the ground truth

there's a tension in game critique between analyzing a game's mechanics in the abstract and incorporating the historical context it exists in. good critique often starts with the former and bleeds into the latter, viewing the raw systems at play using the critic's preconceptions of "good" game design as the ground truth before moving into the wider context of the genre it resides in and the state of the industry. some lean fully into the former and some the latter. however, these two are inherently intertwined; the critic's previous engagement with the wider context taints their preconceptions, and it's impossible to extract any axioms from the ground truth that haven't been tainted in the same way. given that critique is an art and not a science, we can accept this as inevitable and move on. after all, the variety of people's individual preconceptions produces discourse in both its beautiful and toxic forms. if we seek to share critique and provoke the thoughts of others, then having a unique ground truth is meaningful.

this is not favorable to resident evil 4, unfortunately. around its neck is another resident evil 4 which so greatly shaped the medium as to create its own overwhelming ground truth without any path to overturn it. this applies to all remakes of course, but this new resident evil 4 simply begs these comparisons out of the gate. how can I potentially rip the abstract mechanics out of this game and view them without bias when the original product is so closely grafted to its back?

I delved into the simplicity of the original resident evil 4's combat in my previous review of that game. its stagger system and context-sensitive melee options form a crowd-control methodology that remains one of the most memorable aspects of the game to this day. that its remake utterly repudiates these mechanics is shocking at first glance. the context-sensitive melee input's timing is tighter, its area of effect is smaller, and its invincibility frames fail to protect leon quite as effectively as in the original. the inconsistent stagger further complicates this, as I'll get into the next section. these elements of the crowd-control loop structured all combat encounters from the original, and without it the game teeters dangerously close to becoming just another modern zombie game. this was my original impression in that opening village fight, which took me nearly 45 minutes of attempts on hardcore. why did the precision and definitive outcomes get thrown to the wayside in favor of this squishy mess of slow response time, inaccurate aiming, and erratic enemy behavior?

what I had to do as I continued was reframe the ground truth. the original resident evil 4 boils everything down to the above loop in a way that linearizes it. it certainly presents options for the player, but the vast majority of ganados and cultists should be dispatched through this herd->stagger->melee approach. in that way, the game offers complete control over your surroundings virtually all the time. the remake rejects this in favor of widening the option pool, creating further checks and balances on each tool, and fermenting a greater sense of uncertainty and chaos. it captures the experience of being overwhelmed, drowning in a sea of transformed villagers while running low on resources and health. changing the original's combat loop was necessary to conjure these situations.

probably most of you reading the above are going to recoil at that... but stay tuned, I'm setting this up as the ground truth, but I'm going to tear it apart later as well. however, it's necessary to give the game the benefit of the doubt this way in order to observe what it does right as well as understand where it falls short on its own terms.

determinism vs stochasticity

the stagger system in re4r builds something much knottier than its predecessor through a conflux of multiple factors seasoned with a bit of RNG. in other words: it's inconsistent. I doubt we'll ever have a clear idea of how it works until it gets reverse engineered some time from now. in any case, it's a far cry from the deterministic staggers of the original, which could be consistently induced from a headshot or other weak point.

we can view determinism and stochasticity (or randomness) as a continuum for mechanics and games as a whole to fall within, where the former is a pure puzzle and the latter is gambling. let's say that the original falls closer towards the deterministic end while the remake is closer to the stochastic end; of course, each game has elements of both, such as the semi-random enemy AI and plagas spawns in the original and the parry mechanics in the remake. in many action contexts, it makes more sense for move outcomes to be deterministic. we need consistency in order to observe patterns and form strategies with a guarantee of efficacy. if I were playing a game such as souls or monhun and had attacks with heavy commitments fail or produce confusing effects, any outcome that I find myself in could potentially be unavoidable at no fault of my own, and if all my escape options also have heavy commitments or long startups, I may have set myself up for failure through random chance.

