What if Resident Evil 4 did away with tank controls in favor of ‘modern’ controls? That’s the question RE4make is trying to answer, and from which many of its other changes flow. After all, it’s precisely that control scheme which lent the OG many of its unique dynamics. Yet it is also an overwhelming reality of convention and industry standards that makes tank controls in a modern game an incredibly hard sell, which no doubt influenced RE4make’s decision to move away from it. But, I do not believe that tank controls are irreplaceable to the OG’s success. If there’s any opportunity a remake has, it’s to twist the original to see what happens, and RE4R sure has done some twisting. Now freed of tank controls, what are the consequences of that in the remake?
The most noticeable changes by far are that Leon can now aim and reload while moving, and sprint in any direction. In RE4 this was restricted to put more emphasis on aiming as an action and your main method of interaction with the world, as if you were playing a light gun shooter (not unlike how stealth games make your player character poor at combat to emphasize stealth, or how games with a melee focus restrict the usefulness of ranged weapons). In the remake, this was done away with for the sake of appealing to intuitiveness and player comfort. However, by having it play and control more similarly to other shooters on the market this came at the expense of identity. Not that identity and uniqueness really impacts the quality of the game, but people do not experience games by just their ‘objective’ quality. So on RE4’s launch many fans called it “not a real RE game” precisely because of how differently it played to older RE games, whereas nowadays the definition of a “real RE game” has become much looser. It may be a silly and illogical and inconsistent thing, but humans were never perfectly logical creatures to begin with. To mitigate this loss of identity by taking away what makes something unique, you're better off also giving something unique back.
These changes also have several other knock-on effects on a mechanical level. Ranged attacks are now much less oppressive since the player can now simply sidestep most of them, reloading your gun now leaves you much less vulnerable, and the range of enemy melee attacks had to be readjusted to keep up with the player’s newfound mobility. On top of that, there’s the fact that RE4R was designed from the ground up to be a multiplatform release, and thus had to be designed with keyboard/mouse controls in mind. RE4 was designed mainly around the limited movement speed of the crosshair to give you more accuracy on a gamepad; enemies would slow down when they got close enough so you had the proper time and space to line up a shot. Playing RE4 with KB/M controls on PC or motion controls on the Wii then made target acquisition and targeting specific limbs much faster, leading to a different experience where the player could more easily control any given situation. Removing tank controls from RE4 as is would result in a more toothless experience, contrary to the survival horror vibe it wants to go for.
So how does RE4R make sure enemies can keep up with the player’s newfound mobility? For starters, enemies are much more aggressive and harder to control. They initiate attacks from further away, have more tracking on their attacks, and their attacks cover a greater distance. More enemies can attack you at the same time, and most encounters tend to feature more enemies than in the original. RE4R also implements RE2make’s crosshair bloom, making it harder to land hits unless you stand still to steady your aim (unless you have a laser dot equipped on your pistol), but also having a fully steadied crosshair give your next shot enhanced properties on hit.
The most important, and potentially most interesting change by far is that Ganados now take multiple shots to stagger (more prevalently the case on Hardcore difficulty and above, most of this piece is written with the higher difficulty settings in mind). It’s a necessary change considering the ease of target acquisition with the new control scheme. Otherwise automatic weapons would become even more busted than they were in RE4, but also because being able to move while holding the knife would let you set up a lot of staggers for free. What makes this change so interesting however is how it could in turn interact with the ammo economy, reload management, and the new focus shot system. The player could double/triple tap a Ganado for a quick stagger, or they could risk standing still for a moment to line up a focus shot for a guaranteed stagger using only one bullet--saving up on ammo in the long term and staving off a reload in the short term. This way RE4R could have emulated the control constraints of the original in a way where the player wants to not move while aiming rather than being forced to do so, providing a best-of-both-worlds option where the original light gun-shooter dynamic can be preserved in a way that’s also intuitive to most players. Plus, said “focus shots” could be applied to the knife as well, again incentivizing rather than forcing you to stand still for enhanced attack properties. Not only that, but the fact that you’d have to consider firing more shots at once rather than doing one-tap-into-roundhouse repeatedly would add some more nuance to reload management and decision making than RE4 did[^2]! At the same time, the increased aggression of enemy encounters and enemies themselves would make it harder than in the original to stand still and line up a shot, so it’s not as if lining up focus shots would be completely free.
Now, note that I am speaking entirely theoretically. In practice, RE4R doesn’t work like what I just said at all. Focus shots do not cause guaranteed staggers, they only slightly increase the critical hit chance and stagger value of the next shot, which is only a minor reward for a major risk. It makes steadying your aim not worth doing outside the accuracy benefits. Even worse is when you apply the laser dot upgrade on a pistol, which automatically makes every shot a focus shot and makes the stand-still/focus shot dynamic largely irrelevant for pistols (just like in the original Deus Ex, for example). Here I wish the game had adopted a hybrid crosshair system where you had both the OG laser sight and the RE2R crosshair bloom/focus shot dynamic, but alas.
