If you haven’t gotten around to playing this year’s remake of Resident Evil 4 (hereafter called REmake 4 to avoid confusion) you’ve been missing out. Fortunately, Capcom has put out some DLC to remind you of the game’s existence, and just before award season too! How thoughtful of them. The DLC covers the Resident Evil 4 bonus campaign Separate Ways, an Ada-focused narrative that tries to bridge some of the gaps in the RE4 story and theoretically sets events in motion for Resident Evil 5. Fun fact for everyone that didn’t play the original: this is actually the second Ada “side story” in Resident Evil 4, with the first being “Assignment Ada” that was included originally on the GameCube release. Everyone basically ignored it after Separate Ways was included on the PS2 and all subsequent releases of RE4 but still, it does exist!
Separate Ways has the exact same gameplay that was on offer in REmake 4, only slightly more linear. The fantastic, almost action game-style tempo of shoot, melee, and parry is still here, and you still have the Resident Evil formula of encountering a locked door that needs some sort of “key” to get through it and you have to go off the beaten path to do so. The linearity comes from Ada no longer backtracking as much as Leon did in the main campaign, outside of two visits to one area in the early in the game. The environments are mostly the same as well, with Ada returning to the village, castle, and military base in the same order as Leon, albeit in much smaller parts of the levels. Random debris and locked doors where there weren’t any before keep you on the path the game intends for you to follow, though there are a few more unique areas for Ada to explore this time than there were in the original Separate Ways.
Outside of a few new areas for Ada to explore the main difference between Separate Ways and the main campaign is Ada’s grapple gun. Originally just a narrative tool for Ada to leave Leon behind, it was a gimmick for the original Separate Ways to hide treasure or have Ada skip large portions of the map; but in REmake 4 it’s even more of a focus. Most areas now have a grapple point, typically to help Ada move through what I’ll charitably call “platforming” sections of Separate Ways, though a few combat encounters also use the grapple gun to help with positioning or overcoming obstacles. It’s also used frequently in combat as a weapon, as Ada can now use it in RE4‘s melee attacks to close the distance with a staggered enemy to strike them with attacks that Leon would have never been able to achieve. It’s a fun way to differentiate her from Leon in the main game, though her weapons aren’t really designed for this sort of long-range fighting so it’s not used to its full effect. Ada can also buy charms from the Merchant that increase her damage and movement speed (rather than having to win them in side activities like Leon) and one of them gives her a cool grapple attack that she can use to rip shields off of enemies. It’s a great use of the weapon that I wish they had expanded on further, maybe with abilities that disarm or remove armor from targets, but with a campaign that’s only four to six hours long that’s probably asking too much.
What Capcom has expanded on is Separate Ways‘ overall content. In the original Ada was stuck with only certain weapons that had set upgrades throughout the game, but now the Merchant can sell her weapons that she didn’t have access to before, such as the Red9 and the bolt-action sniper rifle. These additions and the ability to upgrade them definitely helps make the DLC feel more open to player agency, but the DLC is also so short you can barely upgrade one gun to completion and Ada’s alternative to the magnum is her stupid exploding crossbow which was only ever a gimmick weapon. Hilariously her crossbow doesn’t have Leon’s reusable bolts either, so you’ll be “wasting” bullets hunting for collectables and be more in danger of running out of ammo in the game than Leon ever was in REmake 4‘s main story.
I was really feeling that lack of a silent, reusable crossbow during some of the fights in Separate Ways. This is one of the strange things about video game DLC that happens “post game” but doesn’t carry over your character that you ended the main game with, as frequently these DLCs have a difficulty curve that can take you by surprise. I’d argue several fights that Ada encounters are more difficult than any Leon ever had in the main campaign, such as being locked in small rooms with tough enemies while others shoot at you from afar. I was playing on the game’s “hard” mode though (not by choice, but I’d done REmake 4’s main game on “hard” as well so it seemed fitting) so your mileage may vary as the game has added extra enemies to encounters in the past. That being said I never felt like I was lacking the tools to face these encounters given Ada’s limited ability to upgrade weapons, it just felt like the fights were tuned up as Separate Ways is designed to be played by those who have played Leon’s story first.
