As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.

I played this game on a whim during the PC release, so I never got to experience the original PS4 release from which Intergrade apparently made many adjustments (changing animation canceling, adding unblockable telegraphs, changing how some materia work, adding quick retries).

When I first played it, I didn’t expect to like the combat much, I was just here to look at pretty characters and listen to good music cuz I was bored by everything else at the time, but was very pleasantly surprised by the combat system in play, so much so, that after reflecting back on it and replaying it multiple times since, I can easily say that this is best new combat system created within the last decade. A focus on resource management, controlling multiple characters at the same time and coordinating their actions, giving each of them compelling action mechanics that can feed into a game plan involving your full party, and nuanced defense compared to most action games make this one stand out from most of its peers. To try to describe why I like this combat system so much, I’d actually first want to talk about my biggest issue with it:

Enemy Health is too low.

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s battle system was designed by Teruki Endo, a Capcom game designer who has worked on the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Tri. Given that Monster Hunter contains my favorite combat in video games bar none, it’s not a surprise I ended up liking this game so much. There are some shared elements in the design enough to make me suspect something after fighting the Type-0 Behemoth. For one, both of these games go out of their way to de-emphasize i-frames as a defensive mechanic, with Monster Hunter having very few to make you to consider many variables when trying to i-frame attacks, and FF7R choosing to have literally none, thus forcing you to heavily consider which attacks are dodgable and which you are better off blocking, and making your choice of direction and situation really matter when it comes to how you use the roll. The current trend of action games thrives on timing-based mechanics and challenges, this game and Monster Hunter are the only modern action games to my knowledge that deliberately make it so that good timing can’t nullify most attacks in the game, and that’s a breath of fresh air unlike any other for me.

To get back to my criticism of the game’s balancing, another similarity is that both of these games are designed with tanky enemies in mind. Much of the depth is placed in the realm of damage optimization. When the enemies are big damage sponges, players are forced to actually interact with the mechanics that allow them to maximize the damage they get from their openings. It’s an easy way to add a lot of depth to fights and make them really replayable as you learn how to take advantage of the patterns better to set up the perfect punishes. Whereas Monster Hunter creates the depth in its damage-dealing through complex weapon movesets that require precision and monster behavior knowledge to take advantage of, FF7R does it through a bevy of system mechanics that govern enemy states; a Stagger system that borrows heavily from FF13 but adjusting its dynamic to be more suited for a real time action game. However, when the enemies die too fast, most of that depth does not come into play.

So let’s get to the nitty gritty: How does this combat system work and how does high health make the game better?

The core mechanic of the game is ATB, a real time translation of the ATB system from the original where you waited for a bar to fill up before being able to perform any actions (spells, items, so on). In Remake, instead you fill up the ATB bar by controlling a character and hitting enemies or blocking attacks. Your choice of character to control is also the choice of who you are giving ATB to, as the other characters only gain ATB slowly when not being controlled. Carried over from the original, defensive and offensive actions both compete for ATB, but with Remake being more of an action game, damage is generally avoidable (but not always) and thus allowing yourself to lose a lot of HP means losing attack opportunities in the future with spending ATB to heal, as well as Mana which is a limited resource on Hard Mode.

I find it important to note the value added by attacks not always being avoidable in this system. Most action games stick to completely avoidable damage because heals/HP often represent a number of mistakes you can make before a Game Over, and healing commitments ala Souls usually just means needing to miss on an attack opportunity before commencing with the regular game, which is good for tension. But in FF7R’s case, the fact that healing takes from a dynamic resource which you actively create with your in-game actions gives it enough depth that it justifies having enemies be able to pepper you with chip damage or giving some bosses unavoidable attacks that make you consider protective spells and pressure you to keep your characters always topped up in health.It makes the resource management all that much more demanding when damaging enemies properly isn't the only thing you are thinking about, and the game goes the extra step of giving you a variety of different healing abilities with varying benefits and costs, allowing you to adjust the way you need to play around Health as a resource. An example would be the difference in using Cure, the regular heal that consumes ATB only heals one character at a time, or Pray, which requires two ATB but uses no mana and acts as a wide heal, letting you save mana for other actions but requiring a bigger commitment to use and smaller healing numbers offset by being an AOE heal.