however, both versions of re4 are shooters, and by their nature most actions are near instantaneous; point the gun and shoot. if an enemy lasts a bullet or two longer before teeing up a melee attack, the reaction needed to fire off another round to get them into that state is much more negligible. abstractly, this kind of uncertainty actually can create interesting types of decision-making and intentionality for the player. attacks with uncertain outcomes can be planned in such a way that option selects occur, where each potential outcome results in a situation that the player can also take advantage of provided they can react appropriately. it also facilitates quick decision-making with gun selection. if not inducing stagger with the handgun could potentially result in damage, the shotgun may be a better tool; weighing these options becomes more challenging when there is a need to factor in percentage chances of success, especially in the way this interacts with limited quantities of ammo. the new reticle mechanic drawn from the previous two remakes also influences player choices in how it forces the player to remain still in order to let the reticle close and cause more damage/stagger. these all coalesce into a toolkit that creates ambiguity for the player on what options may be best at any given point, often leaving the player to act on instinct in a frenzy and then live with the outcome.

furthermore, re4r extends its knife mechanics in order to create a secondary set of tools for the player to grapple with the uncertainty of gun actions. the knife primarily provides a near-universal option for dispelling enemy attacks when used to parry, which comes at the cost of both knife durability and a small player stagger (though a perfect parry effectively nullifies this). it also can be used to push enemies off when they do a forward grab, backstab enemies, instantly kill some spawning plagas, and fight directly to induce stagger in combination with your other tools. this creates two primary spheres of play: the uncertain long-distance area where the player is more-or-less safe but lacks definite control over their actions, and the short-distance area where the player can definitively control the parries and other close-range actions but is in direct danger from every enemy in the game. compared to the original re4, where running into the fray was encouraged thanks to the high safety of melee actions, the remake creates ambiguity in the choice of range for the player. kiting is an option but the ammo use is inefficient, while parries can highly useful but drain durability and potentially set the player up for damage if they miss a perfect parry while another enemy approaches. both of these areas of ambiguity - for options specifically in the long-range as well switching between long-range and short-range - help instill a sense of claustrophobia as enemies swarm leon.

this interpretation isn't without its flaws. the primary issue is that the parry actually drains very little durability compared to some of the other actions (assuming that you aren't using it against certain instakill attacks, which often destroy an entire knife), and as it works on all but a small subset of enemy attacks (such as the hammer or the scythe), it centralizes the other mechanics around itself. perfect parries guarantee a stagger for melee and thus become more appealing than the other options to the point of occasionally just letting enemies approach to get a parry off rather than even considering long-range actions. there are elements that still counterbalance this such as the inability to block attacks from behind (sometimes?) and the uncertainty involved in parrying attacks such as plagas tendrils, but some of this abstract ambiguity becomes lost given the obvious superiority of this mechanic in many instances.

the modern zombie game

last year I reviewed the last of us, a game that in retrospect seems to be one of the many midway points between the original re4 and this remake. in my critique I discuss how the game primarily morphs between three styles of action: cover, stealth, and horde. re4r does add in light stealth elements (specifically in the village chapter), but the most obvious point of comparison between these two are the horde sections.

in that tlou review, I singled out the hotel basement as the best horde section in the game thanks to its non-prescriptive level design and the flexibility of the room layouts. at its best, tlou captured the scramble of running past zombies and efficiently dealing with groups; at its worst, horde encounters would devolve into endlessly running into circles, swapping your various indistinguishable guns around to deal with limited ammo. many months out from my playthrough, several of these fights have congealed together in my brain, with the game's more fleshed-out cover/stealth hybrid sections dominating the majority of my memories. although it had the potential to excel in terms of horde combat, it falls rather slight in execution.

re4r seizes upon this without all of the drawbacks of tlou's lackluster gunplay and overall horde encounter design. in particular, the ammo economy feels skewed away from the original's bountiful reserves to something more akin to tlou. while handgun ammo drops regularly even without the attache case that boosts it, the handgun is the most uncertain of all the weapons, making ammo for your more consistent powerhouses like the shotgun and rifle all the more precious. the new gunpowder system that gives the player the ability to craft ammo at their leisure undermines this somewhat, but the difference between the 20-40 shotgun shells one is likely to hold in the original game to the 5-15 that's more common here makes any shells expended on gunning down basic mooks even more consequential.