Unfortunately it’s in that spirit of “you should have played the main campaign first” that is one of the main things that brings REmake 4’s Separate Ways campaign down. It’s more expansive than the original Separate Ways in part because it takes from a large amount of Leon’s cut content from RE4’s original campaign, but everything cut were things Capcom (mostly) rightly assumed players could live without, which means none of it is that interesting. What’s more memorable, a mine cart chase or a cable car ride across a canyon? A desperate defense of a cabin surrounded by hordes of enemies or a fight against random giant monstrosity that you’ve seen a million times before in other games? These are still fine moments that I’m sure fans of the original game will enjoy, but they don’t have as much excitement around them as what you’ve seen or done as Leon, to the point where there’s nothing really in Separate Ways that I feel particularly inclined to go back and do again. And that’s before I think about the stupid, story-driven boss fight from the beginning that you have to do twice and is nothing but an annoying bullet sponge.
Yes, the plot of the new Separate Ways is the worst part about it, which is a feat considering how the first was just a barely connected string of excuses as to why Ada was in a certain place at a certain time. I’ve only played the original Separate Ways twice so my memory of it isn’t quite as great as it is for the main campaign, but the primary point I’m going to be drawing on here is that the characters motivations made sense and their actions were based on those motivations. In the original game Ada was, essentially from the very beginning of Separate Ways, concerned about Leon’s survival. She specifically goes to the church to ring the bell for him and she betrays Wesker in part to save him from Krauser, as Wesker had marked Leon for death with the logic that “anyone that survived Raccoon City is a threat” and Krauser is Wesker’s triple agent in the original game. In REmake 4 Ada doesn’t seem to do anything specifically for Leon, with most of her help being circumstantial. She goes to the church for her own purposes and rings the bell because she’s in the area, she only helps Leon get to the island because he showed up before she left, and she tries to tell Leon to fuck off without Ashley for no discernible reason, since Wesker NEVER says he wants Leon dead in REmake 4. Hell, Ada telling Leon to leave is actually her being dismissive and detrimental towards his well-being since she says that to him immediately after she learns he’s infected with the Plagas. To be fair Ada does seem to turn on Wesker in the end because he’s being flippant about Leon and Ashley dying when the island explodes, but even then she only goes back to fight the final boss because she still hasn’t gotten the plot device Wesker needs to start RE5.
Ada’s primary motivation in the original game was to get Wesker/her real employers “the Sample” and that is still mostly the case here, with the Sample replaced with the “Amber” as that ties directly into the new lore of a super Plagas strain contained within a giant chunk of amber. However since Capcom wanted to make the story longer and were fresh out of ideas they decided to just steal the secondary objective from the main story and have Ada infected by a virus much like Leon and Ashley are in the main game. Unlike Leon though this is a hallucinogenic and tracking virus that “It,” the forgettable cut boss from the original RE4, infects her with in the first five minutes of the DLC and then tracks her throughout the game, leading to two highly unoriginal fights of the worst kind (the “supposed to lose” where you’re actually supposed to win) that fill up the first quarter of the game until It has the decency to fuck off until you can fight it properly. Then, when the gloves come off and the game has a real opportunity to once again right the wrongs of RE4’s second most forgettable boss, what do they do? They make it based around spitting landmines again. Just. Like. The. New. Salazar. It’s a little less annoying since It doesn’t fly around as much as nuSalazar does so you can spend more time looking at the landmines on the ground, but I want to know who the hell at Capcom loves landmines so much that that’s their go-to answer for any boss redesign. And I want them fired.
The story additions continue to not make any sense outside of Ada’s motivation since Wesker shows up, in person, multiple times throughout when in the original he was just the mastermind voice in Ada’s ear. I was originally just going to write a full review just on why his appearance doesn’t make any sense, but the post-credits scene does take the time to try to explain how he got there so instead my question is this: why is he having Ada do any of this if he’s there in person? You can make the Lawful Evil argument that he’s a smug jerk who thinks he’s too important to get his hands dirty with grunt work, but Wesker is at this moment probably the most powerful creature on the planet as he can punch through solid steel, move so fast it looks like he’s teleporting, and regenerate instantly from any injury. He could solo the whole island before they even see him coming, and it’s something I think he absolutely would do given his repeated criticisms about Ada’s performance, but instead he just shows up, complains, and leaves a few times. What’s even more interesting is it’s hinted that Saddler’s cult knows about Wesker trying to get at their stuff, which feels like an unexplored avenue for further DLC of some variety. Maybe we could call it “Sunglasses Ways”. Or “Wesker’s Ways,” really hit that alliteration on the head.
