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.

So the compensation is a quadruple helping of lengthy single-player campaigns, three of which are playable in co-op. 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. The real surprise is how much of it there is. Resident Evil 5 leaned in this direction, but Resi 6 dives in with both guns blazing. Resi 6 is what you call a run-and-gunner, moving ever-forwards while blasting through crowds of biohazards. 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. In some ways that's a bad thing: Resident Evil isn't scary any more. 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'. 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. 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. 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. 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. O utside of comic books, no medium loves a recurring character quite so much as video games.

Game pc resident evil 6