To get into offensive uses of ATB, it’s mainly used to interact with the Stagger system and it’s what makes using all the characters effectively so important. The basic rules of this system is that all enemies have a Stagger bar under their regular health bar, which starts empty and when filled up puts enemies into a Stagger state (BURST in the Japanese version of the game) where the damage dealt is multiplied for a short period of time. The way in which the player increases the Stagger bar is something that can change completely depending on the enemy, but generally to really Stagger efficiently you need to put the enemy in Pressure state (HEAT in Japanese) where the enemy takes multiplied stagger damage. For most enemies hitting them enough or using elemental weaknesses can put them in Pressure state, and then using certain abilities that deal high stagger damage puts them in Stagger very quickly, and from then you use your pure high damage abilities to take advantage of the multiplier…
But an issue arises! Using your ATB bar to induce the Stagger state as quickly as possible often means you don’t have any ATB left to actually do much damage during your short burst window as your regular attacks don’t actually do much damage, making it feel wasteful and causing you to go back to square one trying to fill the stagger bar again. Careful management of all characters is how you play around this.
An example situation early in the game would be to have Cloud induce the Pressure state with his flurry of attacks, but not before you are sure Barret has a bar of ATB ready to hit them with Focused Shot once Pressure is induced, while Cloud saves his bar to deal big damage in the burst window. Another option would be delaying when you induce the stagger, use character specific mechanics or materia setups that give you additional ATB when you need them, and many other possibilities. But the point is that you can easily overspend ATB to achieve Stagger, and the ways you can prevent this and balance this create very compelling moment-to-moment decision making and planning.

All the characters have extra mechanics that add layers to this Stagger system and ATB management. Barret has a big attack on a cooldown which gives an ATB on use, a free bar on short notice whenever needed while the cooldown is up, but it also makes you constantly need to keep Barret’s cooldown in your head while you switch to the other characters who are more efficient at dealing damage on their own so you can be ready to switch back to him when the time is needed. Tifa has a system where she can buff herself and expend those buffs to perform attacks that increase the Stagger damage multiplier, making you need to spend ATB stock her up with buffs before the Stagger is induced and having her do her attacks early in the Burst window in order to give other characters the chance take advantage of the increased damage.

But here’s the thing…optimizing ATB usage, becoming proficient at staggering enemies, and needing to consistently learn how to avoid attacks before their damage burns through your MP reserves isn’t something that will matter if the enemy dies too fast. For FF7R’s normal mode, that is the case most of the time, and even in its Hard Mode I’d say enemy health is still too low.

I think what I find amusing about this flaw is how it really is just enemy health that is the issue. The damage they deal is fine, the underlying mechanical design of nearly all the enemies and bosses is excellent, and the systems of the game scale very well. Installing a mod on the PC version that simply doubles the enemy health, making no other changes, actually makes the game a lot better in my opinion while still feeling very balanced and well paced combat wise. It shows how strong the core design of this game is that you can simply beef up stats like that and the skill ceiling is more than high enough for it to work, giving you the room to push yourself and letting you actually get exposed to the design of the enemies when you need to contend with them for much longer.

I get that this combat system can be pretty difficult to play properly and apparently people complained about bosses taking too long even in the vanilla game normal mode but It’s a massive shame that the game locks hard mode behind a full playthrough and it doesn’t give you many variables to adjust your own difficulty, since level ups are forced and your damage/health is always scaling with it. This wouldn’t be a problem if more difficulty options were present, but if the game really didn’t want extra difficulties, items that limit XP growth could have been cool too. Regardless of this, I still loved the game’s gameplay, and the existence of many challenge mods on PC allows the game to realize its full potential and I really recommend trying 2x HP even on your first playthrough.

Now I wanna get to the enemy design. While the regular encounters and enemies can be very fun too, the game shines brightest during boss fights, of which there are many. The game demonstrates very strongly how the mechanics of staggering change heavily per encounter with its first boss, the Scorpion Sentinel, who changes to a different method of stagger in each of its 4 phases. Initially it works like a regular enemy who just needs to be hit with regular attacks and thunder magic until it goes into Pressure state, before using the ATB you stored to use staggering attacks in the pressure window. Then in the second phase you need to hit a weakpoint on its behind to break a shield that makes attacks bounce off otherwise, successfully breaking the shield puts the boss in a very long Pressure state until the shield regens, allowing you to get multiple Staggers if you use the window correctly. The third phase has him only entering Pressure after performing a highly telegraphed laser attack, making you stock up bar in preparation for the attack and take advantage of Barret’s ability to use two ATB for single powerful attack that fills up their Stagger bar, compared to Cloud who cannot fit in two ATB attacks during the Pressure window to stagger the boss. In the fourth phase the boss begins healing itself and requires you to break its legs in order to induce Stagger and stop its self-heal. It’s a crazy demonstration of mechanical variety and maybe one that happens far too early as most players don’t really get the system yet and sadly the balancing means you can beat it with all this stuff going over your head.

