Very glad I took a chance on this. Really loved it. I don't get to replay games as much as I'd like, especially when they're big new AAAA releases - but I realised right near the end of this that since I'd replayed every mission before completing it (sometimes multiple times) I'd essentially played this twice already. Just goes to show, you should always make your repetitive tedium optional, folks!

So yeah, it got its hooks in me completely. I even got into the customizing. And I'm eager to see how the alternate story branches go. A great game! I played a whole new game on my Playstation 5 and I loved it! How often do you get to say THAT?

Resident Evil 4 has become a touchstone. Its years of enduring relevance and constant ports have obscured what it actually is; A 2005 GameCube game.

I recently did something I'd meant to do for years. I invested in my GameCube. For far too long, it's been ignored. A novelty device that had been made redundant by the Wii and Dolphin. The only reason to keep it was the far-off potential of maybe buying a Game Boy Player for the thing someday. I finally did it. And I got one of those expensive, aficionado-grade CSYNC RGB SCART cables after using washed-out third-party composite shite for years. It's all come flooding back.

In its day, I would have happily declared the GameCube to be my all-time favourite console. There were better games available for other systems, but after their first couple years, there was little sense of direction to the PS2 or SNES. They were too concerned with going after the audiences that the Xbox and Mega Drive brought into the market. The GameCube was a proud Nintendo console. They'd spent the N64 struggling to release any 3D games at all, and the bulk of its biggest hits were made by foreign companies who'd already got practice in 3D on PC games and Amiga demoscene stuff. By the GameCube, they'd caught up, but they weren't just going to trot out predictable 3D sequels. Everything had some weird, ambitious new twist that set it out. Metroid was first-person, Zelda was cel shaded and focused on expressive character animation, and Mario was, bizarrely, a game about spraying water in the tropics. Nothing was what you expected it to be, but seeing how frequently those games turned out well, it was thrilling. They completely earned my trust. Whatever stupid-looking mistake they announced, I was pretty sure it was going to be incredible by the time I actually played it.

One of their most exciting initiatives at the time wasn't in their own projects, though. It was in their third-party relationships. They'd dropped the ball with Japanese developers in the mid-nineties. Their demands were too limiting, their hardware was too complex and expensive to work with, and they'd become complacent in their dominance after the NES and SNES. Sony stepped in and ate their dinner, encouraging experimentation and allowing publishers to print games as they sold, rather than committing to bulk orders of thousands of expensive cartridges. Demographics took a back seat, and games became more of an expression of the creator's will. Nintendo must have been raging through this all of this, because by the time they were ready to make the GameCube, they were willing to pay out big to acquire exclusive Metal Gear, Final Fantasy and Resident Evil. That gave us Twin Snakes and fuckin' Crystal Chronicles. But Resi? That was a good investment.

Maybe not commercially, but culturally.

Mikami's discussions with Nintendo won him over to their vision of the industry. Before long, he was joining Miyamoto on stage to announce that Resident Evil was now a GameCube-exclusive franchise, reviving the abandoned N64 Resi 0 project and personally directing both a remake of the original game and the much-anticipated Resident Evil 4. Later, he'd also reveal his "Capcom Five" initiative, announcing GameCube exclusives, Viewtiful Joe, Dead Phoenix, P.N.03, killer7 and reassuring the audience that Resi 4 was coming along well and would be "scary than ever before". Mikami jumped head-first into the biggest logistical nightmare of his life. Slowly, the realities would creep in, and sacrifices would need to be made. Exclusivity promises would be discarded, P.N.03 would be rushed to release and Dead Phoenix would be scrapped entirely, but it didn't matter. All he really had to do was make sure Resi 4 would be the best game in the world. And by god, he did it.

I remember the day my pal's US import copy arrived. The European release wouldn't arrive until months later, and here we were, playing this game from the future. It totally felt like that. Enemies would duck and weave as you took shots at them, inventory management was now fun and compelling, and every 15 minutes the game would take some unbelievable new turn. You barely managed to get past the introductory village, but then you were fighting a giant, crushing houses underfoot, and an enormous lake monster, and then the standard enemies sprouted tentacles out their heads. It was a breathless experience, and every time you thought it was wrapping up, it introduced some mad, elaborate new section that you couldn't wait to jump into.

