IGN has had the opportunity to exclusively try out Resident Evil Village’s Mercenaries Mode at Capcom’s offices in Osaka, Japan. We get to enjoy the first stage of the mode, which consists of multiple areas.
For fans of the series, unlocking The Mercenaries after finishing the main game will be the same as seeing an old friend again, as the mode was implemented in previous installments of the Resident Evil series, as well as in a standalone game released in 2011. on Nintendo 3DS. Since Resident Evil 6 is the latest game in the franchise to incorporate the mode, Village will be the first numbered game in over 8 years to reunite with the Mercenaries.
The rules are simple: eliminate as many enemies as you can in each stage and reach the objective before time runs out. Killing a specified number of enemies will be enough to advance to the next area, but most players will want to aim higher. The Mercenaries invite you to eliminate as many enemies as possible in each stage as quickly as possibleas the number of kills and the time remaining are combined to conclude your final score.
The stage we were able to play on led us to town, the main location of Resident Evil Village that we already told you about after being able to test the full game for five hours. Although the first zone was quite simple, later the enemies were located on walls and roofs, with the added verticality that forced us to alter our style of play.
Before heading to a new area, we must go through a room where we find the arms dealer, Duke. Here we can buy ammunition, weapons, first aid and more objects that will help us in the following areas. As in the main game, The Mercenaries also allows you to upgrade weapons. In a similar way to the seen in Resident Evil 4, we can increase the power of the weapon, the rate of fire, reload and the capacity of ammunition. This adds a strategic layer that was not present in previous versions of Mercenaries mode.
Focusing on upgrading one or two weapons (out of the many available) is a good option, although different enemy types and the layout of the next zone play an important role in our choices and decisions. You have to know how to prepare, understand what your personal preferences are, and adapt to the circumstances.
Eliminating the 30 enemies from the first area within the time limit is not very difficult. Every time you kill an enemy you add an additional few seconds to the timer and getting a yellow orb gains another 30 seconds. The number of enemies remaining is shown on the screen and the main task is to find them within the area and kill them quickly. Obviously, the difficulty will increase in each stage, but the real challenge of Resident Evil Village’s Mercenaries mode we will mark ourselves by wanting to increase our maximum score.
This new approach, something more strategic, Helps make the mode enjoyable by all players and not just those looking for a first person shooter challenge. Your shooting and combat skills are important, obviously, but that other layer that we talked about earlier also has a fundamental weight.
There are multiple blue orbs hidden within each zone, each of which allows the player to choose between three different skills. Here too, you have to choose wisely, as they will be kept until the end of the game.
These abilities include the so-called Blade Master, which makes the knives do five times more damage, Slow Motion, which slows down the movement of enemies, or Super Guard, where we will receive less damage when blocking attacks. But there are a lot of other possibilities, which focus on you being able to create a “build” of your character, focusing its strengths on the melee, on the use of a specific weapon or on other combat styles. This makes building the character feel like an RPG, albeit in a simplified form that is perfectly suited to the fast-paced action of the mode.
When finding blue orbs, it is important to choose a skill that matches the weapon that you have decided to improve in the Duke shop, to increase its effectiveness in combat. Finding the playstyle and weapons each player is most comfortable with and making decisions accordingly is very rewarding..
By testing different styles of play, we were able to see how Resident Evil Village’s Mercenaries mode felt completely different. Sometimes it is better to run to the goal and move to the next area quickly, other times it is more efficient to kill all enemies … depending on the weapon, we can also adopt a ranged attack approach or get into the mud and fight close. to body.
From choosing weapons to building the character, It was impressive to see how much variety of options Resident Evil Village’s Mercenaries mode allows. A modality that returns to a numbered delivery after many years and that feels better than ever.
Resident Evil Village will hit the market on May 7. As part of IGN First we have been able to offer you various exclusive content about the game, like this one in which we show you the main villains that we will have to face, because not everything is going to be Lady Dimitrescu. Also, here you can take a look at our impressions after playing the first five hours of the full game.