Resident Evil 6 hands-on: a promising game saddled with a terrible demo

Releasing a demo is a high-stakes affair. If the demo's excellent, pre-orders may double. But if it's merely good, or even excellent but a little too substantial, players may feel they've had their fill long before the finished article hits shelves. And a bad demo? A bad demo can be the kiss of death. Just look at now-defunct GRIN's Bionic Commando remake. It's not a perfect game by any stretch - po-faced and clunky, with an uneven learning curve - but it's a lot better, a lot more interesting than the shonky multiplayer trial makes out.

Capcom stablemate Resident Evil 6 has also fallen foul of a terrible demo. The game impressed at announcement, offering sleek, noisy action montages and a selection of bombastic new zombie types. But when a build arrived in July, offering excerpts from the Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield and Jake Muller campaigns (there's also an Ada Wong campaign, unlocked on completion), the omens were poor.

Leon's bit is the shadowy, suspenseful part, a traipse through the wrecked Tall Oaks university, but he kicks off near the beginning of the game, which means you're lumbered with a protracted, "mood-setting" tutorial. Jake's adventure borders on the superheroic, but his demo segment commences in Resi 6's most boring environment, a warehouse in Rainy Post-Soviet Countryland. Only action man Chris puts on anything approaching a decent performance, with a dense Chinese cityscape to shoot up and no silly attempts to teach us about mechanics we've been familiar with since 2005.

I laid into the thing at the time, mocking Leon's horror pretensions and scorning the way Redfield's section in particular cosies up to the dude-bro fraternity. Having played a preview build for 15 hours, I'm feeling a bit more forgiving. Resident Evil 6 is a game that takes spectacularly badly to being farmed out in chunks - its key systems need time to reveal their worth, and it's stuffed with the sort of heavily tailored, hit-and-miss design novelties Japanese developers seem uniquely conditioned to provide. Focus on the weak spots, as Capcom did, and you'll think it's a catastrophe. Suspend judgement. There's more here than's currently meeting the eye.

Let's start with the gunplay. Yes, there's more of it, and yes, it's a lot looser and nervier than that of Resident Evil 4, where you could easily pop weapons out of people's hands given a level head and a bit of room. The aiming dot now wanders drunkenly about inside the reticule, and while you can spend XP from kills on unlocks to steady your hand, this takes time and, naturally, requires that you develop a certain competence to begin with. Conditions on the ground don't exactly soften the blow. For one thing, much of Resident Evil 6 takes place at night or underground, making a dodgy aim fatal. For another, many of the zombies now mutate into more powerful forms when you shoot the wrong bit.

But none of this really overrides what Resident Evil 4 did well. The same design principles are visible through the flailing, toothy murk - only the pace has changed. Each area is a small tactical puzzle, after the example of that iconic village where Leon made first contact with Los Plagas, stocked with exploding barrels, traps, cover spots and different vantage points. If there appears to be less choice than in the average Resi 4 setpiece, that's because the burden of choice has shifted towards the enemies themselves - what's the most efficient way to tackle a certain type, which targets to prioritise, which combinations to avoid.