The Resident Evil 4 Remake manages to be interesting merely as a concept. Regardless of its quality, there is a debate to be had on whether it is even worth trying to ‘remake’ – that is, improve upon – one of the greatest video games of all-time. At this point, that’s not even my personal opinion; that’s just an objective fact. Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest games of all-time and if you disagree then I can scientifically prove that you are wrong. There are four certainties in life; death, taxes, Dopefish finding a way to name-drop RollerCoaster Tycoon into everything he writes, and Resident Evil 4 being one of the greatest games of all-time.
On the one hand, this endless need to remake and reboot things instead of presenting new intellectual properties is arguably a negative approach in terms of basic creativity; if the R4make – God, that really doesn’t fit into text like the R2make and R3make did – had been developed with the same core gameplay but the plot slightly tweaked and all of the Resident Evil 4 bits scrubbed out – or at least, run by a couple of copyright lawyers to ensure that it was all just a nod of the head and not actual plagiarism – then arguably, critics may have lauded the release of an extremely well-designed action-horror game with stealth elements that makes no major mistakes and sticks the landing. However… that game would have been lucky to sell a million copies, while the R4make – no, really, I need to come up with another way of typing that. Rem4ke? Just as bad. I’ll come up with something – sold eight million copies, and is according to Wikipedia “the fastest-selling instalment in the series.” Can you really blame Capcom then, for not taking that risk?
On the other hand, remakes are an opportunity to fix mistakes, improve upon outdated formulae, and generally just… make good games. A good game is good for the company, good for the industry, and good for the audience. And while Resident Evil 4 is genuinely one of the greatest video games ever made, it had its fair share of weak spots; Ashley Graham is widely considered one of the most annoying video game characters (except by me) characters like Luis Sera and especially Krauser are extremely underutilized, and the combat, while satisfying, is easy enough to master that after just one playthrough, it’s likely that any challenge will be self-imposed, to an extent. Once you realise that almost every single enemy in the game – even in groups of two or three – can be cheesed by ‘walk forwards, wait for their attack animation to begin, step backwards, and when they miss, run up and knife them in the face’ then even multiple chainsaw-wielding Dr. Salvadors become a cakewalk. I don’t think that guy is a real doctor, for the record. Just because a game is one of the best doesn’t mean that it can’t be made better. There’s something admirably ambitious about that; even moreso if I pretend that this is the reason Capcom wanted to remake Resident Evil 4, rather than money and brand recognition.
My personal experience with Resident Evil 4 is that unsurprisingly, I love it. It’s not quite one of my favourite games but it might be in the running for the single-player game that I have completed the most times, at about… I stopped keeping track after ten. All difficulties, a No Merchant run – a real No Merchant run, none of that “I didn’t buy anything from the merchant except for some case upgrades,” “Oh, so in other words, a No Merchant run where you bought something from the merchant,” rubbish – a Red9 only run, a New Game Plus speedrun, knife-only (where possible) and a lot more just for fun. Resident Evil 4 is a phenomenal game and while it certainly didn’t emotionally resonate with me, or change my life in any way other than occupying a few hundred hours of it, then it’s still an easy nine out of ten, and I worry I’m being uncharitable even at that.
So regarding whether attempting to remake something that close to perfection is conceptually a good idea, we could absolutely have that discussion – bit of a one-sided discussion with me doing all of the talking, but a discussion nonetheless – about the Resident Evil 4 remake. That’s right, I’m just going to stick to calling it that, and I’ll try to name-drop it as little as possible, or just refer to it as ‘the remake.’ But that also ignores a very important question, that being… do I want to have that discussion?
Not really, I just want to say what I liked and didn’t like about the Resident Evil 4 remake. So I will! Usually when reviewing games that I want to talk about, but I’m not sure how to go about it, I gravitate towards ‘Here are five positives/negatives/notable things about this game!’ but when writing down the pros and cons of the Resident Evi– the remake, then I came up with… eight. Each. Which means that… I should probably think about cutting this introduction short. Let’s get straight into the pros and cons of Resident Evil 4 (2023).