But perhaps the most damning design choices in RE4R for me are the following two combined: the pistols have a relatively low base rate of fire, and enemies can’t be consistently flinched (i.e., a hitstun reaction without a melee prompt) even upon being shot in the limbs. What this means is that even if you do want to double/triple-tap an enemy into a stagger, the time it takes to get off enough shots is so long that in most cases enemies are about to hit you before you can get a stagger off anyways. In a system where one shot guarantees a stagger a la the original, having a low rate of fire to emphasize careful aiming makes sense, but in the current system that asks you to shoot multiple times for a stagger, a low rate of fire is just painful. At the same time, you cannot create additional time and space to set up staggers by flinching enemies, because whether an enemy will flinch on hit is semi-random[^3]. This wouldn’t have been as much of a problem in games where your workhorse weapons had a higher rate of fire (it’s why in games with RNG-based hitstun like Doom, a fast-firing weapon like the Chaingun is your go-to stunlock weapon), but the opposite being true in this case only exacerbates the fact that trying to control crowds in RE4make is generally unreliable and too slow to match the Ganados’ new aggression and numbers.
As a result of crowds becoming more unreliable to control, it turns the original’s pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay of enemy state manipulation and well-timed i-frames into something more akin to horde shooters like Devil Daggers and Serious Sam. When the state of an enemy or a group of enemies becomes harder and more inconsistent to manipulate, the player will naturally tend to mitigate as much inconsistency as possible by keeping their distance from said uncontrollable threats. Crowd control is now less a matter of creating CC/i-frame opportunities by manipulating enemies to your benefit, but rather trying to out-kill an onslaught of enemies before they overwhelm you. In the original you could play aggressively right in the thick of enemy crowds thanks to the many i-frame/CC options at your disposal, but in RE4R this has been significantly nerfed: vaulting over walls/through windows or climbing ladders no longer gives you i-frames, contextual animations have next to no exit i-frames after you’ve regained control (i.e. still being briefly invincible after Leon recovers from being knocked on the floor or after doing a suplex), and kicks have a smaller hitbox and a smaller effective range on account of enemies tending to be more spaced out from each other now. Being caught in the middle of a crowd in RE4R has a higher tendency to snowball into you being stunlocked to death now that enemies are more aggressive, i-frames aren’t as easy to get, your context melee moves not being as useful for CC anymore, and stuns not being as reliable. While RE4R might have done away with tank controls in favor of more “fluid” controls, trying to control the situation has never been more difficult.
That said, me being Serious Sam’s strongest online defender, I don’t think this kind of gameplay in a RE game is inherently problematic, but when you view RE4R through the lens of a horde shooter you can start to see why it doesn’t really succeed at being one either. For starters, RE4R makes it too easy to kite enemies forever. While there was nothing preventing you from doing so in the original, it’s something that didn’t come as naturally to do on account of Leon’s backwards movement speed being slower than his forwards speed. If you wanted to create some distance, you had to turn your back towards the enemy and so lose sight of the situation. But in RE4R Leon can run towards the camera, allowing him to see his pursuers while running at full speed, thus rendering that original dynamic void. As most enemies in RE4R cannot catch up to a sprinting Leon (outside of Garradors, who only appear sparingly), whether you can kite them forever depends on whether the level you’re in gives you enough space to do so. In RE4R that is the case most of the time, outside of setpiece encounters where you get gradually boxed in from every direction (like the village and cabin fight). The original also made kiting come less naturally to do simply because the context melee moves were that useful, and made you want to stick closer to enemies to take advantage of a stagger before the enemy recovered. Not only was it free damage, crowd control, and invincibility, but it also saved ammo. On paper this is still the case in RE4R, but as mentioned before, context melee moves are now much less safe to do in the middle of crowds, and less rewarding.
Furthermore, RE4’s and by extension RE4R’s enemy cast were never designed to be that interesting to fight from a distance. The nuances in fighting a group of Ganados wielding a mix of one-handed, two-handed or no weapons at all become significantly less pronounced when you aren’t in melee range. Pressure units like Plagas spawns, Chainsawmen and Brutes were not meant to be that threatening from a distance, and ranged enemies with crossbows and grenades were designed to complement regular melee Ganados rather than be any interesting to fight on their own, which is why they have lower HP. There are no real long-range pressure units outside of Crossbow Brutes to make kiting harder to pull off, and Crossbow Brutes only appear in the last third of the game. As a result, target prioritization often feels like a matter of targeting whoever happens to be closest, while occasionally focusing on the ranged Ganado here and there. The constantly shifting threats and priorities that RE4 had with its close-quarters combat or Serious Sam has in its diverse enemy horde compositions is a large part of what kept them engaging, yet RE4R feels like it has neither. For this new horde shooter-ish gameplay to really tick, RE4R would need more enemy types that can control space from different ranges as if it were Doom 2 in order to fit the more ranged focus of its combat, rather than stick with the original enemy roster where most enemy types are melee combatants.
