I will refrain from rating this game because as much as I enjoyed it, I genuinely cannot, in full conscience, dare to call it a well-designed game. Now I know what you must be thinking reading this, “But what matters is if you enjoyed it at the end of the day” and right as that statement is, I feel like I’ve hit a wall with it. When do we stop, draw a line and say “Yeah, we deserve better than this, because we got better than this a fucking decade ago and what we have now has no excuse being worse than what we got before”
What 4R attempts to do is capture the same kind of design RE4 (and subsequently 5/6) had, and modernize it, and to say that it falls flat on its head and miserably fucking fails would be a gross understatement, they removed the one thing all of those games were balanced around, and what made them so satisfying and unique compared to other shooters in the market in the first place, proper enemy feedback which leads to consistent stuns, you’re crowded? You quickly shoot a zombie in the shin or head and perform a melee attack, that’s your bread and butter for proper crowd control, for christ’s sake, it is so tightly designed to the point where RE5 has a difficulty mode where you go into danger status in one hit, one goddamn hit, and it still comes across as a fair, balanced and enjoyable challenge. Imagine the sheer amount of confidence you must have in the systems that you designed to put in a challenge mode like that into the game. Meanwhile in 4R you find yourself at the mercy of the RNGods which is exasperated by reticle bloom, a mechanic pulled from 2R and put into this game just to make you constantly beg, plead and pray for a stun to get yourself out of one tight situation out of a dozen. To at least stagger an enemy that’s running straight at you with a pitchfork, or to grab you, and speaking of grabs, the balance regarding that single move alone is busted to an unbelievable degree, enemies love to spam it and it happens to be ambiguous in how it’s telegraphed to the player, there’s a form of the grab (close running grab) that you pretty much cannot react to. so on-top of an inconsistency in stuns, you also have inconsistency and vagueness regarding the enemy attacks themselves, and for some reason the grab damage doesn’t work like in previous games where the danger comes from messing up the mashing QTE, getting grabbed in itself is a danger because it happens to do insane damage simply at the startup, for example sometimes there’s a delayed reaction because you and the enemy are so close to one another, you shotgun the zombie but in a very short frame it happens to grab you, you are not rewarded for your sharp reaction time because half your health depletes from that startup alone.
The fact that the game design and balance feel like an afterthought despite having a decade of action RE before it to pull from, add on and improve upon is so disappointing that I can’t help but ask the eternal question what were they thinking? All in all, I hope Capcom learns from this game’s shortcomings, but given all the lavish praise it received, I doubt that will be the case.
What 4R attempts to do is capture the same kind of design RE4 (and subsequently 5/6) had, and modernize it, and to say that it falls flat on its head and miserably fucking fails would be a gross understatement, they removed the one thing all of those games were balanced around, and what made them so satisfying and unique compared to other shooters in the market in the first place, proper enemy feedback which leads to consistent stuns, you’re crowded? You quickly shoot a zombie in the shin or head and perform a melee attack, that’s your bread and butter for proper crowd control, for christ’s sake, it is so tightly designed to the point where RE5 has a difficulty mode where you go into danger status in one hit, one goddamn hit, and it still comes across as a fair, balanced and enjoyable challenge. Imagine the sheer amount of confidence you must have in the systems that you designed to put in a challenge mode like that into the game. Meanwhile in 4R you find yourself at the mercy of the RNGods which is exasperated by reticle bloom, a mechanic pulled from 2R and put into this game just to make you constantly beg, plead and pray for a stun to get yourself out of one tight situation out of a dozen. To at least stagger an enemy that’s running straight at you with a pitchfork, or to grab you, and speaking of grabs, the balance regarding that single move alone is busted to an unbelievable degree, enemies love to spam it and it happens to be ambiguous in how it’s telegraphed to the player, there’s a form of the grab (close running grab) that you pretty much cannot react to. so on-top of an inconsistency in stuns, you also have inconsistency and vagueness regarding the enemy attacks themselves, and for some reason the grab damage doesn’t work like in previous games where the danger comes from messing up the mashing QTE, getting grabbed in itself is a danger because it happens to do insane damage simply at the startup, for example sometimes there’s a delayed reaction because you and the enemy are so close to one another, you shotgun the zombie but in a very short frame it happens to grab you, you are not rewarded for your sharp reaction time because half your health depletes from that startup alone.
The fact that the game design and balance feel like an afterthought despite having a decade of action RE before it to pull from, add on and improve upon is so disappointing that I can’t help but ask the eternal question what were they thinking? All in all, I hope Capcom learns from this game’s shortcomings, but given all the lavish praise it received, I doubt that will be the case.