Man I meant to write a preamble about how this answers the question I’ve been loosely asking myself through all these horror games of “what’s my favourite survival horror?” but then when I started writing it I just ended up talking about game mechanics in a bit more detail than is really applicable for the preamble so it just turned into a paragraph of the review itself
Guess that means I’m not gonna have a preamble for this review
Oh well
Resident Evil 4 follows Leon Kennedy — one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 2 — six years after his first day as a cop placed him right at the very heart of the Raccoon City incident. Now an agent of the secret service, he now undergoes a new mission: investigate a village off the coast of Spain in hopes of finding information that can lead to the retrieval of Ashley Graham, the recently kidnapped daughter of the president of the United States. However, upon reaching the village. Leon gets attacked by inhabitants less human than he was expecting, and it soon becomes a battle for survival. With only the tools he finds — and with the help of some allies along the way — Leon now needs to shoot, stab, and solve his way through the village and related areas in an attempt to rescue Ashley, find a way out, and come face to face with some once-thought-lost faces from the Raccoon City incident.
And yeah, okay, I’m a basic bitch, here’s my favourite survival horror game. I think what ultimately makes it work so well is the way it blends its survival horror origins with its more actionized take on the formula in ways that work to enhance both. While the gameplay feels super arcadey in how you go from room to room, fighting through everything along the way — almost like a less on-rails House of the Dead — your limited resources and how overwhelming encounters tend to be means you’re on edge at every moment: cringing whenever you start running out of healing items, having ammo frequently run out on your weapons… something which then goes back to enhance the action game aspect, as the starvation of ammo then encourages the player to switch it up and use different guns in a way that helps the player to understand the strengths and drawbacks of each weapon. The game strikes a basically perfect balance between the two directions it splits off in, and I like how naturally elements of one merge with the other, such as how you tend to backtrack and come back to levels you’ve already been to solve puzzles and find a new way forward, or how the insanely tanky chainsaw guys who kill you in one hit are… enemies the player is egged on to fight given the rewards you get if you manage to actually take them down.
Beyond that, the game is just… insanely fun. It’s easy to see that this game was inspired by/born from the first Devil May Cry — you’re not exactly slashing up demons and pulling your Devil Trigger while you play as Leon, but the way the game divides itself into levels and, as aforementioned, the way you tend to backtrack and find new ways through old areas, is super reminiscent, and a lot of what made that game fun works even better here. It’s super fun to place yourself against the horde and be strong enough to take them all down, and I love how the game continuously varies and keeps things fresh. Sometimes you have multiple paths you can take, or multiple options to take care of one situation. Sometimes there are enemies in the mix who you have to radically change your approach for. Sometimes the challenge is getting through the area or solving the puzzle more than it is taking down the enemies inside. Sometimes you have Ashley who… honestly works really well as an escort NPC? It’s clear that she’s a bit of a weight on your back, and you as the player have to figure out how to keep her safe whenever a situation involves her, but… there’s a lot of effort taken to avoid the typical issues that escort NPCs have. She automatically shuffles behind you whenever you aim your gun, she’ll do her best to duck if the gun’s pointed right at her (meaning that generally if she does get shot it's mostly a case of unfortunate/poor placement of her within a room, and you can order her to stay in place or hide in a dumpster so that she isn’t as much in the way when you need to get into a big fight. Honestly, I don’t really know why Ashley’s considered, like, the poster child of annoying escort missions. By that era’s standards (and tbh even by today’s standards), she really works, both as an element that mixes up the action gameplay and something that adds to the stress of the situation.
Sadly, though, there are issues. Mainly with the boss fights. Out of the… ten or so boss encounters in the game, I could… honestly name only one who I particularly enjoyed going up against? There’s… I think two more that I thought were pretty okay, but all the other fights… lowkey kinda sucked. The big problem, I feel, is that boss HP is jacked wayyyyy too high, which results in fights that mostly just leave you running around, chipping away at the boss’ health bar, kinda getting bored because the fight’s taking way too long. Even when there’s some fun spectacle, or a unique mechanic surrounding the fight, often it only encompasses one part of the fight and as soon as it’s over you’re back to just wailing on them again. Once you start including some of the bosses with instant kill attacks, or mechanics which made doing damage to them a lot harder… yeah boss fights as a whole weren’t really winners. It says something, I feel, when the one boss I did wholly like (Verdugo) was more a matter of avoiding the boss and waiting out a timer than fighting back against it. Maybe this might’ve been a matter of the difficulty I picked (or the difficulty the game moved me to — I know there’s a mechanic like that), but as a whole boss fights felt way too tanky and sloggy to be fun, and are an unfortunate black mark over what’s…
…otherwise just a blast of an experience. I know that it’s…not exactly that unique of an opinion to put this as the best Resident Evil, or even yet the best survival horror game, but between the way the game oscillates between survival horror and third-person shooter in a way that does favours to both, and between how straight-up fun this is to play, I feel pretty confident to say I’ve found one of my favourites. At least for now. Can’t wait to see what the remake does with this. 9/10.