This stuff only gets expanded on with more unique and demanding gimmicks. Two notable ones I wanna mention in this review are Hell House and The Valkyrie.

Hell House requires the player to hit the house with elemental magic based on which attack its using, as each attack it performs will change its attunement to a different element. The interesting thing about this is that often the character being attacked does not have the time to cast said magic after dodging the elemental attacks, so it’s up to the other character to cast the spell while the aggro’d one dodges, meaning your opening is not after the attack but during it. The player actually very directly controls the aggro of enemies in this game since they will always target the character you are controlling upon the start of their attack, and due to the different defensive options available to each character, you have to be very careful about when you control a character as Aerith or Barret have much more limited defense to trade off for their ranged attacks and utility, but you still need to find the right time to control them and generate ATB with them but switching back to a more mobile character in time for the next attack.

The Valkyrie is a very interesting boss in Hard Mode, its a flying robot (with an amazing boss track from guest Ace Combat composer) whose final phase adds an orbital laser that tracks the currently controlled character and detonates upon catching up to them, which is something you’re supposed to use to your advantage as the Valkyrie also shields itself during this phase preventing it from taking much damage or stagger but one can break the shield by hitting it with its own laser. On normal mode its a fairly easy task of simply letting the laser catch up to you during the attacks that leave the Valkyrie floating still, made more interesting by the fact that all of the robot’s attacks control space by leaving sleeping gas clouds and fire spots around the arena limiting the way you can move while dodging its attacks and escaping the laser. However on Hard Mode, the behavior of the orbital laser changes completely, instead it now refuses to detonate even when it reaches your position until the Valkyrie hits the controlled character with another one of its attacks and locking said character in hit/block stun, and the laser will detonate inflicting heavy amounts of unavoidable extra damage. It creates a much more interesting dynamic where you either need to forget about trying to bait the laser entirely, needing to rely on much harder tactic of trying to punish it during certain attack animations that turn on Pressure state, or you can also be creative and try to give Barret a buffet of defensive materia and buffs and to allow him to tank the laser at full health and score a stagger that way, but setting up the situation for that is not easy either and requires heavy investment and sacrifices in other areas.

These are just some of the examples of the creative boss design in this game, but there is so many that test you in so many ways, creating new problems with a system that offers many creative and compelling solutions for you to execute. I would be here all day if I were to write about all of them.

Instead I will move on to touch on the Materia system and my few gripes with the game.

Materia serves as your way of having many different builds and possible playstyles for each character, changing your available toolkit and stats to a considerable degree. The most interesting materia are the ones that let you change the flow of ATB in combat, there are ones that allow a character to spread ATB to other characters by spending ATB themselves, or get a free bar by performing three different ATB commands in sequence. Paired materia and its rarity can also lead to interesting playstyle changes, like one that makes a specific character always do a spell of your choice automatically regardless of their available ATB gauge after the player-controlled character does an ATB command.

As far as magic spells go, I really appreciate how the different magics have different properties attached with variable base damage, making them useful for more than just hitting an elemental weakness. Ice is a delayed bomb attack meaning you can’t use it on a moving target without a plan but it deals the highest damage making it useful even on things that aren’t weak to it, Fire is shot as a projectile and thus the angle needs to be considered if you want to hit a certain part of a boss, while Lightning is hitscan and strikes from the sky, allowing it to hit any enemy part with perfect accuracy but it does the least damage as a tradeoff.

In the Intergrade version, the game handles the need to restart fights to change your materia setup to suit the battle pretty well, giving you a quick restart button for every individual fight. However, what sucks is that the game doesn’t have a Materia preset system which I think the game would really benefit from, having to re-arrange your team’s entire materia setup can be kind of a drag sometimes and it would be great if one could save presets and reuse them quickly.

I also don’t love how the game chooses to teach its enemy mechanics, which involves you casting Assess to get a brief description of the strategy you are supposed to use against them. Sometimes even this description is very vague and not helpful. I honestly think this game would benefit from Doom Eternal style tutorialization, which might be an unpopular opinion but I really think for a game as complex as this one having prompts that give you a general idea of what you’re supposed to do works out a lot better than hoping players bumble their way into understanding the mechanics. I also think many of the move descriptions are lacking and make it easy to miss out on the extra mechanics and nuances of each ability, which you can actually find on the Final Fantasy fandom.com wiki which populates its gameplay pages for the game with detailed info taken from the Japanese Ultimania (god bless whoever translated all that info and put it there). Like did you know that Barrett can press his ability button to cancel the recovery of every ATB command with a quick reload that cuts a couple seconds from his cooldown, or that the transition animation from Operator mode to Punisher mode contains a guardpoint that allows Cloud to his Punisher Mode counter attack without needing to be already in Punisher? There are a lot of hidden details to every character’s mechanics.