This review follows my first post-remake playthrough. The obvious differences between the two games are all entirely granted, and there were minor ommissions I totally forgot about (did you remember the Dark Souls/Deathtrap Dungeon swinging axe room?), but there were still substantive discoveries on top of that. It doesn't seem like nearly as dramatic a leap from the classic formula now. It's a perspective shift, progression is more nakedly linear, and the puzzles are barely even a part of the game, but it's old heavy Resi. Pick your spot, plant yourself there, and fire as the monsters close in. The knife button feels like such a welcome addition to the classic formula that they put it into the DS's Resi 1 remake, and instantly made it a bit of a pain in the arse to go back to earlier versions. So much of that old Resi appeal is here.

For all its wild contraptions, setpieces and ludicrous characters, the original Resi 4 is surprisingly restrained in its presentation. No, honestly. Quite often, large sections of the game - full of memorable little ideas - will play completely without music. The sound design's carried by the oozing tentacles, clanking suits of armour and shotgun blasts. Even when there is music, it's often subtle and atmospheric. Percussion and wailing. It's important that the things in the game feel impactful through everything layered on top. You always know how powerful this stuff is, even when there's flaming barrels and exploding towers all around you.

I also think the level design choices are consistently better in the original, too. Rooms are designed so you're always presented with a route through during hectic encounters. If you're supposed find a crucial puzzle piece when tensions are high, the structure and camera will make sure it's presented clearly to you. It's not so overt to be patronising, but not so obscure that you'll die over and over as long as you're not completely freaking out. It's just a cracking game that takes consideration for the breadth of players who will be getting through it.

I've often argued in favour of QTEs. Instances of direct engagement during elaborate action sequences that couldn't be fully realised within the limitations of regular gameplay. That's a fairly haughty position on the matter. Really, I like QTEs when they're in games that are happy to have a big laugh with them. Ryo Hazuki dodging the football, and that. At one point, you're shown a "RESPOND" prompt to lay Krauser with a retort as snappily as possible. They basically put the "TRENCHANT INSIGHT" button in this. I can't imagine that making Resident Evil 4 was even slightly as much fun as playing it, but there's moments in here that just make me picture the hysterical disbelief at the studio as they were put together. "Fucking hell, we can't seriously be doing this" - "Aye, we're fucking doing it. Come on." Even today, Production Studio 4 veterans are still laughing about the giant mechanical Salazar statue. As much warmth and good humour as there was in the remake, it was a people pleaser. I have so much more respect for the original's wilful disregard for its audience's demands.

It's also clear how well engineered the game was around the GameCube. I won't argue with anyone who say they can't go back further than the Wii Edition, but the button layout is such a good fit for this controller. Those face buttons almost seem like they were engineered with Mario in mind, but they never made a GameCube entry where you held B to run. Leon Kennedy's here to pick up Nintendo's slack. Those big triggers feel so great as you steady your aim or draw your knife. All the fiddly wee buttons are dedicated to the more intricate, cerebral actions like inventory and partner management, while all the lizardbrain shit is right under your fingers' resting spots. I haven't conducted the survey, but I don't think the folk who love this game the most are the ones who first played it on the PS2.

There are undeniable drawbacks to the 2005 release, though. As good a display as you can manage, you're still not seeing that lasersight when you're aiming more than 10 feet away. I'm not going to argue that loading screens and a mid-campaign disc swap make this version better, either, though they do warm the spot in my heart reserved for "Real Game Shit". Man, play whatever version of Resi 4 you like. You're not seriously considering buying the GameCube version if you're not already inclined to love it.