more importantly, re4r builds interesting encounters using staggered enemy types, much like the tlou hotel basement encounter does with its bloater and various infected. the most notable instance of this for me during this playthrough was the twin garrador fight, which has been expanded with many more ganados than in the original. the absence of the famous cage fight is disappointing, but the added wrinkles to this garrador fight make up for it, especially in the way that parrying within earshot of a garrador will cause them to charge. throughout this fight the constant influx of enemies forces you to keep moving and stay on the lookout for ways you can chip away at the garradors and silently kill the adds, with tricking the garradors into slicing down reams of enemies being the most satisfying solution for culling the herd. the chainsaw sisters fight also achieves this in an even bigger environment, where you're chased along wooden scaffolding by enemies in growing numbers as you trap your pursuers with lit lanterns from above. both of these fights are great examples of moments where the original game is legitimately expanded through infusing already excellent fights with more complex spaces and enemies pouring in from all sides. by giving the genius sections from the original the flair of modern, more dense zombie games, the designers here effectively breathed new life into these scenarios.

wide breadth and shallow length

something I neglected to mention in the prior section on stochasticity was the laser sight, which seems to maximize stagger on every shot and improve accuracy. if you do want to play more like the original and its stagger-focused crowd control, the laser sight will let you do that from early on in the game. conversely if you'd rather incorporate some stealth, many of the areas have interconnected pathways and ways to sneak up on enemies with the backstab takedown. the bolt thrower now appears much earlier than before with the mines relegated to an additional ammo type, allowing players more interested in creating traps to focus on that weapon. while many of these choices existed in the original, the wealth of gameplay styles has been expanded here, from differentiating and balancing the handguns even further to adding an assault rifle.

in a way, this variety dovetails nicely with the previously mentioned de-emphasis of the stagger and contextual melee in the way that players can choose what aspects of their kit to invest in over the course of the game. this pairs especially well with the overhauled treasure system, which gives the player more strategic methods by which to maximize their earnings via the new multipliers for color combinations with inlaid gems. in theory this is exactly what I had established the intent for the game as earlier: to delinearize combat and make the optimal choices more ambiguous.

however, I have largely ignored the specifics of the encounter design outside of the previously mentioned twin garrador and chainsaw fights. these areas are excellent to be sure, as are others such as the opening village and the catwalks over the precipice after meeting the merchant, but much of the rest of the game becomes less interesting than its predecessor by way of more tempered enemy layouts (or in the words of my previous review, less of a frenzy). compared to the literal hordes of the original, the remake ends up following a more modern pattern of obstacle escalation when constructing its fights. look at the wrecking ball fight and its strict phases that pace out the most dangerous enemies and end with a round of the bug plagas. an even more egregious example is the water room, the first half of which has been thinned and spread out across an upstairs and a downstairs section. by reducing the flow of enemies in these areas, the chaos the game fosters through its mechanics becomes less apparent through the rigidity of the scenario pacing.

the variety in playstyles intersects with this, specifically in how many enemies are often on-screen at once. with smaller groups, the anxiety of constantly juggling foes from many sides melts away, and one can autopilot with whatever strategy they've invested in. this particularly becomes noticable by the island chapter, where encounters in general tend towards mere handfuls of enemies in-between a few bigger areas such as the AA turret or the wrecking ball. after learning the game on its own merits for the first half, I found myself trending towards simply recreating the original game here, with a fully leveled-up silver ghost and its laser sight becoming a stagger machine and melees/parries dominating much of my approach. in the larger encounters this fell apart, with a greater need to scramble and switch between weapons, but the predominance of smaller encounters pushed me towards just playing a clumsier version of the original.