Pro: Stealth is a welcome addition
It was never a big enough issue to actually have a negative impact on the original experience, but I distinctly remember one part of Resident Evil 4 which made me think “Huh, it would have been nice if they had implemented this somehow.” That part was the very beginning of Chapter 1-3, right after having a cosy chat with Bitores “The Big Cheese” Mendez inside his quaint little home. Directly outside of his house is another Dr. Salvador, flanked by a few regular Ganados. You can actually snipe Dr. Salvador from Mendez’s bedroom window, which is very funny. What’s less funny is that you can then exit Mendez’s house from the back, and Dr. Salvador’s magical pathfinding ability means that he will immediately run straight into Mendez’s house, up the stairs, through the bedroom, out the back as well, and zero in on you. What makes it funny again is that there is a tripwire attached to some explosives which you can leave up, and he’ll run right into it.
While there’s nothing wrong with this, I remember thinking that it would make the game more fun to me if Dr. Salvador was as capable of losing me as I was capable of losing games in the Mercenaries mode when playing as anyone other than Krauser. I’m only realising while typing this that even in the remake, Dr. Salvador would still make his way to my position, rather than just entering some kind of free-roam which would take much more effort to code. But because doorways between big areas now are… actual doors, not loading screens that teleport Leon to the next area, despawning anyone and anything that was chasing him, then enemies are now capable of following you through these doors, and also recognizing when they’ve strayed too far from their path and making their way back to their original location. And then you can shoot them while they’re running away, it’s fantastic.
I’ve done a pretty bad job of explaining how any of this is ‘stealth’ but in the original Resident Evil 4, if there was ever a location filled with enemies who were not immediately alerted to your position, you could probably get the drop on one of them for a free kill, courtesy of a rifle shot to the head, or even something as stealthy as a knife-stun into a melee attack and then finishing them off while downed. But it doesn’t matter if the rest of the villagers are a hundred metres away and if they somehow didn’t hear Leon breaking open all of the nearby barrels to scavenge for pesetas; the second an enemy is hit, everyone in the vicinity immediately knows what just happened, and exactly where. To be fair, this does make some sense narratively, with Las Plagas being something of a hive mind, so an attack on one could be sensed by the others, but from a gameplay perspective, this isn’t great.
The remake fixes this by allowing Leon to stealth-kill enemies silently with his knife. And not just from behind; if you run around a corner and into an enemy – which is still possible thanks to the advantageous camera – then they won’t react immediately, and you can get a quick one-hit-kill stab in, even on the big dangerous Brutes who make a habit of tanking shotgun shells. This is really fun, lends more depth to the gameplay, adds new choices and playstyles, and is just generally really good, even if the game isn’t overwhelmingly full of opportunities to employ this new technique. It’s always fun and always feels rewarding when you can use stealth, and successfully kill several enemies who would have otherwise cost you more than a couple of bullets, probably. You can also backstab enemies who are carrying Ashley for an instant-kill, so Ashley getting kidnapped is almost an advantage, because it provides the opportunity for a completely free kill.
… Just make sure that your knife is durable enough, because-
Con: Your knife has the durability of a melting stick of butter
Like a lot of players, I went into the village and stealthily stabbed a few villagers. I did not initially notice just how quickly a bar above the knife was going down, until maybe the fifth villager I stabbed (it didn’t help that I hung around the first enemy encounter in the game, scoring two more knife kills) at which point Leon’s trusty and reliable combat knife, which he was sent in with in order to rescue the President’s daughter… breaks. The knife. Breaks. I have a small kitchen knife for slicing cheese and dicing chorizo, that I bought ten years ago, and it is more durable than the equipment of a government agent on a mission to rescue the President’s daughter.
As loathe as I am to admit it, I can reluctantly see the point of this; the knife is an instant kill during stealth, or the stunned aftermath of a flash grenade. If it was unbreakable, it would be relatively overpowered. But to counter this, Leon’s knife begins the game as pathetically, laughably weak, to the point where it would be extremely comical if it wasn’t genuinely frustrating. The beginning of the game is when players are getting used to stealth. To take that away from them in the middle of the opening fight – and long after, since you don’t meet the merchant until Chapter Two, when you can first repair it – tells players that the cool new feature, probably the biggest change in gameplay to the original… is not to be relied upon. It sends completely the wrong message, and there are possible workarounds.
