Resident Evil 4 may have changed the world of video games, but unfortunately, other franchises made the best use of its ideas. Dead Space, Alan Wake, and even Gears of War were far more innovative than any Resident Evil game since. As a result, recent RE games have had to put up with a fair amount of criticism.

Resident Evil 6 Review: Incredible Co-op With A Few Kinks. Riding Resident Evil 6's Exploding Roller-Coaster Of Action And Zombie Bloodshed. For Resident Evil 6 Capcom has increased its emphasis on multiplayer, adding 'Crossovers'. These are moments in the game's story where the three campaigns overlap and the characters' stories converge.

Oddly enough, last year’s Resident Evil 6 wasn’t an attempt to return to form. Instead, the game doubled down on pretty much everything people criticized about its predecessors. With this game, Capcom sent the world a message: Resident Evil is going to keep going in the direction it’s headed. Deal with it.

Gundam model sizes. Critics were not pleased, handing out scores in the high 60s and low 70s to this AAA title. Some fans were downright livid. But now that RE6 has arrived on the PC, it's time to reconsider this hasty reaction. Is RE6 really a letdown?

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Not quite. With four separate campaigns stretching twenty-plus hours in total, enjoyable zombie-killing gameplay, and pretty graphics, RE6 has much to recommend it. But the critics did have a point: RE6 is a middle finger to the series' diehard, old school fans, and it fails in some very basic ways.

I might as well start with the big question: Is Resident Evil 6 even survival horror? The obvious answer is no—if RE4 was an action-inspired take on survival horror, RE6 leaves the genre behind entirely.

You've probably already heard about all the features of RE6 that completely and utterly destroy the mechanics that created tension in previous entries. You can run and shoot at the same time, there's a dodge ability, puzzles are few and far between, your PDA will tell you exactly what route to take to your destination, and there's adequate ammo. Many of the cutscenes are absurdly action-packed, with a person or vehicle literally dangling over the edge every five seconds in between explosions. It's as if Michael Bay directed a zombie movie.

And even when the game changes this formula, it doesn't reach into the franchise's rich tradition to create moments of intense fear. Instead, it explores different action clichés, shoehorning in vehicle chases, a cover system, and even stealth.

It doesn't do this well, either, thanks mainly to the controls. Connecting with a melee attack is a crapshoot. Dodging isn't as fluid as it should be. The cover system is awkward. Menu navigation is hell, despite the fact that the game places little emphasis on inventory management—and despite the fact that the game doesn't pause. It's the worst of both worlds: clunky controls paired with shooting-gallery gameplay. Whereas clunky controls induce panic in older RE games, they just make an action game annoying.

And if you hated the multiplayer focus of Resident Evil 5 and Operation Raccoon City, this latest installment will do you no favors. Once again, the entire experience is oriented toward co-op, with the exception of the final campaign, which was designed for single players on consoles (but was soon patched to include optional co-op as well). To be fair, the mandatory A.I. partners are much more competent than they were in RE5, and the interesting new “Agent Hunt” mode lets you play as an enemy in someone else’s campaign. But the tension of being alone with zombies is still gone, replaced by bizarrely frequent situations in which a door, object, or simple puzzle is too heavy or complicated for one person but easily manageable for two.

Even some of the small annoyances are still around. Headshots are finicky; apparently the developers are not aware that a zombie's head is a weak spot, not a bullet sponge. You can vault over some objects but not others, seemingly at random. Checkpoint placement is frustrating, forcing you to sit through cutscenes every time you play certain fights. There are periodic difficulty spikes that will make you want to crack your keyboard in half. And the quick time events are back with a vengeance: You won't just 'press X to not die'—no, you'll need to toggle between two buttons rapidly, mash a single button, or time a button press precisely in order to communicate to your character that you'd prefer not to be eaten. And you'll need to do that a lot.

In the player needs to control Jill Valentine from the 3 rd person perspective. The player also controls another character for a short span of time. You can also download. The player needs to explore the city while defeating and outsmarting the enemies.

Outside of comic books, no medium loves a recurring character quite so much as video games. The goal for any console developer these days isn't to make one great game – it's to construct the foundations of a franchise, a starting point for sequels and spin-offs. Capcom has been at this longer than most and, 15 years after the Arklay Mansion incident, the biggest project in the company's history is Resident Evil 6.