in its own way, what I previously referred to as "linearized" combat in the original really forms the "arcade-like" nature that many have come to love about it. the frenzy of the original and its anti-obstacle escalation doctrine created an incredible spread of scenarios to apply these mechanics to. the original re4 is about observing radically different ideas and designs for encounters and framing them in such a way that you can pull off that herd->stagger->melee loop, just as tetris is a game of turning different stack shapes and tetramino sequences into line clears, or qix is about navigating around the titular entity to find areas to slice away. the small pool of mechanics get stretched in such a way that they never feel rote. meanwhile, the remake takes its wider breadth of options and sacrifices the depth across the length of its campaign, creating more homogenous scenarios overall. there are throwaway rooms in the original that feel more dynamic than major setpieces of the remake, and by the second half I can say it approaches mediocrity. slam-dunks like the double turret section end up feeling like they've run out of ideas. if there's any justification of the original ground truth, where re4r fails while the original succeeds, it's here.

the review

that's a relatively abstract view of the game as a whole though, and obviously I have a lot more thoughts on it from front to back. so let me fire off some random other thoughts that didn't quite fit into my higher-level critique.

bosses overall probably have an equal hit rate to the original. mendez is a good example that I thought improved thanks to a little more structure between the two phases and some extra room; I was never really into meat-and-potatoes bosses like many found in the original. gigante somehow gets worse thanks to exaggerated hitboxes and a jittering, small plagas. the double gigante fight is the opposite, being basically just scripted (throw a flashbang, drop the unarmored one in, wait for luis to come back with the dynamite, blow it up, drop the other one in). krauser is some trial-and-error bullshit and then just a parry fest. salazar stresses leon's clunky movement and the need for camera control far too much... saddler is actually pretty good! the adds in that one give it a nice bit of flavor.

the whole of chapter 11 is just bleh. double gigante, the shockingly boring minecart section, and the one-at-a-time bugs, all of which feel rather slight compared to their original incarnations. and ending with that new krauser fight... this is where I stopped feeling as hype on the game.

side quests are there but thankfully skippable. I didn't really trade for much from the shop since I stuck with silver ghost and ignored all the extra stocks and shit, so I didn't feel the need to touch them much once you hit the castle. backtracking for some of these things is most doable in the village and then feels tacked on later down the line.

the regenerators were never my favorite part of the original, but the way they act here is just ruined by the parry. my roommate had her hands over her eyes the whole time they were chasing me until the fifth time I parried them, and then even she realized that they didn't really pose a threat. the electricity puzzles they plopped in here are obnoxious and tedious; I solved every one just by a simple brute force method. the wrench was cute though, that'll stay burned into my brain even when some of the rest of this game fades away.

I'm fine with slow leon but oh my god some of the aspects of this control scheme are dire. quick turn was butchered not only by being incredibly inconsistent but also by giving three bizarre options for it: back and run (which causes accidental backwards runs), back and crouch (which is basically a death sentence if you end up crouching in place), and back and the left stick button (the fuck were they thinking?). just let me put it on cross... also it seems like I wasn't able to crouch in the middle of a run? confusing oversight. combined with frequent flubbed ground stabs and the weird valid angles for parries... just rough all around.

can't believe how many evade QTEs they stuck in here after it seemed like they were going to excise them overall. why would you cut the salazar statue chase (the fire breathing is cool though) in favor of giving random-ass scythe enemies an unparryable attack with a QTE evade? and the bosses are still so reliant on it... at the same time I get the reluctance to add a dodge roll to this. a general dodge would've required a complete design overhaul, and it's sort of overkill with the ability to strafe, but the overreliance on them especially when it comes to boss battles feels like a major case where a reimagining would have been greatly appreciated.

Reviewed on Apr 08, 2023


2 Comments


11 months ago

GodManAntilope pointed out on discord that you can bind quickturn to cross. I double-checked and it looks like that's a feature... but not for the default A-1 control scheme. still a very confusing choice to me, but I wanted to clarify that point.

9 months ago

a little late on this but if you're curious to hear more thoughts from me, @JetSetSet, GoufyGoggs, @JohnHarrelson, @LukeGirard, and @wondermagenta on this remake, how it stacks up against the original, and where the series is going from here, check out our podcast on it here!