Resident Evil 4 Remake Review

Resident Evil 4 remake, this was a game I was intially antagonistic on when the moment it was announced. I am not a big fan of REmakes 2 and 3, and Village and even RE7 while I like, I am not super big on, when it comes to modern RE and modern Capcom by extension, I don't like them that much. This remake however was a massive surprise for me, it's the best RE engine game, the best game since RE7, the best modern remake, and an overall improvement over the original game. I have some issues with it overall that prevent it from being head and shoulders above the original game, but when it comes to moment to moment gameplay, I think REmake 4 is the better game. 

I'll start with the good, you can actually move while shooting and have more mobility in general, this makes the game FEEL much better to play as opposed to the tank controls and turret like gameplay in the original. You can also reload while not aiming, which is massive improvment when it comes to intense combat since now, you don't have to worry about possibly getting hit while in the middle of the reload animation, or just having to aim your gun to reload in general which can be rather cumbersome and can waste time when all you want to do is quickly reload every gun.  A lot of the combat in the original game was basically a game of aim, shoot, quick turn, aim, shoot, quick turn, rinse repeat it felt like a flight game where you aren't in control of a constantly moving vehicle and compared to shooters that came afterwards especially to something like Dead Space, it can feel dated and not as refined. Original RE4 made up for its awkward shooting mechanics and lack of overly deep shooting with enemies reacting to different areas when shot, very good weapon sounds and feedback, and plenty of situational depth where it wasn't about just straight up killing enemies in hordes. REmake 4 retains all of this with the added mobility and more refined movement and controls. You will be going through a creepy village and fighting a one hit kill chainsaw monster while holding off a bunch of other enemies, you will be escourting Ashley and while doing that fighting enemies while taking out multiple trebucets, fighting a monster on a boat, holding off a horde of angry villagers in a house with Luis, fighting alongside Luis later, collecting puzzle pieces to open doors, fighting in a maze with dogs, going on a crazy mine cart ride, going on an elevator ride while enemies are constantly jumping down and attacking you and much more. And luckily the game manages to keep all this while keeping the more modern controls and movement. Everything is just more updated now to accomadate for the updates. Where REmakes 2 and 3 were basically a fixed camera angle games having overhauled the gameplay for over the shoulder view and has jarring changes like zombies taking multiple headshots from pistols and shotguns in order to compensate for the fact that the player now has free aim and it being harder to tell where you should move the stick after a zombie grabs you especially after the camera jerks around so much and REmake 3's case of having Nemesis be less persistent due to the fact that it's harder to tell how far he is from the player due to the over the shoulder camera, REmake 4 however was already a remake of an over the shoulder game to begin with so all of it's changes didn't need to be massively overhauled to the point of the game feeling much worse. The combat is just as if not more satisfying the original game due to the RE engine's more detailed visuals, and the weapons all feel as good as ever and unlike Village the upgade system doesn't ruin this game and you can't buy upgrades out the ass and have overpowered weapons by the end. The best thing about this remake is the added defensive options with the knife, in the original game you didn't have much in the way of blocking attacks or any form of defense, if an enemy hits you in the original game, you had to tank the hit and hope you had a healing item on you to recover. In REmake 4, you can block incoming attacks making combat more dynamic since now you can mitiage damage and even perform counterattacks  now so if an enemy attacks you, it is possible to prevent damage rather than just take the hit. The blocking and parry window is generally big enough to make it a viable option in combat. Another thing, I like is the quality of life improvements like when crafting herbs it tells you what healing items you want to create and does so automatically which makes menu fiddling less tedious as a result. You also have weapon shortcuts now so less travelling in the menu to select weapons. Also, those annoying QTEs are gone and down away with, they are mostly just connecting to dodging which I don't like but more on that later. The bosses are also an improvement over the original since I felt the tank like movements, low hit points and the lack of moving while shooting made them grating to fight so I always bought a rocket laucher to insta kill them in the original game. Now in the remake since everything is modernized, I can actually fight them without doing that and they are decent change from the normal encounters even if I feel like console aiming for precise weakspot aiming is rather cumbersome, I didn't bother with the built in gyro controls since gyro aiming seems to be hard to get right. 

