good RE puzzles! Then you get a couple meh boss fights and a shitty helicopter segment.
One of the games main issues is definitely how much it stretches itself out. They spent a shitton of money on making this thing and it shows, with the large number of enemy types and set pieces. So much so that there's entire mechanics and context based moves, you may never see or learn how to use when you play it.
All of that can be hand waved, but the main issue is that this game suffers from a villain problem.
Simmons is basically the main bad guy of the game, but he's a wet blanket. He barely has a personality besides wanting Ada as his personal fuck doll. The most interesting thing about him is the fact that he belongs to some mysterious organization that existed as far back as RE2. This is neat, but a lot of the supplemental stuff is in unlockable lore, that I still need to read though. He's not compelling villain material. Ada's evil clone is! But.... she gets taken out too early. She has a really cool and creepy ass transformation sequence, but her boss fight in Ada's campaign ends a chapter too quickly, and what we are left with for Jake and Chris's campaigns is monster clean up.
There's a lot of good stuff in this game, but I do feel it was the correct decision to scale back things for RE7.
Shame Jake wasn't more popularly received, I totally would have bought his game.
Personally, I think he just needs to grow some hair.
