Resident Evil 4 is one of the best, most influential games of all time and I’ve wanted to do a review of it ever since I started writing reviews. The opportunity never really arose, as I never really felt like there was a “right time” to spill my guts about the inspiration for the entire third person genre post-2005 and the game that single handedly saved the Resident Evil franchise. But now we have the remake of Resident Evil 4 (here after referred to as REmake 4 for the sake of clarity) so I’m going to kill two birds with one stone and talk about both games at once! This review will have two parts, a quick no-spoilers section for people that have never played the first Resident Evil 4 and then a relatively spoilery section in terms of game events and changes compared between the two games for those who have played RE4 at any point over the last 18 years.
If You Haven’t Played Resident Evil 4
Six years have passed since Resident Evil 2 and its rookie cop protagonist, Leon S Kennedy, has clearly changed from the naive teenager starting his first day on the force. Bitter and a little traumatized, Leon was pressured to join a special task force set up by the President to up his combat skills and travel the world fighting biohazard threats, but now the President’s daughter Ashley has been kidnapped by parties unknown and taken to a remote corner of Spain. Leon goes in alone to find her and discovers that everyone in the area has been infected by a strange parasite called Las Plagas, which makes the locals hostile, resistant to gunfire, and able to accurately throw a sickle twenty-five yards.
If you played the remake of Resident Evil 2 you’ll probably have a general idea of how the game handles, at least initially. Here we’ve got a third person shooter that encourages you to stand still to improve your weapon’s accuracy, set in interconnected areas that require keys and side paths to progress. You’ll get to an area, find a locked door, and either have to take a roundabout path to unlock it from the other side or find a key to open it so you can continue on. The big deviation comes from how you handle enemies, with REmake 2 more focused on resource management (using two bullets to deal with four zombies that were always going to be where you left them) while REmake 4 is more about crowd control. You’ll routinely face six or more enemies at once in 4, enemies that will charge you from a distance, throw projectiles, or grab you so other enemies can stab you, and it’s up you to manage the raving horde. Fortunately the combat system has been expanded in 4 compared to its predecessors, and Leon can stagger enemies with shots to the limbs and head before following up with sweeping melee attacks that damage and knock back everyone around him. This creates a sort of rhythm in the combat that is unique to Resident Evils 4 through 6 where you encounter a group of enemies at a distance, unload a few shots into the first one that looks at you funny, and then charge into the horde to kick them and knock everyone off their game. It sounds like suicide in the context of the zombie battles that came before but it’s actually ridiculously effective and never gets old, with the variety of enemy weapons and your own resource levels never making the gameplay loop feel stale.
There’s a surprising amount of strategy that comes from the combat too, especially once the parasites that are part of the enemies get involved. Shortly after the early chapters of the game you’ll encounter many enemies that will spawn tentacled monstrosities from their heads when they take too much damage, that can be dealt with through shooting them, using flash grenades, or trying to stop them before they come out with knife attacks from behind or on the ground. All these have their own pros and cons to consider: available ammo, flash grenades being rarer than the true cross, and knife durability, but it gives you a real feeling that there is no one “right” way to play the game. This is also aided by the variety of weapons you can unlock in the game, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and super upgrades that make (most of them) feel useful rather than just being strictly better upgrades of your previous gun like they were in Resident Evil 8.
One little stitch in the mix comes when Leon finds Ashley surprisingly early on in the game and suddenly you have an AI partner following you around. Ashley can’t attack enemies and if you’re separated from her for too long it’s game over, so along with managing enemies in combat you occasionally have to step out of your comfort zone to keep her safe too. If you know anything about the original game you’ve probably heard about Ashley constantly needing supervision and screaming Leon’s name as she’s carried away by the mob, and in some ways that’s the same here. Ashley is slightly more capable in this version of the game as she no longer needs Leon to help her climb down ladders and she doesn’t have a health bar either, instead she just enters a “downed” state whenever she’s hit and Leon needs to take a second to help her up (or she’ll get up herself eventually if you just leave her assuming no enemies get near her for a LONG time), but there are a few trade-offs as well. In the original game you could make Ashley stand anywhere you wanted, but that was somewhat abuseable so they’ve removed that and instead she kind of… wanders? You can tell her to stay close or “give you distance” but her AI just does whatever it wants, especially in close quarters melees where you might be running from one side of the room to the other constantly and Ashley moves like she missed her cue cards. In the original game I found her AI to be routinely on point, shadowing you to such a degree that any attack you avoided would generally miss her too, even in mini-boss fights that she absolutely shouldn’t have been a part of but I hadn’t thought to tell her to stand outside the door. New Ashley is not that precise, but fortunately outside of a few harrowing fights in the mid-game the game will separate you via a cutscene or give you a place to tell her to hide so you won’t be in too many situations where her new found free-spirit will get in your way.
