Sound design didn’t get shafted in this quest for visuals. The guns are punchy and visceral. Every surface has a different footsteps sound effect, and the ambient environment effects will keep you on edge during quiet moments. Voice acting is exceptional, even when actors are forced to say nonsense.

Resident Evil 6 is a game that clearly outgrew its ambitions for visuals, scale, and complex action…and then Capcom somehow cobbled it all together and shipped all of it anyway, a month earlier than its original projected release of November 2012.

My biggest personal frustration with the game, outside of the frame rate, is the story.

The narrative is a big clunky mess, full of wacky dialogue and over-the-top action moments. Sure, it features a who’s who of favorite Resident Evil characters like Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, and Ada Wong, but it also features a bunch of new characters who are awkwardly tied into the plot.

Rather than use these new characters to expand the universe of the game, many of them are directly related to the existing characters in ham-fisted ways.

Unlike Resident Evil 4 and 5, which both clearly establish the stakes in their opening cutscenes and then take you on thrilling adventures with plenty of twists and turns, Resident Evil 6 allows you to play its four stories in any order.

As a result, the game can’t count on you knowing anything, and its narrative is more like a series of big thrilling moments and shocking revelations that just happen one after another.

None of it truly comes together until you’ve seen all the stories through.

That type of disjointed storytelling is not as satisfying as a clear linear through line. Although there is a chronological timeline to the four storylines, they aren’t listed in that order on the campaign selection screen, further adding to the confusion.

Chris Redfield’s campaign has been chastised for years, and with good reason. It’s a weird left turn into “Zombie Military Shooter,” and feels like it came flying in from another game that was trying to mimic other popular action franchises. The tone veers closer to camp and goofy writing abounds.

I guess that shouldn’t have been too surprising since Resident Evil 5 ended with Chris punching a boulder to death.

The game forces you to play through a Prelude at the beginning that you’d think would set up the main stakes, but instead it just features two of the main characters, Leon and Helena, running through a series of explosions and quick time button reaction events. It’s really amazing to look at even seven years later, but unless you already know who Leon is from earlier games, you’ll be thinking “What is this video game about?”

I guess in that sense, the Prelude gives you an honest look at how the rest of the story will go.

Resident Evil 6 is the sort of game that results when the producers say an emphatic YES to every idea. It has no sense of focus, no sense of direction, and way too many things.

Nintendo Switch screenshot taken by me.

But its visuals, combat, and sheer scale are still a triumph of brute force design all these years later, and I still love playing it.

Regrettably, this combat system never got another chance to shine. Resident Evil Revelations 2 retained some of its features, but had a much lower production budget and lackluster visuals designed to run at a more reasonable frame rate.

Resident Evil 7 rebooted the gameplay entirely, casting it in a first-person perspective.

This year’s Resident Evil 2 Remake was a return to the over-the-shoulder camera first made iconic in Resident Evil 4, and is the closest thing to RE6’s gameplay if you’d like to see a more modern take on its detailed combat.

It’s a true shame that Resident Evil 6’s audacious scope destroyed the coherence of its narrative and its frame rate. But it’s wonderful that the game is now available on modern machines that can run it well, for a reasonable price.

Even if you choose the Switch version, you’ll get a slightly better experience than on the original consoles, and you’ll likely be impressed that visuals this atmospheric and well-animated can come out of a portable machine.

Resident Evil 6 is my secret favorite in the iconic series, in spite of many aspects being messy.

It makes me feel like I’m in an action horror movie, and makes me wonder about an alternate universe where this level of over-production and scope is the standard for linear third person action shooter titles.

Instead, the genre has faded from its high point in the previous generation, and although we still occasionally see a standout release, none of them are as over-the-top in the same way as RE6.