The main consequence of how kite-heavy RE4R’s gameplay turned out is that fights now feel a lot more homogenous, despite many encounters being largely identical to their original counterparts! The nuances that the tank controls and pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay brought to each encounter are largely gone, and what’s come in its place doesn’t truly fill the void (however, with more radical changes to the original formula, or by bringing it more in line with the original instead, it could have done so). While it’s true that fights in the original could easily be boiled down by doing headshots into roundhouses ad infinitum if you wanted to, the system still allowed for a high degree of control and aggression the better the player got, which combined with the nuances in enemy behavior and controlled injections of RNG kept the game fresh and engaging even across multiple playthroughs. RE4R’s system on the other hand relinquishes potential player control in favor of creating uncontrollable chaos, resulting in a more defensive and reactive game where reasonably skilled play is identical to higher skilled play simply because there is less space for expression. Playing “lame” is what RE4R’s higher difficulties push you into by default. Again, this style of gameplay that you commonly see in horde shooters isn’t inherently problematic, but RE4R doesn’t have the enemies or spaces or tools or target prioritization to make the process of planning around and dismantling hordes that interesting.
To give you a (sharp) edge amidst all this chaos, the game thankfully gives you room to breathe using the new knife. Now that moving away from tank controls would take focus away from the original light gun-shooter feel and thus by extent Leon’s signature preference for pistols, RE4R absolutely made the right call by instead focusing more on Leon’s signature knife. New knife moves include being able to perform takedowns on stunned or knocked down enemies, which instantly kills regular Ganados and deals massive damage to higher-tier Ganados, while also preventing Plagas spawns. You can backstab unaware enemies using the new stealth mechanic, which felt like something Leon should have been always able to do, what with him being a special agent. My favorite new interaction is how takedowns work together with the new wallsplat state: carefully aimed staggers or kicks that cause enemies to stumble backwards into a wall puts them in a wallsplat state, during which you can execute a knife takedown on them from the front for big damage. It adds a new and interesting dimension to fighting Chainsawmen and Brutes where you’re trying to position yourself correctly to chain multiple takedowns together, and so get rid of them quickly while saving up on bullets.
Of course, it’s impossible not to bring up the new knife parry[^4]. It works as you’d expect. Time a parry right--you escape damage. Time it perfectly–you get a free stagger on top. It’s the only tool in your arsenal to let you play with any degree of aggression rather than endless kiting, so regardless of your feelings about the prevalence of parries in modern action games, the knife parries are arguably a net positive inclusion in RE4R. Thankfully RE4R is sane enough not to have parries be the answer for every attack: you won’t be able to chain parry a stream of arrows/bullets, a knife won’t help much against fire or explosives, chainsaw swings can only be blocked with your knife and usually end up breaking it in the process, and hammer swings and grabs can only be ducked or ran away from rather than parried. Sounds good, right?
Well, there’s actually two major caveats that end up kneecapping the usefulness of parries in larger fights. One is that while perfect parrying attacks gives you some reward, successfully ducking grabs gives you nothing. Second is that unarmed grab-happy Ganados are present in almost every encounter, and you can increase their numbers if you disarm a Ganado holding a weapon. So what does this have to do with parrying? The issue is that even if you’re trying to play with some measure of aggression by parrying a group of enemies in their faces, the presence of unparryable unarmed Ganados will make parrying an unsafe choice compared to just kiting the entire group. You’ll parry one, and then you get grabbed immediately afterwards from behind. You could of course focus on the unarmed Ganado by doing a well-timed duck, but this in turn leaves you vulnerable to any other kind of attack, nor do you get any reward out of well-timed ducks. And even if perfect ducks gave you a free roundhouse kick like perfect parries, it still wouldn’t be an effective CC option with how nerfed the effective range of kicks has become and enemies being more spaced out in general. It’s a deadly mix that’s not worth getting close to.
While creating dynamic situations where some player options are less or more optimal than others is what action games should strive for, here we have a situation where next to no option except one (the almighty kite) ends up being the correct one, which is just as bad as one option being so strong that anything else is just redundant. It’s something that could have been avoided with more consistent flinch/stagger rules on (unarmed) enemies. If anything, that’s already how it works against Ganados with throwables in RE4R! You may not be able to parry explosions or fire, but you can shoot a ranged Ganado’s projectile to make it prematurely explode/deflect or shoot them in their arm to momentarily disable them. That way you can proactively create safe opportunities to deal with melee Ganados without having to keep kiting for an opening. Instead, you’ll just have to deal with the chaos.
As to why the developers chose to make RE4R more a game about being subjected to chaos, one can only guess, but mine is that it was done to bring it more in line with the Resident Evil 2 Remake that the team previously worked on. RE2R was unabashedly about risk mitigation and being subjected to RNG, also as a way of minimizing player control over situations for the sake of creating horror. How many shots it took to kill a zombie there was even more random! But the key reason it worked there and less so in RE4R is because of RE2R’s traditional survival horror structure. You could kite zombies, sure, but the even scarcer ammo management discouraged killing every zombie you see in favor of running past them, whereas the narrow halls of the RPD made running past zombies easier said than done. The fact that your objectives made you backtrack through zombie-filled rooms you already visited added more long-term considerations on whether to spend ammo on zombies in a room you’re likely to revisit often, and on how to plan your route through the map. Add an invincible pursuer enemy to the mix, and you get gameplay that really tickles the noggin’. The micro-level dynamics of dealing with individuals or groups of enemies in RE2R is simpler than in RE4R, but what kept RE2R engaging was the macro-level resource management and routing gameplay on top of that. RE4R being more of a linear action game means these macro-level dynamics couldn’t be as present. It’s probably why RE4 added more nuance to how micro-level engagements played out to keep the linear gameplay interesting, even if Leon roundhouse kicking and suplexing enemies would make the game end up feeling less scary. The remake then trying to make the horror more pronounced again by downplaying player control over situations without adding anything to fill the void probably wasn’t the best choice.
