Resident Evil 6 Is Not Just About Zombies

Or maybe it is.

We were privy to one of the missions in the Ada Wong campaign for Resident Evil 6 at an exclusive Xbox media event this afternoon. Ada Wong – the fourth playable character in the game – will have her campaign unlocked only after you’ve completed the first three (comprising of Leon’s, Chris’s, and Jake’s).

Ada is the only character with no partner, which is kind of expected since she’s a spy. It’s hard to sneak around when you have someone tagging along. Her role also means that her mission objectives involve a lot more espionage compared to the others. There are, however, still zombies.

In the Chapter 2 portion of the Ada campaign, we watched as Ada hunted for pieces of the Simmons Family Crest. Those key items were needed to unlock a door. The process by which Ada would retrieve said pieces of the Crest was based more on problem solving than the simple zombie bashing (you get to do more of those in Leon and Chris’ campaigns – but that’s another story altogether).

In one area, Ada had to angle a lever so that she would be able to shoot a dead zombie down onto it and keep a trapdoor open long enough for her to jump through. In another, zombies in electric chairs had to be pushed onto live wires to act as conductors. The third live wire required a living zombie to walk through it – if you can call zombies living – and required some maneuvering on the player’s part to lure it over the trap.

So while Ada does go around kicking and shooting the not-quite-living daylights out of zombies, there are also a lot more puzzle-solving elements in her campaign, in particular. RE6 seems to be taking a slightly different stances from its predecessors, and that’s not a bad thing at all in our books.

Resident Evil 6 will also feature the Agent Hunt mode, where gamers can play as zombies and hunt down agents. This optional feature is part of the crossover feature central to RE6, where different campaigns will mix together when the characters featured in them need to interact. It is possible to play the Agent Hunt mode with other gamers, be they your friends or complete strangers.

Agent Hunt mode also lets players experience being the degenerated J’avo: zombies that have the ability to not just regenerate when injured, but also to mutate to other grisly forms after taking substantial damage. Shoot one in the arm long enough, and you’ll be slapped in the face with a tentacle instead.

It looks like Resident Evil 6 may just be the game changer of the series.