Sounds like a straight-to-DVD nasty, doesn't it? Resi 6 is more like one of those box sets yoking together Con Air and Die Hard, promising the purchaser several evenings' worth of extras getting tipped over balconies. Resi 6 is obsessed with delivering a 'cinematic' action experience, its levels punctuated by regular set-pieces, constant explosions, sharply-edited camera changes and a never-ending supply of near-death experiences. The directorial eye is a big part of Resident Evil's heritage, but here the focus has overwhelmingly shifted: 'survival horror' is now 'constant action'.

In some ways that's a bad thing: Resident Evil isn't scary any more. It'll give you a few shocks, enemies jumping out of hidden places and big monsters bursting through the floorboards, but the days of creeping through darkened rooms with bottom clenched are over. Resi 6 is what you call a run-and-gunner, moving ever-forwards while blasting through crowds of biohazards. Resident Evil 5 leaned in this direction, but Resi 6 dives in with both guns blazing.

The real surprise is how much of it there is. Capcom's focus on the production values of Resi 6 makes a casualty of progress – in the context of the third-person shooter genre, the controls are clunkier than they should be, and you'd be hard pressed to call any of its new systems innovative. So the compensation is a quadruple helping of lengthy single-player campaigns, three of which are playable in co-op.

Heroes return, of course. Leon S Kennedy, last seen in Resident Evil 4, is joined for the first campaign by US agent Helena Harper, and this slice of Resi 6 is supposed to be delivering the horror. We know it doesn't quite manage that, but the most atmospheric environments in Resi 6 are found here – an early journey through a zombie-filled subway tunnel, complete with running trains, showcases the game's exquisite lighting tech like nothing else.

Things escalate. By the end of Leon's campaign you'll have fought on top of trains, piloted a helicopter, wrestled a shark, had a shootout atop a skyscraper, ridden a mine cart and more or less surfed a jet; I'm pretty sure I saw a kitchen sink exploding at one point. These events are all over the place, really, some breathlessly exciting and others falling flat – the latter mainly thanks to an over-fiddly implementation of 'Simon says' button-pressing, which isn't a fun thing to be doing in the first place.

The other two campaigns star Chris Redfield, AKA Stubble Straightjaw, and Jake Muller, AKA White Rapper, and follow a pretty similar pattern – move forwards, fight a group of enemies, big set-piece, rinse and repeat. One of Resi 6's unqualified triumphs is that its shooting feels great, the meatier guns packing heavy recoil and each shot accompanied by a bellowing audio crack. It also doesn't hurt that the common enemies, whether zombies or the humanoid J-Avo, are often sent backflipping by the sheer force of your weapons.

This is what saves Resi 6. Its cinematic sequences take control away from the player to a large extent, and then veer between brilliant and plain silly. But the bulk of the game is a combat system we've known since Resi 4, tweaked and tuned to be a tad more manoeuvrable, and then playable in co-op. Co-op makes everything better, that's just a truth, and Resi 6 is designed to be played with a buddy throughout (though the ally AI has improved vastly since Resi 5's item-quaffing Sheva).

Each of the four campaigns took between five and seven hours to complete, plus on top of this there's the Mercenaries mode. This bonus mode is probably the best in gaming's history. Introduced in Resi 4, Mercs puts you in an enclosed arena, with a timer, sends in the enemies and doesn't stop – chaining kills gets combos, the enemies get more deadly as time goes on, and hitting big scores unlocks more gear for future missions. Freed of narrative restrictions and the need to move onwards, Resi's combat is left to fend for itself in a corner – and does it ever. Resi 6's take on Mercs is spiced up a little by the inclusion of assignable skills, but fundamentally it's a familiar, fantastic beast.

In that sense, Mercs is Resi 6 writ large: a game built on old foundations. It's not a progressive title at all, but then it isn't intended to be. Capcom's intentions are simple: to move Resi into the mainstream action zone, and give players as much bang as possible for their buck. It is an unsophisticated experience. If you want to be terrified, or use your brain, Resi 6 isn't the game. But if you just want to spray monster brains all over the place, while occasionally cooing at some gorgeous scenery, Resi 6 delivers in several spades.

•Game reviewed on PS3