Capcom has announced that the first wave of Resident Evil 6 DLC will launch on December 18, exclusively for Xbox 360. The DLC consists of three new multiplayer modes, each priced at $4 (320 MSP) individually, with all three available in a bundle for $9 (720 MSP). The three new modes are Predator, Survivor, and Onslaught. We got some hands-on time with each of the new multiplayer game-types. Our impressions follow.
In Predator, one human player takes control of the B.O.W. Ustanak that stalks Jake Mueller throughout the main game's campaign. The remaining players are humans, who must either defeat the Ustanak or elude it until the game's time limit runs out. The main objective in this mode is to boost your score: helping downed friends, saving them from the Ustanak’s clutches, and even pounding down humans as the Ustanak, itself, all contribute to your points total.
The result is a harried flurry of survival, as ducking and dodging the Ustanak is no easy feat. New firearms will drop on the battlefield (we played a six-person round on the tightly-spaced subway map, Rail Yard) while one of the goals — as a human character — during our six-round session included destroying the Ustanak-only grenade launcher that sprouted up on the map at random. Stomping the B.O.W.’s weapon was faster with more folks contributing, but it helps to have your human buddies distract the Ustanak while one person concentrates on demolishing the weapon, uninterrupted.
Playing as the hulking villain was a test of simply stomping and grabbing as many survivors as possible within the time limit. Nabbing the grenade launcher helps with range attacks — and thus, adding points to your overall score — but the round-robin nature of who exactly controls the Ustanak changes with each new round.
Predator supports two to six players.
Survivors is a deathmatch mode, playable both solo and in teams. After a player is killed, he or she respawns as an enemy (an infected or other creature). If the enemy kills any of the other remaining human players, the player gets to resurrect as a human. The last team or remaining player wins. It’s a nice twist on standard Deathmatch to be able to transition from creature back to human again if you’re successful, but it’s no easy feat. Survivors supports two to six players.
Onslaught offers a very different form of competition. In Onslaught, two players compete against one another to eliminate enemies while amassing chain combos. You and your opponent will spawn on separate maps and never actually interact with one another. Instead, defeating enemies and chaining long kill-combos (like luring enemies to surround an explosive barrel, then detonating it in their midst for maximum kill counts) will send a string of monsters and infected types into your buddy’s game.
The bigger your combo, the tougher and nastier the enemies that’ll appear in your friend’s scenario will be. It’s a tussle to continually keep killing waves of bad guys in order to keep your kill count up to eventually overtake your opponent’s ability to keep up with the numbers of enemies. Some of our sessions were lengthy, while others were over in the matter of a handful of minutes. Of all the new add-on modes we played in our time with RE6’s upcoming downloadable content, Onslaught was by far the most inventive — it felt like a 3D shooter version of one of Capcom’s other titles, the arcadey block-dropper Super Puzzle Fighter, in its aim at tactically sending oppressive waves of blocks (or in this case, enemies) at your opponent in hopes of overwhelming them.
Onslaught supports only two players.
In addition to the DLC, on December 17 Capcom will launch a free update to Resident Evil 6 that adds extra options to the game. Players will now be able to adjust the in-game camera to grant them a greater field of view, as well as play the game with English language audio and subtitles in another language. The update also automatically unlocks Ada Wong's campaign, and adds a partner character so it can be played in co-op mode. Finally, it adds the super-hard No Hope difficulty level.