Workaround one; just double the starting durability of the knife and have the upgrades count for a little less to compensate. Yes, that does make the game easier, and it’s entirely possible – and probably intended – to beat without relying too much on the knife, but the starting durability is truly pathetic. It also lessens the chance of getting to pull off one of the coolest moments of the trailer; parrying a chainsaw. That’s right; Leon’s knife can now parry attacks if you pull it out just as they strike. It can deflect projectiles – even Gatling gun bullets (well… it’s actually just an extremely rapid-fire crossbow, but still!) although you’ll probably still get hit by several of them – and even block the infamous one-hit kill of the chainsaw. But this raises an inconsistency, because how in Saddler’s name can this knife block a running chainsaw and yet it breaks if you stab five people with it? That doesn’t seem consistent.
Which also brings me to workaround two; in order to teach the player about parrying, shortly after the village fight (when most players are calming down, knowing from experience that they have some respite now that everyone’s gone to bingo) pop another chainsaw wielder in, and have Leon block the blade in a cutscene with his knife. This is amazing because a) It visually demonstrates that Leon is capable of parrying attacks with the knife, b) It provides an explanation for why the knife’s durability just went way down, and c) It terrifies complacent players who are overconfident that this game is going to follow the steps of the original, ergo “Oh, I can relax now, the village fight is over- OH, SHIT! After I gathered up the loot and opened the gate to the next area, a crazy chainsaw lady just burst through and almost killed me in a cutscene! And now my knife is screwed!”
There is some narrative reason for Leon’s knife being garbage; according to the item description, this is the same knife that Marvin gives Leon near the beginning of the Resident Evil 2 remake. Which is… look, Leon, I hate to say it, but I think you might just be a hoarder. Because that’s a lovely thought, but I’m sure that if Marvin was still alive, even he would tell you “That’s a shit knife, Leon. Get a better one.” The knife that you get in the R2make isn’t even special there, Leon and Claire find several more, because they’re completely nondescript. You can find several more knives in the remake as well, but they’re somehow considerably more basic than Leon’s, because they break significantly more quickly and cannot be repaired, although you can somehow turn them into bolts for the bolt-thrower. It was a nice gesture Leon, but you really hamstrung my enjoyment of the village fight, and the ensuing section where if you’re patient, you can stealth-kill a Brute. But not if your knife has broken.
Pro: A crafting system which isn’t terrible
If I were ever to make a list of two-word phrases that immediately dissuade me from giving a video game a chance, then the top of that list would doubtless be populated with things like ‘live service’ or ‘season pass’ or ‘Digital Homicide’, but I’m confident that ‘crafting system’ would be near the top of that list too. I struggle to think of a game which has been improved by a crafting system; it reminds me of The Wind Waker, weirdly enough – weirdly because I don’t think that game even has a crafting system – but it’s in the same vein as finding a big treasure chest inside a difficult part of a dungeon, and opening it to find… a map. A map to an undersea treasure chest in the Great Sea. And each time it happened, I just thought “Could you not just save me the time and give me the item now?”
I feel that way whenever a game gives me crafting materials. Could you not just skip the part where I gather twenty bear asses and use them to make a +2-defence fur coat, and just give me the fur coat? It just feels like filler; a needless extension of the process that adds only tedium, not fun. Which is why it’s so surprising in retrospect that the only series to avert this is not a craft-heavy game – that’s probably the reason why it doesn’t annoy me – is Resident Evil. Because this series has always had crafting, whether it was gunpowder, herbs, or chem fluid. Resident Evil VII, Village, the R2make and R3make; all of them have crafting and I did not not enjoy the crafting systems in any of those games. And the Resident Evil 4 remake continues that trend, even though it ups the ante to include ‘resources (small)’ and ‘resources (large)’.
In addition to the general herbs that Leon mashes together like a panicking child on MasterChef Junior, he can combine various amounts of gunpowder with small or large resources to make handgun ammo, shotgun shells, rifle ammunition, flash grenades, etc. It detracts from the general “Ugh, why couldn’t you have just given me the item?” sentiment when you know for a fact that whatever you’ve just picked up instead is guaranteed to be useful, and quickly, and useful in a way that you can personally decide. Sure, the resources (large) sometimes clog up your inventory, and they can’t be used to make shotgun shells, which I would have expected from large resources, but overall… good crafting system. I give it a half-hearted thumbs up.
Con: Where has the item box gone?