Another DLC explaining this would probably mean I’d need to spend time with Wesker’s new voice actor though, so maybe we should skip it. He’s better now, don’t get me wrong, as more than two lines of dialogue have given him the chance to get hints of that edge in his voice that previous Wesker VAs rode into the stratosphere, but he still sounds like “a guy” half the time which isn’t want you want from a villain voice. On Ada’s side her new VA still doesn’t deserve the metric ton of hate she received on REmake 4’s release, but increasing her dialogue by a factor of ten unfortunately didn’t help endear her to me like I hoped it would. To be fair to her a lot of the flat delivery that we saw in the main campaign was taken “out of context” and now that Separate Ways shows us the situations Ada was in at the time I too would probably sound deadpan and fed up in those moments. The dialogue doesn’t help either, as any semblance of fun or camp that existed in either version of RE4 is now completely gone and all we’re left with is lines of Ada commenting on seeing a raccoon being “fate” or getting déjà vu when she picks up a rocket launcher to give to Leon. Coupled with the mediocre set pieces and mediocre delivery, I just wasn’t very engaged.
Even if you don’t feel like spending money on Separate Ways, Capcom also added a free expansion to the wave-based Mercenaries with four “new” characters. Wesker and Ada return to Mercenaries after being sidelined from the main release, and the other two characters are just alternative versions of Leon and Ada with different loadouts and outfits. This is the same copout that Resident Evil 5 pulled by giving us “eight playable characters in Mercenaries” that were just four characters with two skins a piece, and I hope if REmake 5 is coming they can incorporate Ada, Leon, HUNK, etc into REmake 5‘s Mercenaries mode since it’ll most likely be on the same engine. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as I’m here to complain about REmake 4‘s Mercenaries. Ada’s inclusion unfortunately feels like she’s just “Leon adjacent” since her super move is similar and she’s lacking her grapple gun that made her feel unique in the first place, but this is probably because if she did have the grapple gun she’d feel a little too much like Wesker. Wesker’s primary gimmick is his super speed which lets him melee enemies across great distances, hilariously giving his combat the same tempo as Separate Ways. His other and arguably far more exciting feature is that Wesker is the only character in Mercenaries that can parry indefinitely thanks to being able to parry attacks (including chainsaws) with his bare hands while everyone else needs to use their knives. This is a cool but rather awkward-looking feature (Wesker counterattacks after the parry but the animation doesn’t look great) that definitely gives Wesker a feeling of being a stronger character than the rest of the cast, and this combined with his super ability that makes him invincible while spamming melee attacks is probably the best Wesker power fantasy Capcom has put out… until it isn’t.
You see the problem with REmake 4’s mechanics is that a number of the special abilities that characters have are tied to having a knife, specifically breaking grabs and attacking transforming enemies on the ground. Without a knife Wesker is mechanically unable to easily break grabs, which immediately sucks you out of the illusion that you’re a superhuman that can destroy anyone with a punch or three. And yes, Wesker in the other Mercenaries modes also couldn’t easily break out of grabs, but no one else had a way to immediately break out of grabs so it was less noticeable. I’m hoping someone is noticing how bad things feels for a potential REmake 5 and they return to more contextual melee attacks like they had in RE5, but until then Wesker and Ada are welcome returnees to Mercenaries, though not as perfectly implemented as they could have been. Plus it’s free, which is enough of an excuse for me to play more Mercenaries.
REmake 4’s Separate Ways is an undoubtable improvement over the original in terms of the content department. More weapons, more new areas to explore, and even more importantly Ada gets unique gameplay and bosses that makes Separate Ways feel like her own experience rather just walking in Leon’s shadow. It’s less interesting than the main campaign and the story is unquestionably worse, not to mention somehow more disjointed, but if you’ve been hungry for another four to six hours of REmake 4 campaign content (which you can of course replay for unlockables) or are a fan of the character I think its ten dollar price tag is perfectly reasonable. Just don’t go in expecting the fireworks from main campaign and you’ll be fine.
