What are we doing here? You know the Resi 2 remake was only made because the fans were begging for everything to play like Resi 4? Resi 4 already is Resi 4. What is this?

Resident Evil 4 (2005) isn't its story. It isn't its setting or characters. It doesn't have much interest in them and abandons any notion of reverence towards them within the first couple hours. It's a tightly defined ruleset explored thrillingly through a riotous campaign that jumps the shark, then proceeds to jump over Fonzie, and then jumps over the guy who jumped over Fonzie. New areas weren't added out of any consideration for the story, but because the team were having too much fun coming up with things to put in the game. It's a million little ideas that all complement each other. I think a big part of what made me so emotional when I played Breath of the Wild is that I'd given up on there ever being a new game like Resident Evil 4; a radically new and invigorating approach to an old formula, where each component felt beautifully designed and embraced by the surrounding framework. A game you were just dying to pick up the controller and be a part of. Nothing between 2005 and 2017 gave me that gut punch. Trying to inject modern game design standards into its structure would be missing the point of what that game was.

Frustratingly, Capcom haven't really proven my case here. The Resident Evil 4 remake is a well-considered endeavour that expands on curious ideas that the original may have glossed over too soon, and celebrates the game's most loved qualities with the right balance between taste and wreckless abandon. The current-day Resi staff are talented designers and incredible technicians. It shouldn't be a surprise that when they took on a project as prestigious as Resident Evil 4, they made a good game. It's clear that the remake was created by people who genuinely like the original and think about it often. I'm reticent to admit that they got away with it, but shit, man. The game's good.

That demo really rubbed me the wrong way, though. All of my worst fears were realised in front of me. That initial villager who approaches you with his neck already impossibly broken, instantly washing away any thought that maybe these are just regular people, long before the classic transformation scene. The hideous tonal clashes between the gritty new environments and Leon jumping through windows and quipping about bingo. The glowing reverence for the village's structure while adopting gameplay that fundamentally changes its purpose. It felt pointless, stupid, and ignorant of what made the original game work so well.

Prior to that, while I wasn't keen on the principle of remaking Resident Evil 4, what I was expecting was a good game that I'd have a litany of massive frustrations with. After I played that demo, I was expecting a bucket of shite. I'd only be playing it so I'd have something to say if I was ever asked about it. Just miserable.

It's odd, because the game I received was pretty much in line with my initial expectations. I liked it more than that, even. It's embracing me as an endlessly devoted Resi 4 lover and presenting a game that I'd enjoy.

I still hold up the 2002 Gamecube Resident Evil as the best remake ever made, and subsequent remakes in the series have been conscious of what it achieved. The little surprises that work more effectively because of the fans' familiarity with the original. There's clever wee moments in the Resi 4 remake that work the same way. The thudding as you approach Luis for the first time isn't the sound of him struggling to force his way out of a cupboard, but a villager hammering down nails in the trap door he's detained under. It's not a massive jumpscare, but an effective subversion of your expectations if you've played through Resi 4 about twenty times. Wee things like that. The old insta-knife defence seems to be the connective mechanic through all the remakes. The way it works here helps justify the controversial knife degradation, and while I'm not a big fan of that, I'll give anything a pass if it reminds me of the single Mikami-directed remake.

A big point in the game's favour is how they've handled Leon. Even a single oneliner that seemed either a bit too cool or too much like Will Ferrell bullshit, and I'd have taken a hammer to the disc. I can see a version of this game that set out to meme. I'm delighted to say that it just feels like they've continued writing more dialogue for Resi 4 Leon. He's a delight. He's survived Raccoon City, so he thinks he's the shit, but he has all the wit and self-awareness of an 8 year-old who's just watched Die Hard. Leon seeing a 20 foot hammer and sarcastically retorting "good luck finding someone big enough to use that" had me completely sold. I love this man to pieces.

There's directions that the remake takes that I don't like, too. It frequently lifts iconic environments from the original with only the barest of tweaks, and that clashes against the more aggressive AI and greater range of movement. They often just feel too cramped here. The Resi 2 remake's more dramatic shift in design gave the designers the opportunity to play around with the scale to complement these changes, whereas 4's locations often feel like they've been dragged and dropped into a DeepLearning upscaler. You're constantly dogpiled upon in corners, just hoping for a lapse between the attack animations to push your way through. It feels clumsy and due some further revising, but they've like-for-liked big stretches of a game that played dramatically differently. I died countless times on the siege with Luis, but one-shotted my way through the Big Cheese fight that takes place soon afterwards, because they had the sense to make the barn about twice as wide this time. I don't know.


Oh- don't play on Hardcore. This experience may have been the thing that dropped this from a 9/10 to an 8. I always pick Normal for my first time with a game, but telling me that it was the mode for those in the audience who had played Resident Evil 4 was such a coy ruse. It's not the game. It's the bullshit Challenge version of the game. The one that had me play through the whole of the Regenerators' chapter with zero ammo. It's not tense, it's not scary, it's not a challenge. It's the software not functioning properly. It's seeing elaborate new locations and knowing you won't really get to play a game there, because you've just got to run through it until they decide you're allowed another bullet. Whoever presented that as the mode for established fans deserves a fucking hanging.