This was initially just named ‘A crafting system that’s not that great either,’ but most of my problems with the Resident Evil 4 remake’s crafting system – which I do like, but I like it the least out of every Resident Evil crafting system I’ve encountered – would no longer apply if they hadn’t just removed the item box. Let me compare this remake to the other most recent Resident Evil games.
In the remake of 2, the remake of 3, and Resident Evil 7, you can find craftable materials all over Raccoon City Police Department/Raccoon City/the Baker house, but if they’re ever in danger of properly clogging up your inventory, there is a handy item box in most save rooms which you can use to deposit items that you don’t currently need, so that you can pick them up again later from a different item box. I used to always stash the ‘Gunpowder (Large)’ pickups until near the end of the game and then be swimming in shotgun shells or acid rounds for Claire’s grenade-launcher. This system was fine.
There is no item box in Resident Evil Village, which brought back the well-received inventory system of the original Resident Evil 4 – and by ‘well-received’, I mean that there are puzzle games on Steam right now based solely on reorganizing your Resident Evil 4 inventory. There’s one named Save Room that has a sequel and they’re both pretty good and full of cheeky RE4 references (re4erences?) – but it also kept crafting materials, like herbs, metal scrap, rusted scrap, gunpowder and chem fluid. Actually, that’s all of them. And they don’t take up space in the inventory. They’re treated like treasures, carried around by the character but not taking up precious gun or ammo space; at least, not until they’ve been crafted into ammunition or healing items. There’s no item box, but why would you need one? Your inventory isn’t clogged up with all of the resources you’ve picked up.
The Resident Evil 4 remake combines these systems into one which doesn’t feature an item box which lets you store your craftables, but also counts them in your regular inventory. To be clear, whenever you stop at a typewriter to save, there is an option for ‘storage’ where you can stash your guns or the occasional first-aid spray, but ammunition, gunpowder, resources; they’re with you for the long haul. You crafted some bolts and attachable mines for the bolt-thrower? They are with you forever… or at least, until you use them up in the whopping two instances where it’s useful to use the bolt-thrower (setting up an explosive trap for the Bella Sisters, and later helping Ashley with her Miley Cyrus impression when she needs to destroy a wall and comes in like a wrecking ball.)
Is this a serious inconvenience that significantly negatively-impacted my opinion of the game? No. Was it outrageous that they overlooked such a hideous flaw? No. It was an intentional design choice and it’s not terrible by any means, it just means that your inventory will be a little over-stuffed in the first half of the game because you obviously don’t want to throw away any resources (large) but you just don’t have the means to craft anything with them, and… they are large. Is this awful? No. Do I think that the system they ended up with is perfect just the way it is? Also no. That is all.
Pro: Way more merchant requests
In Resident Evil 4, after the village fight, a blue note on a tree informs Leon and the player that if they shoot down ten out of fifteen targets in two areas found in Chapter 1-1 and Chapter 1-3, then you unlock a special free gift from the merchant; the Punisher handgun, which… kind of sucks; its benefit – a high-rate of piercing which allows it to penetrate through multiple enemies at once – just isn’t very useful because Ganados are not fans of approaching you in a conga line, and you should probably be aiming for their heads anyway (unless you’re attempting some crowd control… in which case, why are you using your handgun?) At the very least, you can sell the Punisher back for some extra pesetas. And it’s fun! It’s nice hunting down those blue targets. It’s a shame the merchant doesn’t have more requests for you.
Oh boy.
There are more blue medallions to shoot in the village, and then twice again in the castle, and then two more on the island. The merchant would also appreciate if you could sell him three vipers, and/or a gold chicken egg, and/or the Lunker Bass, a special fish found on the outskirts of the lake where Del Lago resides. The merchant would also appreciate if you could deface a certain grave in the graveyard, throw an egg at a Salazar portrait, or kill some of the large rats hiding in various areas of the game. The merchant would also appreciate if you could kill several new mini-bosses, including a giant Plagas-infested dog (or wolf? The Resident Evil wiki says that the Colmillo enemies are wolves, but the request is called ‘A Savage Mutt,’) a stronger variant of the Plagas-controlled Armaduras (the knights,) and a very buffed and Plagas-filled Regenerator (the Regenerators; probably didn’t need to explain that one any further.)