One final gripe I’m gonna mention is the aerial combat, though its a minor one as not many enemies fly in the first place. It feels pretty awkward and usually your goal is to use ranged attacks and put them in the ground anyways but I wanna bring it up because the sequel to this game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has already been showcased and is overhauling that aspect greatly, making it so characters cannot go into the air automatically by attacking flying enemies and instead you must use specific new synergy attacks or ATB moves that put your character in the air and allow them to go for air combos and dodges while also giving them the ability to cast many abilities in mid-air. One of the bosses they’ve shown explicitly takes advantage of this and is a flying boss from the original that before acted as a way to make you use long range materia, now acts as a way to force you to use all the new aerial combat mechanics to hit it. It’s already making me giddy with excitement for all the potential these mechanics bring.

I really love this game, so much that I find it difficult to write about and describe properly with how many ways it layers its mechanics to create the kind of fun I enjoy. I think it’s already very polished and deep as is, but I am excited to see how they will be refined and expanded upon in the upcoming entries. And if you didn’t feel this way about the combat when you first played this game then I hope reading this has given you some insight into the sheer amount of quality design and inventiveness that I find hiding in its combat system….now if only they would give us better difficulty options in the next game.

Earlier this year, I played most Armored Core bar the PS3 games in anticipation for this game, though not really out of pure hype, but because I was curious what bedrock of design From Software was working with. I didn’t expect to like them much, as I'm not a big mecha fan and I rarely hear high praise for its gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. Armored Core had a great niche in which fast movement did not mean great flexibility. You can boost around at high speeds, but your ability to turn and aim is limited by your mech’s legs and your FCS Lockbox. It was an incredibly compelling way to design a console shooter in which traditional aiming was not the main skill, but instead the usage of movement and positioning to supplement your limited tank controls was heavily emphasized. It tickled a very different part of the brain than most games usually do, and this is not without getting into how deep and detailed the mech-building was and the way in which it very directly affected how you control and move with your AC.

I felt very positive towards Oldgen AC as a whole in spite of some issues with mission design, but I also felt like there was no chance FromSoft could replicate any of this. The core conceit of the system after all was limited and unintuitive controls. Without it, none of this would work, and in the year of our lord 2023 we’ve already had a couple releases whos primary objective to sand off anything awkward to the modern gamer even if it leaves glaring flaws in the design (looking at you, Resident Evil 4 Remake) so I prepared myself for Armored Core 6 to not really reach those same heights.

Having played it now, I can call it decent as a brainless mecha-themed action game, though only decent, as even on those metrics it is greatly brought down by poor balancing and some core mechanic weaknesses. It had cool spectacle, and the music was occasionally good, and the plot had enough intrigue going on with answerable questions if you cared to find hidden data logs. The challenge that some bosses give at the beginning was interesting, and I particularly liked the Ibis Chapter 4 boss, who moved too fast to brainlessly shoot at, demanding you wait for openings and keep closing the distance to make sure your shots don't ricochet. Though unfortunately that challenge faded and never returned, even as I completed the supposedly extra difficult content of NG++ and attempted to nerf my own builds to allow the game to shine more while it had the chance, and FromSoft missed the chance of fix Armored Core’s long standing issue of boring mission design, which in some ways is made even worse as they are all made much shorter and less demanding and ammo/repair costs feeling like a complete non-factor to the mission gameplay thus failing to incentivize you to play around saving costs.

The game’s greatest virtue in my opinion is the mech creation sandbox and how much flexibility you have with the ability to place numerous decals anywhere and change the material type of the different metals all over the mech. You can create some very beautifully rendered custom mecha in this game and it makes it easy to get attached to your particular creation if you put some effort into them, and I think that alone can definitely carry a playthrough of this game. However, that about sums up all the nice things I have to say about the game. The actual gameplay suffers and does not justify replaying the game three times to see all the content, and that's what the rest of this review will be dedicated towards.