Where Ashley isn’t is in the game’s Mercenaries mode, which came out as free DLC two weeks after launch. It’s essentially the same as it was in the original game: a horde mode where you can use unique characters with special abilities to try to survive as long as you can, only with two exceptions. The first is that there aren’t “unlimited” enemies any more, and instead there’s a set amount including several scripted mini-bosses, which is a fine change that only hurts those of us who liked the ability to just play the mode until the clock ran out. Honestly if you’re good enough you could probably play a Mercenaries level forever, which doesn’t feel great if you have places to be and you have to “throw” a match just to move on with your life. The second is each character has a “super mode” now which you can build up over time and activate once the bar is full. They vary in strength from explosives and speed to infinite ammo and a mutant form, but they’re a nice thing to have in your back pocket when a mini-boss shows up, and while it’s a mostly unnecessary change it helps with the arcadey/score attack atmosphere of the mode. If you love the combat mechanics as much as I do you might end up sinking more hours into Mercenaries than the campaign.
I feel like I should have more to say but most of my criticisms are just in reference to how the game was originally, and if you haven’t played the first one before you won’t notice the many “why did they do this?” questions I’ll be asking in the second section of the review, nor should you care about them. So instead of dragging this on any more I’ll run through the presentation really quickly and then you can stop reading this and get to playing the game. The visuals are, in a word, wonderful, as we should come to expect from the RE Engine at this point. Every enemy that they’ve included has been glowed up in a dramatic fashion, as shown below, and the RE Engine’s great locational damage gives you the ability to cut and blast off enemy limbs, plus there’s a lot of cute little details like Leon holding his weapons differently in close combat or reacting to the rain and cold with small animations. The voice acting isn’t terrible either, though none of the original cast returns (to my knowledge) and no one is saying as many funny lines as there were in the first game. I’d have preferred a different intonation for some of the delivery and really hate who they went with as a voice for a particular character at the end of the game, but most of that is probably my “knowing what the first game was like” brain poisoning the well again. Outside of a few contextual knife attacks not always wanting to work and game breaking glitch in the late game (that only happens if you do a very specific thing that no one would ever do) the game is also surprisingly error free, mechanically. Which is a hell of a lot better than I can say about almost every other Triple A game that is released these days. So yeah. REmake 4 feels great, looks great, sounds great, and any changes from the original are essentially concessions to new mechanics. Go play it. Or stay here and keep reading about my nitpicks when it comes to everything that’s different from the old game.
If you’ve played Resident Evil 4 before
Boy Resident Evil 4 sure was great, wasn’t it?
The first thing you’ll probably notice when you see anything about the remake is that you can move and shoot at the same time, which you might remember as one of the main things people wanted in the original game. I never really minded the stationary shooting, but fortunately the game’s been balanced around this change, with faster movement and some never-before-seen charge attacks that can catch you unawares if you’re going in expecting the same game experience. Another new feature is increased uses for the knife, since now it can be used to break enemy grabs and counter almost every attack in the game with the right timing, but at the cost of knife durability. This was probably the biggest hurdle for me to get over in the game, as the knife going from your trusty “oh god I have no ammo left what do I do” option to something that breaks and has to be repaired seemingly every time you turn around was very infuriating at first, especially when it loses durability from even basic attacks rather than just being a fee you have to pay for using its special abilities.
I don’t think I ever actually got over this, it was just something I put up with, but the improved other combat mechanics are a treat (when the contextual prompts work) such as being able to stab enemies on the ground for instant kills or get behind staggered enemies for huge damage with your knife as well. The benefit of both of these attacks is that an enemy killed in this manner won’t spawn a Plagas from their neck, which will definitely save you pain and resources, so it’s nice that the skill ceiling has been raised a little higher than in the first Resident Evil 4 by giving you more options for dealing with enemies. Resources also feel a little more vital this time than in the first game because along with your knife and armor being a limited resource that have to be repaired it also feels like the game is a little skimpier overall with its supply drops. This is probably due to the game adding crafting resources that you can use to make ammo and grenades, so you might hope ammo drops from dead enemies but you’ll just get more FUCKING GUNPOWDER instead, but that plus the scarcity of flash grenades make fights feel like a little more of an investment than they were in the original game. Fortunately one of the new weapons is a crossbow with retrievable bolts, which is a terrible weapon but means that you can shoot hanging treasures and single enemies without losing your precious, precious ammo, but it does take up inventory space alongside the aforementioned crafting materials (and while the game does provide storage options at save points you can only store weapons and not crafting materials or ammo) so there’s some opportunity cost there.
Another way to deal with lone enemies is the game’s stealth options, another new use for your knife where Leon can crouch walk up behind unaware targets and stab them in the neck for an instant kill. I was worried that it would feel forced (and there’s one section after you’re captured with Luis where it absolutely is forced) but the first RE4 had multiple areas where you could more around unaware enemies to snipe them or otherwise choose your moment to engage, so this feels like a reasonable extension. It also makes the fights against the blind Garradors less of a guessing game about “how fast is too fast” and you can use the crouch option to take advantage of REmake 4’s EXCELLENT hitboxes to dodge things like grab attacks, horizontal swings, or even some thrown weapons, which makes the combat feel even deeper than the counter system did already.