Overall, while the new additions from RE4R to RE4 are generally okay, the changes to existing elements end up feeling haphazard. It doesn’t quite try to refine/emulate the original, but at the same time doesn’t try to do something radically new either. Perhaps the intention was to bring it closer to RE2R in terms of gameplay, but in a linear action context that would never quite work. When changing a core element such as tank controls, especially in a game as mechanically lean as RE4 was, there will be a lot of ripple effects. Some will be obvious, but a lot will be more subtle. As it turns out, a lot of the subtler ones are also the little details that helped make the original tick. Without a clear vision on where to take the gameplay in a new modernized context, and without thorough knowledge on how the parts in the original moved and worked, it’s easy to end up with what feels like a stilted translation of an old text. At the very least, it is interesting to see how experiments like this pan out as a way of reexamining what made the original (not) work, and for trying out what-if scenarios. I did expect a remix of RE4 rather than a comprehensive reimagining, and that’s largely what I got.
I give it a 5/5 S.T.A.R.S.
Addenda:
The new ammo crafting system may feel like a thoughtless modernism, and perhaps it indeed was one, but I think it ends up being a major net positive. Basically, by introducing more crafting items with a high drop chance to the enemy loot table, you end up reducing the chances of you getting healing or ammo drops. The more items there are in a loot table, the lower the theoretical maximum drop chance of any given item is going to be. But at the same time, these crafting items let you mitigate these lower drop chances by giving you more direct control over what kind of ammo or grenade you want to craft. It’s a brilliant two-birds-with-one-stone solution! It makes resources more scarce to more often push outside your comfort zone and reconsider every shot (especially in comparison to how lenient RE4 could get ammo drops, even on Professional). At the same time, giving extra control over what resources you get prevents the game from feeling like you’re at the total mercy of RNGesus. It also has the hidden benefit of smoothing over and covering up the ammo rubberbanding the game does under the surface, which helps diminish the notion that you can expect the game to automatically start dropping extra bullets for your gun if you happen to almost run out.
Footnotes:
[^1]: Incidentally, the original already has a near-identical dynamic when it comes to the time it takes to target different limbs. Because of how OG Leon always recenters his aim to head-level when deploying his guns, it means that it’s always faster to move your crosshair over an enemy’s head (for doing headshot into roundhouse kick for crowd control) than it is to move it over their shins (for doing legshot into suplex for big single-target damage). Re-centering your camera upon aiming down sights is another one of those things that you absolutely could not get away with in a modern game, even though it comes at the potential expense of cool dynamics like these.
[^2]: Rather than one shot guaranteeing a stagger or a flinch reaction depending on the enemy hitbox you shot and the state they were in, now there’s a hidden bar for staggers and flinches that fills up the more damage you inflict. How much stagger/flinch value a shot inflicts is calculated via an obtuse formula which depends on the base stagger/flinch value of your current weapon, the damage of that weapon, whether it’s a focus shot, and some additional random deviation. Basically, as you upgrade the damage on your weapon, the more often it will inflict stagger/flinches on hit. What this means is that in the early game stuns are triggered inconsistently as all hell, and throughout the game it becomes difficult to intuit what exactly the minimum and maximum shots required to stun is, which becomes even more complicated since some enemy variants have different stagger resistances on top of that. Then to throw another wrench in the works, enemies in the Island get increased stagger resistance overall.
[^3]: Reloading is one of those things that gets taken for granted in most shooters, yet RE4 forcing you to stand still while reloading already makes it a more interesting implementation than those in most other games. When you consider that reloading and limited magazine capacity is the shooter equivalent of stamina systems in action games, you can start to see how barely any games try to do anything interesting with it and just include it for realism’s sake. Basically it’s an inevitable cooldown where the player can control when and where it gets reset. In RE4 this led to several interesting decisions, where sometimes it would be better to forego knifing a downed enemy in favor of reloading your gun so you were prepared once all other downed enemies woke up. In other situations where reloading was too unsafe to do, it’d push you to switch to another weapon that either doesn’t really fit the situation or uses an ammo type you’d rather not spend, which ended up creating cool moments of improvisation. RE4R having smaller base magazine capacities and making you expend more bullets at once would mean reloads have a larger presence in combat, but being able to freely move and even run while reloading cuts out most of the risks associated with reloading. Annoyingly there’s also the tendency on top for most shooters to just let you upgrade reload speeds and magazine capacities to the point where the downtime of reloads becomes irrelevant, which includes both RE4 and RE4R.
[^4]: Though I’d hesitate to call parries being new to RE4. The original already had parries, it was called “shoot an enemy in the face right before they hit you”. This even worked against Chainsawmen! Normally they tank blows to the head as a pressure unit should, but shoot a Chainsawman in the head right as he’s swinging off your head, and you get a guaranteed stagger! Then again, this is a bit easier said than done considering enemies would rear their head back right as they swung at you.
