Look man, don’t get me wrong, this game is good… but it’s not THAT good, I’m sorry. Just getting it out there for clarification, I’m not one to derogate or bring something down for another thing that it’s not at fault for, and I feel like calling things “overrated” or something along those lines is overdone and not real criticism, but never has that been more fitting for something in my eyes than this game.
Developmentally, the road on the way was rocky to say the least. It went through multiple testing phases before Capcom decided to lay down the track once and for all. Stagnancy is very real and it falls on the lap of plenty franchises, including RE, so trying something new was well worth it. However, I just disagree with the notion that RE had to be redone from the ground up to fit the (at the time) current mold.
There was nothing inherently wrong with fixed camera angles, pre-rendered backgrounds, or tank controls. Those game design conventions worked within the constraints at the time and lent to the identity of the RE trilogy. Moving the franchise toward more action and less survival horror wasn’t necessarily bad but Christ, the common consensus makes it seem as if that’s the ideal when it’s not. It’s not like that changed anything because RE has been chugging along for over two decades trying to recapture the success of RE4 and failing. If anything RE4 made things worse.
Let alone the industry-wide influence of the game and its ramifications, the game itself has its own trifles too. Opting for an even item distribution that rewards the player for engaging in the combat system, it makes for an engaging gameplay loop, but at the same time it trivializes the attaché case. Why have an item management system if you’re inundated with so many resources? You almost never have to think about what to use and when, even in Professional runs.
On top of that, the game’s sense of progression is kind of slipshod. If you know what you’re doing you can clear every room without weapon mods or upgrades on your first play-through. Hell, you can beat the whole game using exploits with the knife or silver ghost and not once visiting the merchant. There can be roadblocks but it’s doable, which you can’t really say for the previous RE games unless you’ve studied their ins and outs and gotten intimately familiar with their structure.
As the cherry on the sundae, the strides this game took to make itself stand out from the other RE games make it worse. I’m probably the only person that gives a shit about RE stories on the planet, which checks out sure, but RE4 does not pay heed to anything established before. Canon be damned. As a result you get a game who’s story is just a fatuous nothing burger with funny one-liners being the only thing holding it up. RE2 laid the groundwork for a duo-logy about a man learning to overcome his survivor guilt and RE4 was just like fuck that, ballistics and right hands coming off. Shit irks me.
Part of me wishes 3.5, or the hook man demo, was the game we actually got and RE took an indefinite break from then on, but that’s not how the cookie crumbles I suppose. A lot of people put this game on an unreasonably high pedestal and future games in the genre to an impossibly high standard, and I never really understood why. But just as I have the right to my feelings, they have the right to theirs, and there’s no taking away how something makes you feel. If something is special to you, more power to you, that’s great.
But I dunno, this game disregards something else that’s special to me and everyone likes it precisely because of that, which is a bit frustrating. But at the end of the day the game we have is still a well made, tight package that came just at the nick of time to send waves through the channel, and that’s alright. I’m not a fan of how popular the game is, but the game itself is still cool despite that.
Developmentally, the road on the way was rocky to say the least. It went through multiple testing phases before Capcom decided to lay down the track once and for all. Stagnancy is very real and it falls on the lap of plenty franchises, including RE, so trying something new was well worth it. However, I just disagree with the notion that RE had to be redone from the ground up to fit the (at the time) current mold.
There was nothing inherently wrong with fixed camera angles, pre-rendered backgrounds, or tank controls. Those game design conventions worked within the constraints at the time and lent to the identity of the RE trilogy. Moving the franchise toward more action and less survival horror wasn’t necessarily bad but Christ, the common consensus makes it seem as if that’s the ideal when it’s not. It’s not like that changed anything because RE has been chugging along for over two decades trying to recapture the success of RE4 and failing. If anything RE4 made things worse.
Let alone the industry-wide influence of the game and its ramifications, the game itself has its own trifles too. Opting for an even item distribution that rewards the player for engaging in the combat system, it makes for an engaging gameplay loop, but at the same time it trivializes the attaché case. Why have an item management system if you’re inundated with so many resources? You almost never have to think about what to use and when, even in Professional runs.
On top of that, the game’s sense of progression is kind of slipshod. If you know what you’re doing you can clear every room without weapon mods or upgrades on your first play-through. Hell, you can beat the whole game using exploits with the knife or silver ghost and not once visiting the merchant. There can be roadblocks but it’s doable, which you can’t really say for the previous RE games unless you’ve studied their ins and outs and gotten intimately familiar with their structure.
As the cherry on the sundae, the strides this game took to make itself stand out from the other RE games make it worse. I’m probably the only person that gives a shit about RE stories on the planet, which checks out sure, but RE4 does not pay heed to anything established before. Canon be damned. As a result you get a game who’s story is just a fatuous nothing burger with funny one-liners being the only thing holding it up. RE2 laid the groundwork for a duo-logy about a man learning to overcome his survivor guilt and RE4 was just like fuck that, ballistics and right hands coming off. Shit irks me.
Part of me wishes 3.5, or the hook man demo, was the game we actually got and RE took an indefinite break from then on, but that’s not how the cookie crumbles I suppose. A lot of people put this game on an unreasonably high pedestal and future games in the genre to an impossibly high standard, and I never really understood why. But just as I have the right to my feelings, they have the right to theirs, and there’s no taking away how something makes you feel. If something is special to you, more power to you, that’s great.
But I dunno, this game disregards something else that’s special to me and everyone likes it precisely because of that, which is a bit frustrating. But at the end of the day the game we have is still a well made, tight package that came just at the nick of time to send waves through the channel, and that’s alright. I’m not a fan of how popular the game is, but the game itself is still cool despite that.