Speaking of being captured with Luis, the game designers did a very interesting job combining or reusing certain areas of the game in different ways. Immediately after you’re captured with Luis, for example, instead of going straight into the canyon area you’re instead treated to a forced stealth section in the “dynamite warehouse” that was originally set before finding Luis at all. Later in the castle REmake 4 combines many of the grand halls from the second act into just one room where you meet Salazar, do chandelier puzzles, and run into a pack of cultists, which makes the whole castle experience feel tighter while also tying into the game encouraging you to explore more. During the early chapters especially there are a handful of instances where the game opens up and offers you multiple side areas you can travel to or revisit with the boat or when you get Ashley to find treasures or complete side missions.
Yes, side missions. The developers were apparently “inspired” by the blue medallions you shoot for the Punisher gun in the original and decided to create over a dozen other “side activities” to do, which you are informed about in a similar way (blue notes) pinned on walls either right before or right after an environment you were just in. It’s nice that they aren’t really hidden and typically they aren’t that intrusive to your existence, usually something mundane like finding a particular item, killing rats, or breaking more medallions, but a few also lead to optional difficult fights against super versions of normal enemies. The rewards are the spinels that you might remember as the most common form of treasure that you could sell to the Merchant, but now they’ve been transformed into a special currency that you can use to buy exclusive items, such as stocks or enhanced scopes for several weapons that used to be just purchased through the merchant. I don’t hate this system as much as others I’ve seen, since the detours are generally minor and you aren’t missing out on too many things if you choose not to do them, but it does also sometimes feel like the game could be doing something better with your time than hunting through three different rooms for a single rat.
Along with the changes to spinels there has been a marked improvement in how the treasure system has been implemented. The game still has the rare treasures you can collection that can be improved by combining them with other treasures, but in REmake 4 they have done away with any sort of relationship between the parts that you can combine. For example, the cat statue you’d find in the original game required three different, unique stones to be combined with it and the total cost of the item would be dependent on how many of those stones you could find in the levels before you decided to sell it. Now however in REmake 4 you can find six different kinds of gems throughout the game, three round and three square cut, that can be inserted in any treasure to increase its value. Each gem has a different cost and the game has a table of color combinations that you can use to maximize item value, and while the items don’t look as impressive as they did with the “coordinated items” in them from RE4 this change still makes treasure collection a more enjoyable experience. On the other hand the game decided that dropping these gems was a fair reward for killing mini bosses, so now instead of getting tens of thousands of coins for killing chainsaw men or even Verdugo you instead just get “a gem.” This makes the investment of time and resources you put into killing these things feel much worse and rewards could have probably could have been cut entirely just because by the end of the game I was swimming in gems with nothing to put them in despite getting essentially every treasure in the game.
Before I get to the most spoiler-filled part of the review I’d like to take a moment to talk about how much better almost all of the characterization is in this game than the original. I love the original’s cheesy dialogue and deliveries to death because it was being an intentional cornball, but as I said in the non-RE4 playing section the voice actors and dialogue really delivers here. Leon is a bit of a sad sack initially but after the cabin attack he suddenly has a switch flipped and starts doing things like unnecessary backflips and a few one liners that are great fun (I mean mostly cutscenes here, in-game he quips every other melee attack and that gets dull really quick). Ashley is a standout not only for her improved personal abilities to do radical things like climb down ladders and occasionally help with puzzles but her expanded dialogue and character is good as well. She is a terrified, whimpering girl in the beginning and after a few rough spots starts to grow a little more self assured, which is both a realistic portrayal of someone in that situation and one that makes her feel more like a character than a walking liability. Krauser is also a highlight in that he actually isn’t a Russian stereotype any more and they also go into his history with Leon to make him more of a fleshed out antagonist, which was material that was always available but you had to go outside of the game to find a lot of it. Fortunately though this extra depth doesn’t lead to extra screen time so he doesn’t overstay his welcome, though I would have preferred maybe one more cutscene connecting one or two more dots. There’s a lot of controversy right now about Ada’s performance, mostly from bad faith actors but I do think she sounds a little flat at times, more so in her expanded scenes than dialogue she says that’s ripped straight from the game. Saddler is a little less fun for me, with a more muted and hyper religious focused performance (outside of his boss fight) than he was in the original, and Wesker’s new VA is awful with very little inflection in his voice at all, to the point that he sounds like just “some guy,” so I hope he’s recast before Resident Evil 5 is remade.
If you don’t want to see the rest of my review that’s just comments on changes to boss design I’ll just put my closing thoughts here: the updates to the combat, treasure, and tightening up the levels does nothing to detract from what came before and arguably makes the game even better for it. It’s not as groundbreaking as it was in 2005, but it was never going to be and REmake 4 deserves recognition in its own right for expanding on what was already good in both RE4 and the other recent remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 to make something very special. It’s just in the little moments where my knife breaks, contextual button prompts don’t work, or I’m suddenly running through a scripted sequence that is a little too linear and I get a brief flash of what little changes REmake 4 could have had to make it flawless for me. However these are admittedly just quibbles, which is the only thing there is to complain about when the game is as good as this one. If you don’t play this you’re missing out.
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