The Markdown markup for footnotes will remain unmarked as-is until Backloggd adds support for them like any sane website made in the Reiwa era.
The most noticeable changes by far are that Leon can now aim and reload while moving, and sprint in any direction. In RE4 this was restricted to put more emphasis on aiming as an action and your main method of interaction with the world, as if you were playing a light gun shooter (not unlike how stealth games make your player character poor at combat to emphasize stealth, or how games with a melee focus restrict the usefulness of ranged weapons). In the remake, this was done away with for the sake of appealing to intuitiveness and player comfort. However, by having it play and control more similarly to other shooters on the market this came at the expense of identity. Not that identity and uniqueness really impacts the quality of the game, but people do not experience games by just their ‘objective’ quality. So on RE4’s launch many fans called it “not a real RE game” precisely because of how differently it played to older RE games, whereas nowadays the definition of a “real RE game” has become much looser. It may be a silly and illogical and inconsistent thing, but humans were never perfectly logical creatures to begin with. To mitigate this loss of identity by taking away what makes something unique, you're better off also giving something unique back.
These changes also have several other knock-on effects on a mechanical level. Ranged attacks are now much less oppressive since the player can now simply sidestep most of them, reloading your gun now leaves you much less vulnerable, and the range of enemy melee attacks had to be readjusted to keep up with the player’s newfound mobility. On top of that, there’s the fact that RE4R was designed from the ground up to be a multiplatform release, and thus had to be designed with keyboard/mouse controls in mind. RE4 was designed mainly around the limited movement speed of the crosshair to give you more accuracy on a gamepad; enemies would slow down when they got close enough so you had the proper time and space to line up a shot. Playing RE4 with KB/M controls on PC or motion controls on the Wii then made target acquisition and targeting specific limbs much faster, leading to a different experience where the player could more easily control any given situation. Removing tank controls from RE4 as is would result in a more toothless experience, contrary to the survival horror vibe it wants to go for.
So how does RE4R make sure enemies can keep up with the player’s newfound mobility? For starters, enemies are much more aggressive and harder to control. They initiate attacks from further away, have more tracking on their attacks, and their attacks cover a greater distance. More enemies can attack you at the same time, and most encounters tend to feature more enemies than in the original. RE4R also implements RE2make’s crosshair bloom, making it harder to land hits unless you stand still to steady your aim (unless you have a laser dot equipped on your pistol), but also having a fully steadied crosshair give your next shot enhanced properties on hit.
The most important, and potentially most interesting change by far is that Ganados now take multiple shots to stagger (more prevalently the case on Hardcore difficulty and above, most of this piece is written with the higher difficulty settings in mind). It’s a necessary change considering the ease of target acquisition with the new control scheme. Otherwise automatic weapons would become even more busted than they were in RE4, but also because being able to move while holding the knife would let you set up a lot of staggers for free. What makes this change so interesting however is how it could in turn interact with the ammo economy, reload management, and the new focus shot system. The player could double/triple tap a Ganado for a quick stagger, or they could risk standing still for a moment to line up a focus shot for a guaranteed stagger using only one bullet--saving up on ammo in the long term and staving off a reload in the short term. This way RE4R could have emulated the control constraints of the original in a way where the player wants to not move while aiming rather than being forced to do so, providing a best-of-both-worlds option where the original light gun-shooter dynamic can be preserved in a way that’s also intuitive to most players. Plus, said “focus shots” could be applied to the knife as well, again incentivizing rather than forcing you to stand still for enhanced attack properties. Not only that, but the fact that you’d have to consider firing more shots at once rather than doing one-tap-into-roundhouse repeatedly would add some more nuance to reload management and decision making than RE4 did[^2]! At the same time, the increased aggression of enemy encounters and enemies themselves would make it harder than in the original to stand still and line up a shot, so it’s not as if lining up focus shots would be completely free.
Now, note that I am speaking entirely theoretically. In practice, RE4R doesn’t work like what I just said at all. Focus shots do not cause guaranteed staggers, they only slightly increase the critical hit chance and stagger value of the next shot, which is only a minor reward for a major risk. It makes steadying your aim not worth doing outside the accuracy benefits. Even worse is when you apply the laser dot upgrade on a pistol, which automatically makes every shot a focus shot and makes the stand-still/focus shot dynamic largely irrelevant for pistols (just like in the original Deus Ex, for example). Here I wish the game had adopted a hybrid crosshair system where you had both the OG laser sight and the RE2R crosshair bloom/focus shot dynamic, but alas.