If this tars my reputation, I'll accept it, but I think QTEs can be good. When used well, they can add a sense of personal stakes to moments that can't be replicated in regular gameplay. Shenmue fans know this (though the sequel's Yellow Head Building can fuck right off), and Resident Evil 4 had some good ones. I bring it up constantly, but the Resident Evil 2 remake really ought to have utilised it to make the alligator chase something more dynamic than the half-hearted Crash Bandicoot horseshit we were given. The new developers have taken a hardline stance against QTEs, and I don't support it. Many of those big moments remain, but they're just cutscenes, and they fall flat without the risk of death. The Krauser knifefight always felt like an odd choice to present as QTEs in the original, and the biggest point of dread for QTE skeptics, and the boss fight that replaces it is okay here. Just okay. You can hammer away at L1 to parry everything, and there's little skill or strategy to it, but fine. What were they supposed to do?

I played this game while in the middle of moving house, packing endless boxes with every single item I own. Please forgive me for using the auto-sort function in the inventory screen. I honestly didn't mean to, but I accidentally activated it once, and when the arrangement of my items lost any sense of personal touch, my inventory was effectively dead to me. It's a welcome tweak for less patient players, but it undercuts an aspect of the game that was widely loved. Something that made item management more playful. I'm a Tetris fan, so I've always been fond of it, but I guess some folk will be coming to this from Gears of War, so I understand the compromise.

I'm kind of mixed on the "crafting" system. I did not welcome them abandoning the old "combine" terminology to appeal to the Markus Persson generation, but given the new complexity of the system, it's justifiable. The game's full of different weapons, and players will find their own combinations of problems and guns, so it makes sense to give the player a hand in the kind of ammo they end up with. There's a little risk/reward dynamic in whether you cash out immediately for shitty pistol shots or save up for shotgun shells and grenades. It's Resi 3 stuff, but it's not absurd to suggest it can work in 4. I don't know how much I like it in effect, though. I didn't have a problem with the old ammo system. It encouraged making better use of the full range of your arsenal and gave you something to sell to the merchant if there was a gun you just plain didn't find useful. Now, I've got to visit a window and make a decision every time I run out of bullets. I don't love it, but I can see its utility.

I did encounter a few technical hiccups in my playthrough. Character models deforming under gunfire, and Ashley slipping through the environment constantly until my next "You Are Dead" screen. Leon even slipped through the gameworld and died in the middle of the last boss. I know Digital Foundry have had harsh words for the PS5 port's presentation. It doesn't really bear making a point of. A game like this is going to be patched in about an hour, and the launch issues will only remain in funny videos. We can pretend it's not there, because it almost certainly won't be for long.


The tone is really uneven early on. I'd likely hold more against it, but they've done such a good job giving Resi 4 Leon more stuff to do and say that I'll give them a pass on how awkwardly the one liners and Jackie Chan bullshit clashes with the sight of young women's bodies hacked away on bloody altars. There's an attempt to explore the subject of murderous cults with some degree of seriousness, but it doesn't work when they're busy filling their homes with whimsical clockwork nonsense. I didn't want the fun taken out of Resi 4, so I'm glad that they stuck the landing on that, but the grizzly, grim stuff sticks out very uncomfortably in the middle of it. Like someone taped over 5 seconds of Roger Rabbit with videocamera footage of themself masturbating. Thankfully, the game forgets this intention as soon as you get to the castle, and it's back to funfair.


Ashley has been changed significantly, and in ways that I expect will rile up some oldheads. The representation of female characters is something that has been dramatically reconsidered since the mid-2000s, and while the intentions are positive, I'm not convinced she needed to be a more competent and less bratty character. I do welcome them making the power dynamic between her and Leon a little more even, but I don't expect a president's daughter to jump into being a pro Resident Eviler against her will. The series had already established a range of likeable, capable women before Ashley. Many of the biggest fans of the early games I know are women, and I don't think they'd be nearly as keen on them if Jill and Claire had been presented as regressively as many typical PS1 heroines. Regardless, I quite like the new Ashley. When she's actively coming up with ideas and getting Leon out of trouble, I'm quite warmed by it. It feels like she's grown up a little. She just feels a little more boring without her old personality flaws. 2005 Ashley was somebody that was quite fun to pair against the cocksure buffoon, Leon Kennedy. I don't think they had to get rid of her identity in order to show respect for her gender.

In relation to that, I quite like how they've played up the threat of Ashley's contamination. It does a better job of highlighting the baddies' intentions than just having her fall into mechanical traps and shit. There's effective dramatic stakes, and I think it's one point that the remake does a better job at than the original. Good work.