So this is a) a bucketload of new content to enjoy, b) a chance to earn new rewards from the merchant, who will pay you for completing these tasks with Spinels, which now – rather than just being worth selling for two thousand Pesetas each – can be traded for exclusive items, gun modifications, treasures, treasure maps, and even the odd yellow herb c) a reason for players to keep their eyes open as they explore old and new areas alike, keeping watch for anything out of the ordinary. Half of the merchant requests that I completed, I did so before I had even found the little blue notices taped up asking for my help; I just saw a bird’s next, shot it, found a scratched emerald, sold it to the Merchant – while explaining that the scratch was definitely probably already on it before I opened fire in its general direction – and was then on the fast-track to Spinel-town. I don’t have a lot more to say about these requests, other than that they are amazing and I love them all and am so glad that so much new content was added to the game. Oh, and d) It gives you more of a reason to back-track to old areas too. Unlike the other primary reason for back-tracking, which is-
Con: Locked drawers and small keys
Hey, remember that tangent about The Wind Waker? Well it’s back, and it’s much worse.
At several times in the Resident Evil 4 Remake, you will stumble across a locked drawer. At times that will feel rarer even though there are mathematically just the same (unless you miss a key) then you will find a small key which is apparently made of the same stuff that Leon’s knife is made of, because the mere act of turning the key in the lock renders it broken beyond repair. The village and castle are full of these locked drawers (… well, there are five in the village, three in the castle,) and the game is paced so that unless you intentionally skipped a drawer, you will never approach one with a spare key in hand. The locked drawer is just there to let you know that you have found a thing, but you can’t get the thing until you come back with a different thing to use on the thing to let you get the thing. Simple enough? Sure. Fun? No.
What makes this frustrating is that it’s a catch-22 in terms of reward. If the game hid some genuinely game-changing items in these locked drawers – a fire-rate increase for a rifle, a trinket that narrows the range but increases the power of the shotgun, etc – then that’s a notable disadvantage for the poor player who missed that one small key in the Chapter Two valley, which you can’t go back to in Chapter Four when you give in and look up a guide and realise you missed it. Not that this is what happened to me, typed Dopefish, wondering if he could somehow hyperlink that text to the ‘Suspiciously Specific Denial’ page on TVTropes.
But these treasures take considerably more effort to find than regular treasures, which makes it a disappointment when you backtrack all the way to the castle area where you fight a Level 36 El Gigante who it seems only knows the move ‘Rock Throw’ – and if Leon is standing behind cover, it’s not very effective – to find the locked drawer in that one specific location, only to find… an Ornate Beetle. I mean, it’s a free twelve thousand Pesetas, but you find an Ornate Beetle for free in the garden after completing the water hall section. And this is the most valuable treasure you find; others are in the eight thousand to ten thousand region. Not bad, per se, but not any more impressive than any of the generic treasure you find throughout Leon’s Spanish vacation. And every time you find a locked drawer or a small key, you will likely be thinking to yourself “Could you not just give me the item instead?” The answer to which is yes. Yes they could.
Pro: The shooting range has a purpose now
At various times (I want to say… four?) in the original Resident Evil 4, the merchant will give you some time to unwind in a shooting range. It’s a fun but not groundbreaking minigame, which I never recalled that fondly, but it also wasn’t massively difficult and you get little bottle-cap figurines of characters for doing well, which I think is how most people found out the names of most of the enemies. I don’t think ‘Dr. Salvador’ was written officially on any of the village notes. It was… fine, and forcing Leon to use different weapons was a fun way to let the player try out guns that they hadn’t necessarily purchased yet, although this is pretty much limited to the TMP, unless you somehow haven’t bought a rifle, halfway into the castle.
In the remake, not only is Leon tasked with just shooting all of the bad people, but also shooting a specific number of skulls that are littered around; some on specific cardboard cutouts of baddies, some that only appear if you trigger a bonus round, and some… hidden behind barrels, which is a huge dick move. If a bad guy is peeping his head over a barrel, it makes sense to snipe him in the head at the perfect moment. Rewarding the player for wasting a few shots demolishing his cover and then shooting him feels counterproductive, but there are two other bonuses I’ve yet to mention.
The first is strictly narrative; at various points in the game, Leon will not be alone, so Ashley and Luis can sit back and watch as you play the game, cheering you on, commenting if you did well, and generally adding slightly more depth to their characters. Very slightly; there’s only so much backstory you can extrapolate from Ashley saying “That was like something you’d see at their fair! It reminds me of being a kid!” finally answering one of the most important questions in the history of Resident Evil canon; Ashley Graham has been to a fair.