But perhaps the most damning design choices in RE4R for me are the following two combined: the pistols have a relatively low base rate of fire, and enemies can’t be consistently flinched (i.e., a hitstun reaction without a melee prompt) even upon being shot in the limbs. What this means is that even if you do want to double/triple-tap an enemy into a stagger, the time it takes to get off enough shots is so long that in most cases enemies are about to hit you before you can get a stagger off anyways. In a system where one shot guarantees a stagger a la the original, having a low rate of fire to emphasize careful aiming makes sense, but in the current system that asks you to shoot multiple times for a stagger, a low rate of fire is just painful. At the same time, you cannot create additional time and space to set up staggers by flinching enemies, because whether an enemy will flinch on hit is semi-random[^3]. This wouldn’t have been as much of a problem in games where your workhorse weapons had a higher rate of fire (it’s why in games with RNG-based hitstun like Doom, a fast-firing weapon like the Chaingun is your go-to stunlock weapon), but the opposite being true in this case only exacerbates the fact that trying to control crowds in RE4make is generally unreliable and too slow to match the Ganados’ new aggression and numbers.
As a result of crowds becoming more unreliable to control, it turns the original’s pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay of enemy state manipulation and well-timed i-frames into something more akin to horde shooters like Devil Daggers and Serious Sam. When the state of an enemy or a group of enemies becomes harder and more inconsistent to manipulate, the player will naturally tend to mitigate as much inconsistency as possible by keeping their distance from said uncontrollable threats. Crowd control is now less a matter of creating CC/i-frame opportunities by manipulating enemies to your benefit, but rather trying to out-kill an onslaught of enemies before they overwhelm you. In the original you could play aggressively right in the thick of enemy crowds thanks to the many i-frame/CC options at your disposal, but in RE4R this has been significantly nerfed: vaulting over walls/through windows or climbing ladders no longer gives you i-frames, contextual animations have next to no exit i-frames after you’ve regained control (i.e. still being briefly invincible after Leon recovers from being knocked on the floor or after doing a suplex), and kicks have a smaller hitbox and a smaller effective range on account of enemies tending to be more spaced out from each other now. Being caught in the middle of a crowd in RE4R has a higher tendency to snowball into you being stunlocked to death now that enemies are more aggressive, i-frames aren’t as easy to get, your context melee moves not being as useful for CC anymore, and stuns not being as reliable. While RE4R might have done away with tank controls in favor of more “fluid” controls, trying to control the situation has never been more difficult.
That said, me being Serious Sam’s strongest online defender, I don’t think this kind of gameplay in a RE game is inherently problematic, but when you view RE4R through the lens of a horde shooter you can start to see why it doesn’t really succeed at being one either. For starters, RE4R makes it too easy to kite enemies forever. While there was nothing preventing you from doing so in the original, it’s something that didn’t come as naturally to do on account of Leon’s backwards movement speed being slower than his forwards speed. If you wanted to create some distance, you had to turn your back towards the enemy and so lose sight of the situation. But in RE4R Leon can run towards the camera, allowing him to see his pursuers while running at full speed, thus rendering that original dynamic void. As most enemies in RE4R cannot catch up to a sprinting Leon (outside of Garradors, who only appear sparingly), whether you can kite them forever depends on whether the level you’re in gives you enough space to do so. In RE4R that is the case most of the time, outside of setpiece encounters where you get gradually boxed in from every direction (like the village and cabin fight). The original also made kiting come less naturally to do simply because the context melee moves were that useful, and made you want to stick closer to enemies to take advantage of a stagger before the enemy recovered. Not only was it free damage, crowd control, and invincibility, but it also saved ammo. On paper this is still the case in RE4R, but as mentioned before, context melee moves are now much less safe to do in the middle of crowds, and less rewarding.
Furthermore, RE4’s and by extension RE4R’s enemy cast were never designed to be that interesting to fight from a distance. The nuances in fighting a group of Ganados wielding a mix of one-handed, two-handed or no weapons at all become significantly less pronounced when you aren’t in melee range. Pressure units like Plagas spawns, Chainsawmen and Brutes were not meant to be that threatening from a distance, and ranged enemies with crossbows and grenades were designed to complement regular melee Ganados rather than be any interesting to fight on their own, which is why they have lower HP. There are no real long-range pressure units outside of Crossbow Brutes to make kiting harder to pull off, and Crossbow Brutes only appear in the last third of the game. As a result, target prioritization often feels like a matter of targeting whoever happens to be closest, while occasionally focusing on the ranged Ganado here and there. The constantly shifting threats and priorities that RE4 had with its close-quarters combat or Serious Sam has in its diverse enemy horde compositions is a large part of what kept them engaging, yet RE4R feels like it has neither. For this new horde shooter-ish gameplay to really tick, RE4R would need more enemy types that can control space from different ranges as if it were Doom 2 in order to fit the more ranged focus of its combat, rather than stick with the original enemy roster where most enemy types are melee combatants.
The main consequence of how kite-heavy RE4R’s gameplay turned out is that fights now feel a lot more homogenous, despite many encounters being largely identical to their original counterparts! The nuances that the tank controls and pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay brought to each encounter are largely gone, and what’s come in its place doesn’t truly fill the void (however, with more radical changes to the original formula, or by bringing it more in line with the original instead, it could have done so). While it’s true that fights in the original could easily be boiled down by doing headshots into roundhouses ad infinitum if you wanted to, the system still allowed for a high degree of control and aggression the better the player got, which combined with the nuances in enemy behavior and controlled injections of RNG kept the game fresh and engaging even across multiple playthroughs. RE4R’s system on the other hand relinquishes potential player control in favor of creating uncontrollable chaos, resulting in a more defensive and reactive game where reasonably skilled play is identical to higher skilled play simply because there is less space for expression. Playing “lame” is what RE4R’s higher difficulties push you into by default. Again, this style of gameplay that you commonly see in horde shooters isn’t inherently problematic, but RE4R doesn’t have the enemies or spaces or tools or target prioritization to make the process of planning around and dismantling hordes that interesting.