Ramon Salazar used to be the pinnacle of the game's absurd high camp. I guess he still is, but that doesn't really seem to be the case until his boss fight, which he berates Leon throughout. It's a relief when he drops back into his old familiar bullshit, but there's so much noise masking his distorted voice from the rooftop, I had to switch on the subtitles to understand anything he said. It's a good laugh when he drops his high-fulluton nonsense about scriptwriting and gives it the old "Die, you bastard". He never hijacks the comms line from Hunnigan this time, though, and it's all a bit much when it's condensed into one boss fight. I don't know if those who haven't played the original will think much of him. He's just a big, noisy boss. Bit of a shame. It's a fun boss, at least. One that I used to save a rocket launcher to skip, it actually feels kind of like a Metal Gear boss now. All the running around and reading attack patterns. Scratches an itch.

They easily could have overegged the famous moments and totally ruined them, but I think it mostly delivers them fairly well. The beautiful, divine white dog emerging to save the day from a mountaintop, accompanied by a lightning strike really worked for me. There are moments that were determined to be too stupid to reappear without some tweaking, but there's little references in easter eggs and the trophy list that show the team is fond of that stuff too. In the broader context of the remake, I'm kind of glad the bingo line's still here. It'd be a shame to lose it.

If anyone was holding out for me to give this game a thorough slagging, here's some quick points about things I really didn't like:
THE STEALTH KILLS: Wishy washy shite. They're nothing. There's nothing natural about their incorporation into the game. Just occasionally, you'll come up to some enemies who are locked into a very artificial patrol route, and you'll have the opportunity to stab them from behind to conserve your ammo and make the inevitable swarm of bodies easier to deal with. It's like the stealth bits in GTA: San Andreas; Really fucking crap. And they've put them in a game called "Resident Evil 4". It's like they put tailing missions in Burnout.
FALLING THROUGH WOODEN FLOORS: It's a trick that could be scary. It's rubbish, irritating, and they do it multiple times. Having to scrap your old plans and reorient yourself in an instant is a surprise that could work in a scary action game like Resi 4, but redoing the flimsy wooden boards with no prior indication of their fragility is just crap. Have a big man pick up Leon and chuck him out a window or something. Have a monster pop up from beneath the floorboards and drag Leon down, fine. Hell, just present a surprise and don't do it a bunch of times. Just crashing through perfectly good timber again and again is crap.
SPOOKY GRAFITTI: This is an element of environmental horror design that I just hate. Bloody writing on the walls, talking about death. It's rubbish. Unless you're doing Danny Torrance or something, where an innocent is possessed into writing something fucked up, there's just nothing to it. There are far better, subtler ways to indicate that something horrible has gone on than having a monster man write "Grr, I'm going to kill you!" on their front door. It's the kind of shit that The Evil Within 2 ought to be too good for. What do they think they're doing putting it in Resi 4?
CHECKPOINTS: The game encourages going back to find equipment and treasures you missed, but only sets a new checkpoint the first time you enter a new location. This lead to me assuming I had done jobs or got equipment, and only realising that the game hadn't counted it once I couldn't go back. It's the kind of oversight I think might get addressed in a patch, and it's only a temporary issue, but it's something I feel I have to warn people about, for now.
THE GAME IS TOO KEEN ON ME KILLING THE ANIMALS: You've always been able to kill crows and fish for quick bonuses in Resi 4, but you were never explicitly encouraged to. Now the merchant has a bloodlust for rats, and I'm the mercenary weighing up whether I care more about the ethics of blasting apart virtual vermin or gaining exclusive weapon upgrades. Sometimes I'll kill them on the assumption that I'll be asked to go back for them later, and it doesn't pay off. And what the fuck is up with setting the cow on fire? Have some fucking decency, Resident Evil.
SHOOTABILITY: This is probably going to be a little tough to explain, but the original Resident Evil 4 was a very shootable game. If you fired a shot, it probably did something. Breaking down doors to fire at swarming enemies on the other side, or shooting down the chain holding up the drawbridge. Leon was approaching gun ownership with the same level of restraint as Homer Simpson. That stuff just isn't in the remake. Usefully breakable items are typically covered in yellow paint now to grab the player's attention. That drawbridge now asks you to damage a couple of weights covered in yellow paint. It's helpful, but it loses that sense of fun. Not that I wanted to piss around experimenting with gunfire when the ammo is so punishingly scarce, but it feels far less visceral and exciting when playing around with your guns solves fewer problems.

Leon does sidle through a lot of narrow passageways, but I think that's just a prerequiste if you want to submit your game to be verified for release on PlayStation 5. Maybe that would upset you, and I can already see the sarcastic YouTube compilations, but it didn't really bother me.

I think the most upset I can get with this game is if I think about those who will opt to play this and never touch the original, but those "newer=better" folk would never touch the thing anyway. I'm not really worried about how the remake will affect Resi 4's legacy beyond that. It's an adaptation. It's merchandise. It's a big, loud reason that a million people are talking about Resi 4 again, and the right folk aren't going to stop loving the original because of it. Why would I ever care about the assertions made in a fucking IGN review?

I feel untouchable now. Go ahead, remake Metal Gear Solid again. God Hand. Turn Super Mario World into a crap touchscreen mobile game with microtransactions. Whatever. I can't be hurt anymore. Nothing is sacred. They put lipstick on Jesus Christ's corpse, and I frenched him.