Now on to the bad, this part will be lengthy but let me assure that this game is very good and is worth playing it's just that these aspects of the game prevent it from being even better for me. One thing I dislike about the game is the pointless stealth that adds nothing to the game, you can sneak around in REmake 4 but you are given no stealth indicators or actual mechanics to work with so it makes it a pointless option, you can't even distract enemies or even actively get the drop on them and relocate after like in the Last of Us. This also means dodging is contextual yet again(why can't a modern RE just give me a dedicated dodge button already?), my suggestion would be to have circle be a dedicated dodge button and remove the crouching and stealth entirely. The contextual dodging isn't too bad in this game but I would just prefer to reliable be able to avoid attacks whenever I feel like I can rather than having a prompt pop in order to dodge certain moves by enemies and bosses. The side missions and the explorable worlds are also pointless and add nothing to the game. RE4 was never an exploration heavy game to begin with like RE2 and 3 so the addition of this just feels jarring since you have to these boring fetch quests that have no story to tell just to unlock certain things like the Red9 stock or the laser sight for certain guns. Plus after certain sections of the game, you can't do these missions again and you can't fast travel back either making these missions even more dull and pointless to do. I just did a couple to get the Red9 stock and moved on. If I did these more, my opinion of the game would greatly diminish so I am glad when I stopped when I did. At least in the Dead Space remake while the side missions were pointless in that game, they at least provided lore, this game's side quests are irksome, add nothing to the game and feels out of place in an action game like this. Just let me buy everything, and while I am at it, I am not a big fan of the whole inlaying gemstones in order to have certain jewlery sell at a higher price. I just want to sell the gem stones already, I don't want to hurry up and and hope I can sell the gems at a higher price. While I also like the knife system, I also feel like the knife should've never have degraded, it felt like a weird and once again meaningless addition to the game since once your knife is upgraded, it will rarely ever break and you can fix your knife with ease too back to it's original state so it might as well have umlimited uses since the durablity adds little to the game overall since it's easy to fix and rarely ever breaks when upgrading past a certain point. Ammo crafting also doesn't add much to the game either, I would much rather have ammo spawn instead of creating ammo since this game is mostly pistol city. I do like the Red9 a lot, I also feel like ammo crafting doesn't add much since RE4 isn't a traditional survival horror game where ammo isn't as common and you want to create ammo for guns you want to use, this doesn't work as well in an action game since you are better off just spawning ammo rather than just creating ammo which the resource system is mostly biased towards pistol ammo and you get lots of pistol ammo as is. 

The next issue is that while the game on Standard is generally easy there are some annoying difficulty spikes on occasion. First is when you fight the chainsaw monster which can feel out of place since the player is just getting used to the controls and gameplay systems so having an insta kill enemy with a massive horde can feel like a strange way to ease player into the game. This issue could extend to the original game as well. Another issue is that the sections is with Ashley is actually something this remake does worse than the original. Where in the original, Ashley didn't speak nearly as much, she had a health bar telling you how close she was to dying and Ashley didn't get knocked down constantly and didn't get in the way nearly as much and the animations to revive her after her getting knocked down take a little to long for my liking since enemies could possibly attack and get the drop on you after you revive her, it's at it's worst during the trebuchet section where you could dodge the fireballs but it could hit Ashley thus meaning you have to wait for the fire to disappear and then revive her just for another fireball to hit you afterwards. On top of that you could accidentally hit her while someone is grabbing her and you don't know if that accidental shot could get you a game over. Whenever the difficulty spikes it tends to always involve Ashley in some way, which is a shame since the original game handled her pretty well. The Island section is better here than in the original, but at the same time, it's still rather weak in comparison to the rest of the game since I find the shooting mechanics too weak to support it's rather action heavy final portion, they do break up the pace a bit better by comparison since there is auto turrets now and I do like the keycard swiping and reginators and the modernized controls and moblity helps but after the section in the lab and especially after the Kruaser boss, the game just starts to drag and I wish the game would just wrap up since the game becomes even more of a one note shooter with not enough situational depth and it's basically just endless shooting galleries where you just headshot, melee, shoot, headshot, melee, rinse repeat. This is something RE5 gets critcized heavily for but it did begin in RE4 first, just thought I'd add that. 

Finally, these issues aren't too big, the voice acting and story isn't that great, it's both two steps forward and two steps back from the original. Ada's voice acting isn't as bad as I thought it would be and I do like that it has the Leon actor from REmake 2 which makes for a smoother continuity compared to before, he does an okay enough job. At the same time, the voice acting for the villains like Krauser, Salazar and Saddler aren't very good and they have a much less of a prescence in this remake compared in the original especially Salazar and Saddler where both those villans would talk to and taunt Leon in the original, in the remake, they barely show up and don't taunt Leon nearly as much. Luis and Krauser are better and expanded upon. Luis' death hits a bit more in the remake since he was given more screen time and development but at the same time Krauser killing Luis feels weird since he wasn't even the main villain. The story in general just isn't that good much like the original, I never liked just how Capcom thinks they can tell a good story and every time they try to, they come off as a bunch of kids who think they are way smarter than they actually are like when Leon and Krauser are talking to each other about absolute power. Krauser just comes off as a bargain bin General Hummel from the Rock since he never really makes any interesting points regarding how corrupt his government was nor does his actions show anything. It feels like a superhero arguing with a supervillain but it also feels so hollow since neither Leon or Kruaser's actions are explored that much. At this point, I would love an RE game with barely any plot or story since I feel Capcom never knew much when it came to nuanced writing. 

Overall, despite my lengthy review, I think REmake 4 is a very good game, just that I have a number of issues with it that prevent me from liking it more than I already do. Is the game "perfect?" No much like the original, but at the same time I can't say I didn't have a blast playing it, and for a guy that plays a lot of games like I do that is all I can hope for.