To give you a (sharp) edge amidst all this chaos, the game thankfully gives you room to breathe using the new knife. Now that moving away from tank controls would take focus away from the original light gun-shooter feel and thus by extent Leon’s signature preference for pistols, RE4R absolutely made the right call by instead focusing more on Leon’s signature knife. New knife moves include being able to perform takedowns on stunned or knocked down enemies, which instantly kills regular Ganados and deals massive damage to higher-tier Ganados, while also preventing Plagas spawns. You can backstab unaware enemies using the new stealth mechanic, which felt like something Leon should have been always able to do, what with him being a special agent. My favorite new interaction is how takedowns work together with the new wallsplat state: carefully aimed staggers or kicks that cause enemies to stumble backwards into a wall puts them in a wallsplat state, during which you can execute a knife takedown on them from the front for big damage. It adds a new and interesting dimension to fighting Chainsawmen and Brutes where you’re trying to position yourself correctly to chain multiple takedowns together, and so get rid of them quickly while saving up on bullets.
Of course, it’s impossible not to bring up the new knife parry[^4]. It works as you’d expect. Time a parry right--you escape damage. Time it perfectly–you get a free stagger on top. It’s the only tool in your arsenal to let you play with any degree of aggression rather than endless kiting, so regardless of your feelings about the prevalence of parries in modern action games, the knife parries are arguably a net positive inclusion in RE4R. Thankfully RE4R is sane enough not to have parries be the answer for every attack: you won’t be able to chain parry a stream of arrows/bullets, a knife won’t help much against fire or explosives, chainsaw swings can only be blocked with your knife and usually end up breaking it in the process, and hammer swings and grabs can only be ducked or ran away from rather than parried. Sounds good, right?
Well, there’s actually two major caveats that end up kneecapping the usefulness of parries in larger fights. One is that while perfect parrying attacks gives you some reward, successfully ducking grabs gives you nothing. Second is that unarmed grab-happy Ganados are present in almost every encounter, and you can increase their numbers if you disarm a Ganado holding a weapon. So what does this have to do with parrying? The issue is that even if you’re trying to play with some measure of aggression by parrying a group of enemies in their faces, the presence of unparryable unarmed Ganados will make parrying an unsafe choice compared to just kiting the entire group. You’ll parry one, and then you get grabbed immediately afterwards from behind. You could of course focus on the unarmed Ganado by doing a well-timed duck, but this in turn leaves you vulnerable to any other kind of attack, nor do you get any reward out of well-timed ducks. And even if perfect ducks gave you a free roundhouse kick like perfect parries, it still wouldn’t be an effective CC option with how nerfed the effective range of kicks has become and enemies being more spaced out in general. It’s a deadly mix that’s not worth getting close to.
While creating dynamic situations where some player options are less or more optimal than others is what action games should strive for, here we have a situation where next to no option except one (the almighty kite) ends up being the correct one, which is just as bad as one option being so strong that anything else is just redundant. It’s something that could have been avoided with more consistent flinch/stagger rules on (unarmed) enemies. If anything, that’s already how it works against Ganados with throwables in RE4R! You may not be able to parry explosions or fire, but you can shoot a ranged Ganado’s projectile to make it prematurely explode/deflect or shoot them in their arm to momentarily disable them. That way you can proactively create safe opportunities to deal with melee Ganados without having to keep kiting for an opening. Instead, you’ll just have to deal with the chaos.
As to why the developers chose to make RE4R more a game about being subjected to chaos, one can only guess, but mine is that it was done to bring it more in line with the Resident Evil 2 Remake that the team previously worked on. RE2R was unabashedly about risk mitigation and being subjected to RNG, also as a way of minimizing player control over situations for the sake of creating horror. How many shots it took to kill a zombie there was even more random! But the key reason it worked there and less so in RE4R is because of RE2R’s traditional survival horror structure. You could kite zombies, sure, but the even scarcer ammo management discouraged killing every zombie you see in favor of running past them, whereas the narrow halls of the RPD made running past zombies easier said than done. The fact that your objectives made you backtrack through zombie-filled rooms you already visited added more long-term considerations on whether to spend ammo on zombies in a room you’re likely to revisit often, and on how to plan your route through the map. Add an invincible pursuer enemy to the mix, and you get gameplay that really tickles the noggin’. The micro-level dynamics of dealing with individuals or groups of enemies in RE2R is simpler than in RE4R, but what kept RE2R engaging was the macro-level resource management and routing gameplay on top of that. RE4R being more of a linear action game means these macro-level dynamics couldn’t be as present. It’s probably why RE4 added more nuance to how micro-level engagements played out to keep the linear gameplay interesting, even if Leon roundhouse kicking and suplexing enemies would make the game end up feeling less scary. The remake then trying to make the horror more pronounced again by downplaying player control over situations without adding anything to fill the void probably wasn’t the best choice.