One of the core issues that hurts this game’s vision is the Stagger system. It acts like a simplified but more extreme version of the Heat mechanic from the older games, however the changes made to it hurt the game’s balance severely. Armored Core 6 rewards the player exponentially for adopting a burst damage based playstyle, often turning fights into complete stomps in favor of the player once you put on a shotgun or grenade launcher. In contrast, anything that doesn't include some form of burst feels heavily undertuned and weak, try playing assault rifles in this game and you will have a bad time for multiple reasons. The issue is twofold here and I will be using it to segue into my other issue with the game’s design.
Stagger leaves the enemy open to critical damage for a small window, and so in order to take advantage of that window, some kind of burst damage is sorely needed. Building Stagger bar itself is also primarily dependent on the damage being dealt, and this makes it so slow damage over time weapons often are bad at causing stagger too, whereas burst damage options will both inflict Stagger very fast while also allowing you deal massive amounts of damage during the window. Finding a build that allows you to take advantage of the stagger system to a reasonable degree while also not completely invalidating the enemies is a far far more challenging task than anything in the game itself. But why balance it like this? Why are Shotguns so obscenely strong?? I suspect the answer to that lies in them being carryovers from Old AC design without much consideration put into how their power changes when the core limitations of tank controls were removed.

In Old-Gen AC, options like a shotgun or a stationary rockets/grenades were much harder to line up the shot for due to the nature of tank controls and FCS. This especially was felt with Shotguns, which demanded you to stick up close to an enemy to get worthwhile damage, which in Oldgen this meant that you were consciously moving into a range where you cannot track your target very well as they can move much faster than you can turn around to chase them, and thus lining up the shot properly took a lot of skill and finesse. Your movement needed to make up for your limited turning and made it so your ability to deal high damage was highly reliant on moving in smart ways, but this conflicted with the demands brought on by needing to dodge enemy attacks and keep yourself out of their sights. This created an incredibly complex dance of challenging priorities that made the high damage feel earned once you manage to land the shots.
However, in the world of Armored Core 6, the mechs are blessed with hard-lock auto aim and insta turning around, nearly all your shots will land, the negligible drawbacks of hard-lock are not felt whatsoever in PvE and the game’s much too stationary bosses. Your movement rarely needs to take into account your ability to land shots, just do whatever it takes to dodge the enemy’s telegraphed cannons and stay close while spamming the shoot buttons.
The assault rifles and other long/mid range options still had a strong place in Old Gen because in order to track targets within your lockbox, you had to keep a certain distance that made their movement manageable, allowing them to be good ways to chip away at enemies with ease. In comparison, AC6 gives you no reason to ever be far from opponents. With the increased power of laser blades, the addition of assault boost kicks, and the bosses who constantly dash up to you for Souls-like melee attacks, there is nearly never a reason to play long/mid range. You need to stay close to even dodge most boss attacks which ask you to hover over them and/or dash past them. It’s telling that most FCS given to you are close-range focused and that Sniper Rifles didn’t even make it into this game.

I find these flaws to be the result of the sacrifices made by the game for the sake of ultra-intuitive controls, but when you take away the entire skill of aiming and the movement, positioning, and weapon balancing factors that come with it, issues like this are bound to bubble up. It's also because of this that none of the mech types really feel as different as they used to, with the controls homogenized the way they are, many of the drawbacks and strengths of different mech-types are not as apparent. Of course the flipside of this is you can now bring a tank leg into any kind of fight you want, whereas Oldgen AC tended to railroad you into making a fast AC if you wanted to deal with its endgame challenges. But unlike this game, Oldgen AC often still had a lot of bite and challenge left to it even when you develop an AC that has the right tools for the mission. That isn’t to say that you can’t cheese difficult fights and challenges with some broken weapons/setups, but you had to go out of your way to make them and most challenges feel beatable without a cheese build, you just need the skills to push yourself over the finish lines. The demands of the build were only one half of the puzzle, but playing well enough to beat challenges was even more emphasized, which I don’t find be the case in Armored Core 6 as the “right build” is both even easier to make and once created, utterly destroys any challenge and doesn’t let me have any fun with the boss. Perhaps this is great for the type of player who likes the power-fantasy of crushing infamous Souls bosses by changing their build, but I was never that kind of player and even if I was, the relative ease and simplicity at which you can create a build that dominates all this game’s content makes even that part of the game unsatisfying in concept.

It's hard to look at the game in a good light after three playthroughs, with the flaws in the game’s balancing and the limited depth of its systems becoming more apparent as I attempted to find ways to make the game challenging. This a game where you never need to worry about anything but dodging once you’re locked on and while yes, the ways in which you dodge in this game are definitely more fun than Souls i-framing, dashing over forward moving attacks that every boss spams is not enough to make me fall love in with a game, especially not with the vast majority of missions being some flavor of “boring” with how little they demand of any of the systems in place. At the very least I hope the way this game introduces mech-building can serve as a nice way to ease players into the older games.

To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.

To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.

A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.

To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.

Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.

So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.

Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.

Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.

The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.

There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.

Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting

Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.

And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.

Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.