If you obsess over the creative process that brought these games to audiences, there's an appeal to getting as close to the source as you can. For the cultural touchstone it's become, there's a coherent logic to why, after multiple retreats to the drawing board, that this would be the game that would finally receive the "Resident Evil 4" title. How the action genre had progressed in the decade since the PS1 original's release, and Mikami's devotion to Nintendo's vision for the industry. It was always a mad gamble, and shifting market trends meant it stood as something of a martyr for the Japanese games industry for years after. Japanese audiences would drift away from consoles, western influence would radically shift the trajectories of big studios, and outspoken developers would be silenced as publishers chased US money. Nintendo had been right, though. They knew the strengths of Japanese developers, and with the Switch, global audiences are finally starting to side with them again. They were right. Mikami was right to side with them. And Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games ever made.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

Had a really good time, but honestly felt like I was missing something, waiting for a set piece or a cutscene or whatever to knock me sideways. There's some mad stuff for sure, and the post-game had me momentarily stunned, but overall I'm not in love with it. Maybe it's just been hyped up too much.

There's an unfinished vibe permeating the world; quest lines that wither to nothing, tripwires in the wild that don't seem to belong to anybody, what are those big empty cages for, a vague lost-in-translation plot, etc. A climactic moment referred to my "beloved" and I was like...her? Honestly feel like I accidently skipped some important stuff, or it didn't trigger, or something. Or again maybe I was just expecting too much.

It's a testament to how fun (and funny) it is that I simply ignored stuff that I've properly grumbled about in other games, like the generic fantasy aesthetic and the excessive amount of materials for crafting (which I managed to almost completely ignore by just having magic pawns cover all the healing and buff/debuff business). Combat is a hoot, and the party system makes for a grand adventure. Even when I'm not sure what I'm doing next (which is often), I'm happy to just pick a random quest from my list and head out with my scantily-clad entourage. Plus the Bitterblack Isle stuff is some good solid dungeoneering.

It's good! I'm not sure it's great. Though there were definitely times when I muttered quietly to myself "this is better than Elden Ring".

You know how good we were eating in the compilation-heavy days of the late PS2? Back on the PS1, we'd be lucky if we got five pre-1986 arcade games in a collection. They were selling three variants of Street Fighter II on a disc and asking you to buy that instead of Rollcage or Vagrant Story or something. Jump a few years later, and we were getting 20, 30, 40 games at once. And with Taito Legends 2, it was stuff like G-Darius, Elevator Action Returns and Puzzle Bobble 2 - Games that had been released as standalone full-price titles on the PlayStation and Saturn. While the masses were trying to convince themselves they were enjoying cutting-edge releases like Perfect Dark Zero and Resistance: Fall of Man, I was going buck wild over Taito Legends 2.

Taito Legends 2 wasn't just great for the late-nineties stuff. It opened the door to a ton of scruffy, weird little games that I now hold very dear. Cameltry, Space Invaders '95: The Attack of Lunar Loonies, Football Champ, and most powerful of all - GROWL.

Can you imagine my delight as I first selected this title, completely ignorant of its contents?

Growl is a four-player beat 'em up (though notably, I haven't owned a version that allowed for more than two players until this week's Arcade Archives release) where righteous vigilantes fight against evil animal poachers. Before you even punch your first baddie, you're offered a fucking Resident Evil 1 rocket launcher.

Everything in Growl explodes. A big man. Chairs. The pub garden roof that inexplicably crushes all the on-screen enemies when you respawn. "SHBROOOM!"

There's an absurd brutality to Growl. Picking up enemies with one hand, as they struggle to regain their strength, and swinging their limp bodies into the ground, back and forth over your head until their skulls are mush. That's what you get for caging a majestic eagle, you villain!

It would be disingenuous to suggest that Growl is actually a good game. It's relentlessly repetitive, irritating, and its enemy spawns would put Heavenly Sword to shame. That's part of the fun for me. How dumb its design is. Minutes before the final boss, the game abandons the established structure and puts you in a spike-filled cave for one of the worst platforming sequences I've ever played. I think this is what some folk get out of Midway trash like NARC and Pit Fighter, but their tone of meat-headed, straight-to-rental VHS didn't resonate with me nearly as much.