Overall, while the new additions from RE4R to RE4 are generally okay, the changes to existing elements end up feeling haphazard. It doesn’t quite try to refine/emulate the original, but at the same time doesn’t try to do something radically new either. Perhaps the intention was to bring it closer to RE2R in terms of gameplay, but in a linear action context that would never quite work. When changing a core element such as tank controls, especially in a game as mechanically lean as RE4 was, there will be a lot of ripple effects. Some will be obvious, but a lot will be more subtle. As it turns out, a lot of the subtler ones are also the little details that helped make the original tick. Without a clear vision on where to take the gameplay in a new modernized context, and without thorough knowledge on how the parts in the original moved and worked, it’s easy to end up with what feels like a stilted translation of an old text. At the very least, it is interesting to see how experiments like this pan out as a way of reexamining what made the original (not) work, and for trying out what-if scenarios. I did expect a remix of RE4 rather than a comprehensive reimagining, and that’s largely what I got.
I give it a 5/5 S.T.A.R.S.
Addenda:
The new ammo crafting system may feel like a thoughtless modernism, and perhaps it indeed was one, but I think it ends up being a major net positive. Basically, by introducing more crafting items with a high drop chance to the enemy loot table, you end up reducing the chances of you getting healing or ammo drops. The more items there are in a loot table, the lower the theoretical maximum drop chance of any given item is going to be. But at the same time, these crafting items let you mitigate these lower drop chances by giving you more direct control over what kind of ammo or grenade you want to craft. It’s a brilliant two-birds-with-one-stone solution! It makes resources more scarce to more often push outside your comfort zone and reconsider every shot (especially in comparison to how lenient RE4 could get ammo drops, even on Professional). At the same time, giving extra control over what resources you get prevents the game from feeling like you’re at the total mercy of RNGesus. It also has the hidden benefit of smoothing over and covering up the ammo rubberbanding the game does under the surface, which helps diminish the notion that you can expect the game to automatically start dropping extra bullets for your gun if you happen to almost run out.
Footnotes:
[^1]: Incidentally, the original already has a near-identical dynamic when it comes to the time it takes to target different limbs. Because of how OG Leon always recenters his aim to head-level when deploying his guns, it means that it’s always faster to move your crosshair over an enemy’s head (for doing headshot into roundhouse kick for crowd control) than it is to move it over their shins (for doing legshot into suplex for big single-target damage). Re-centering your camera upon aiming down sights is another one of those things that you absolutely could not get away with in a modern game, even though it comes at the potential expense of cool dynamics like these.
[^2]: Rather than one shot guaranteeing a stagger or a flinch reaction depending on the enemy hitbox you shot and the state they were in, now there’s a hidden bar for staggers and flinches that fills up the more damage you inflict. How much stagger/flinch value a shot inflicts is calculated via an obtuse formula which depends on the base stagger/flinch value of your current weapon, the damage of that weapon, whether it’s a focus shot, and some additional random deviation. Basically, as you upgrade the damage on your weapon, the more often it will inflict stagger/flinches on hit. What this means is that in the early game stuns are triggered inconsistently as all hell, and throughout the game it becomes difficult to intuit what exactly the minimum and maximum shots required to stun is, which becomes even more complicated since some enemy variants have different stagger resistances on top of that. Then to throw another wrench in the works, enemies in the Island get increased stagger resistance overall.
[^3]: Reloading is one of those things that gets taken for granted in most shooters, yet RE4 forcing you to stand still while reloading already makes it a more interesting implementation than those in most other games. When you consider that reloading and limited magazine capacity is the shooter equivalent of stamina systems in action games, you can start to see how barely any games try to do anything interesting with it and just include it for realism’s sake. Basically it’s an inevitable cooldown where the player can control when and where it gets reset. In RE4 this led to several interesting decisions, where sometimes it would be better to forego knifing a downed enemy in favor of reloading your gun so you were prepared once all other downed enemies woke up. In other situations where reloading was too unsafe to do, it’d push you to switch to another weapon that either doesn’t really fit the situation or uses an ammo type you’d rather not spend, which ended up creating cool moments of improvisation. RE4R having smaller base magazine capacities and making you expend more bullets at once would mean reloads have a larger presence in combat, but being able to freely move and even run while reloading cuts out most of the risks associated with reloading. Annoyingly there’s also the tendency on top for most shooters to just let you upgrade reload speeds and magazine capacities to the point where the downtime of reloads becomes irrelevant, which includes both RE4 and RE4R.
[^4]: Though I’d hesitate to call parries being new to RE4. The original already had parries, it was called “shoot an enemy in the face right before they hit you”. This even worked against Chainsawmen! Normally they tank blows to the head as a pressure unit should, but shoot a Chainsawman in the head right as he’s swinging off your head, and you get a guaranteed stagger! Then again, this is a bit easier said than done considering enemies would rear their head back right as they swung at you.
The Markdown markup for footnotes will remain unmarked as-is until Backloggd adds support for them like any sane website made in the Reiwa era.