Guess that means I’m not gonna have a preamble for this review
Oh well
Resident Evil 4 follows Leon Kennedy — one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 2 — six years after his first day as a cop placed him right at the very heart of the Raccoon City incident. Now an agent of the secret service, he now undergoes a new mission: investigate a village off the coast of Spain in hopes of finding information that can lead to the retrieval of Ashley Graham, the recently kidnapped daughter of the president of the United States. However, upon reaching the village. Leon gets attacked by inhabitants less human than he was expecting, and it soon becomes a battle for survival. With only the tools he finds — and with the help of some allies along the way — Leon now needs to shoot, stab, and solve his way through the village and related areas in an attempt to rescue Ashley, find a way out, and come face to face with some once-thought-lost faces from the Raccoon City incident.
And yeah, okay, I’m a basic bitch, here’s my favourite survival horror game. I think what ultimately makes it work so well is the way it blends its survival horror origins with its more actionized take on the formula in ways that work to enhance both. While the gameplay feels super arcadey in how you go from room to room, fighting through everything along the way — almost like a less on-rails House of the Dead — your limited resources and how overwhelming encounters tend to be means you’re on edge at every moment: cringing whenever you start running out of healing items, having ammo frequently run out on your weapons… something which then goes back to enhance the action game aspect, as the starvation of ammo then encourages the player to switch it up and use different guns in a way that helps the player to understand the strengths and drawbacks of each weapon. The game strikes a basically perfect balance between the two directions it splits off in, and I like how naturally elements of one merge with the other, such as how you tend to backtrack and come back to levels you’ve already been to solve puzzles and find a new way forward, or how the insanely tanky chainsaw guys who kill you in one hit are… enemies the player is egged on to fight given the rewards you get if you manage to actually take them down.
Beyond that, the game is just… insanely fun. It’s easy to see that this game was inspired by/born from the first Devil May Cry — you’re not exactly slashing up demons and pulling your Devil Trigger while you play as Leon, but the way the game divides itself into levels and, as aforementioned, the way you tend to backtrack and find new ways through old areas, is super reminiscent, and a lot of what made that game fun works even better here. It’s super fun to place yourself against the horde and be strong enough to take them all down, and I love how the game continuously varies and keeps things fresh. Sometimes you have multiple paths you can take, or multiple options to take care of one situation. Sometimes there are enemies in the mix who you have to radically change your approach for. Sometimes the challenge is getting through the area or solving the puzzle more than it is taking down the enemies inside. Sometimes you have Ashley who… honestly works really well as an escort NPC? It’s clear that she’s a bit of a weight on your back, and you as the player have to figure out how to keep her safe whenever a situation involves her, but… there’s a lot of effort taken to avoid the typical issues that escort NPCs have. She automatically shuffles behind you whenever you aim your gun, she’ll do her best to duck if the gun’s pointed right at her (meaning that generally if she does get shot it's mostly a case of unfortunate/poor placement of her within a room, and you can order her to stay in place or hide in a dumpster so that she isn’t as much in the way when you need to get into a big fight. Honestly, I don’t really know why Ashley’s considered, like, the poster child of annoying escort missions. By that era’s standards (and tbh even by today’s standards), she really works, both as an element that mixes up the action gameplay and something that adds to the stress of the situation.
Sadly, though, there are issues. Mainly with the boss fights. Out of the… ten or so boss encounters in the game, I could… honestly name only one who I particularly enjoyed going up against? There’s… I think two more that I thought were pretty okay, but all the other fights… lowkey kinda sucked. The big problem, I feel, is that boss HP is jacked wayyyyy too high, which results in fights that mostly just leave you running around, chipping away at the boss’ health bar, kinda getting bored because the fight’s taking way too long. Even when there’s some fun spectacle, or a unique mechanic surrounding the fight, often it only encompasses one part of the fight and as soon as it’s over you’re back to just wailing on them again. Once you start including some of the bosses with instant kill attacks, or mechanics which made doing damage to them a lot harder… yeah boss fights as a whole weren’t really winners. It says something, I feel, when the one boss I did wholly like (Verdugo) was more a matter of avoiding the boss and waiting out a timer than fighting back against it. Maybe this might’ve been a matter of the difficulty I picked (or the difficulty the game moved me to — I know there’s a mechanic like that), but as a whole boss fights felt way too tanky and sloggy to be fun, and are an unfortunate black mark over what’s…
…otherwise just a blast of an experience. I know that it’s…not exactly that unique of an opinion to put this as the best Resident Evil, or even yet the best survival horror game, but between the way the game oscillates between survival horror and third-person shooter in a way that does favours to both, and between how straight-up fun this is to play, I feel pretty confident to say I’ve found one of my favourites. At least for now. Can’t wait to see what the remake does with this. 9/10.