Growl is camp 40s kids adventure serials through the lens of early 90s kusoge. A traintop fight against fat Moroccans and American prostitutes. A stampede of cheetah kittens attacking international criminals. A Phantom of the Opera with machine gun claws and a mind-controlling alien worm in his back. Hook it up to my veins.

Rotten game. A must-buy.

There's a spark in here that promises more than it delivers but I want to nourish & nurture it until the debt is paid.
It really is a few adjustments away from something I'd luvv, but Exoprimal finds itself utterly lost at sea in an attempt to copy the other Games As A Service bigboys. Progressing the story and blossoming the enemy pool alongside a predetermined amount of matchmakes sounds fine in theory, but it essentially means that it takes about thirty sessions before the game graces you with the challenge and variety it so desperately needs in the early half. Even with my saintly patience I considered dropping it at multiple points, which is kind of a shame, the later boss battles are great fun! With more of a focus on co-op boss battles and the large scale PvE encounters it fitfully teases u with, there'd be something here. With this being a fully-fledged Capcom lunch & dinner, I had hopes in the leadup to release that there would be some Lost Planet 2 DNA in here, but alas!!!! Gone are the days of densely curated linear mission structures, matchmake and pray the randomly choreographed instance permits you a good time. Your moneys no good here we only accept dinobux. Ultimately I think I'm being kinder than I should because Exoprimal fell out of gamepass and it's fun on the most baseline level of human experience to hold left click and watch hitboxes disappear.

I think the most gutting thing is knowing that it's a GaaS title with "Content Coming Soon" which I can very safely and sagely forecast just means "we didn't receive enough battle pass subscriptions for season 1, & have decided to terminate service before we even get the chance to add content that really lets the strengths of the gameplay shine".
Annoying that they came so close but I liked what it offers!!!

"?? MYSTERY BAG ??" review - Part one of eight

Today, I attended PLAY Expo Glasgow 2023. They rent out a hockey rink and fill it with a load of arcade machines, old home computers and vendor booths. I didn't have a lot of time to spend there, but I'd regret it if I didn't go, and it was nice to have a shot of Dragon Wang on the Sega Mark III. One of the vendors was selling a £10 "?? MYSTERY BAG ??", adorned with Google image search results for "Sega", "Nintendo", "Xbox" and "PlayStation". I'm such a mark for these things.

I have fond memories of a subscription service called "My Retro Game Box" that ran during the height of Loot Crate's popularity. They'd ask which consoles you owned, which games you had for them, and what kinds of games you'd like more of. You got your fair share of stinkers, sure, but it's also the service that gave me Super Mario Advance, Kirby's Dream Land and Skate or Die: Bad n Rad. A wee surprise each month, and even the rotters were a good laugh for 20 minutes. The folk running it were real champs, and they got nothing but grief from cunts on Twitter complaining about being sent games like Shenmue and Ristar. It was unsustainable, and I don't think they kept it running for even a whole year.

That allure still sits with me, though. The games you didn't know you wanted to play.

I opened my bag.

TouchMaster for the DS is a collection of 23 touchscreen-based games from Midway. Despite their history of arcade hits such as Mortal Kombat, Rampage and NARC, they've opted to fill this with simple puzzle and card games. This was their pitch at the Touch Generations market, and there's little to draw the interest of gamers. It's also very skewed towards an American audience. There's a trivia game here, which asks you how many stitches are on a baseball and which sitcom Haley Joel Osment was on in 1997. There's an attempt at a Tetris-like puzzle game, but it's about coloured balls with numbers on them, and you can match three balls by either their colour or number, and it's really ugly and boring.

Those looking for action will be most drawn to "Hot Hoops", where five identical basketball players in #81 jerseys stand in a line as a hoop moves left and right at a constant speed. Touch each player in time and they will throw the ball at the hoop. Find the rhythm, and you'll play a perfect game.

I'm committed to reviewing each one of these eight games, to find some value in the £10 I spent on my bag.

I do not recommend TouchMaster.

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.