The most important change is the reward. If you play well – or even half-decently – then you will come away with a handful of gold and silver tokens, which can be redeemed in groups of three for a random charm from… one of those candy vending machines, which can be attached to Leon’s attache case and actually provide him with gameplay bonuses! The Striker charm slightly increases your movement speed – a funny nod to one of the original game’s most iconic glitches – while the Merchant charm gives you 5% off weapon upgrades, Leon with Handgun gives you 30% off knife repairs, etc. These are beneficial enough to provide you with a genuine bonus, while not leaving other players feeling left out if they didn’t get the charms, didn’t get enough tokens, or just don’t want to play the shooting range. Which is good, because after taking it for a spin a few times, I wasn’t in a huge hurry to play the shooting range, because-
Con: The aiming is much worse, and the purpose isn’t great
I mentioned before that you can now trade Spinels to the merchant for unique items. One of the first items you will want to get is the red-dot laser-sight for the handgun. This is practically mandatory, because much like the R2make and R3make, it takes Leon quite some time after lining up a shot for the crosshair to actually narrow enough to reliably hit the target. Which is fine, because in the R2make, it’s rare to be cornered by more than two zombies at once. It’s not like you have to shoot several targets accurately in quick succession, right? Not like a shooting range, or something.
Leon is a rookie in the R2make, so it makes sense that he doesn’t have a perfect, steady-as-a-rock aim, and Jill found the laser-right upgrade so quickly in the R3make that it’s not really relevant. And even in the OG Resident Evil 4, Leon’s aim would sway slightly, meaning you couldn’t reliably score perfect headshots one hundred percent of the time. But the Resident Evil 4 remake gives Leon sway, and it still takes a short eternity for the aim to actually… aim. The first time you play the shooting range is an exercise in frustration because I believe it’s not possible to have collected the Spinels you need to redeem the laser-sight attachment. Which, for the record, doesn’t even work on every handgun, making some of them borderline unusable.
Well, no problem, you can just do the shooting range later. Except… those charms. Sure, you can do the shooting range later, and get the charm that gives you a 20% bonus when crafting Shotgun shells, giving you some precious extra ammunition during an early game where you desperately need it. No biggie. I’m sure you can probably survive the next five chapters without that.
And I don’t know if this makes it worse, but the charms that you redeem? The order in which they are generated is randomly selected at the start of the run. So if you were going for a no-damage run – in which case, the Rhinoceros Beetle charm (+100% sale value of health recovery items; with this, a Red, Yellow and Green herb combo sells for twenty thousand Pesetas) would be incredibly helpful – then… tough luck. You can try to redeem your tokens in any order you like, but if you save up nine gold tokens and redeem them all, three in a row, for three charms, then if that combination doesn’t give you the charm you want, then you can reload and try again all you want; it never will.
On the one hand, I can see the benefit of this; to prevent players from save-scumming their way to their preferred charms. On the other hand, this only encourages save-scumming in a different way; once you have a handful of tokens, it’s wise to redeem them all in different combinations to see what you get, then reload to determine which are the most helpful to you. I think I was pretty lucky, because in my short time at the shooting range, I ended up with the +20% bonus Shotgun shell crafting, +20% bonus Rifle ammo crafting, and 30% off knife repairs, and that was honestly enough for me. Even when I had the laser-sight, the shooting range never really clicked for me – probably because the laser-sight is automatically off in the shooting range – which is annoying, because the impact of the charms only makes it feel less optional this time around.
Also you don’t get any bottle-caps. Boo.
Pro: New weapons, and changes to existing ones!
Remember the Punisher? Not the comic book character who has been uncomfortably appropriated by cops and violent right-wing fanatics (bit redundant of me to say the same thing twice there,) but the ineffective handgun you get in the original game for destroying ten out of fifteen of those blue medallions? I wouldn’t blame you if you’d forgotten, it had the bonus effect of being able to penetrate up to four enemies when fully upgraded… and that was about it.
Well it’s now the second most accurate handgun in the game, solely by virtue of also being compatible with that laser-sight attachment. And it has better stats than the original gun too, albeit not to a huge degree. But hey, that’s a nice change. And the Blacktail now only takes up four slots of space in your inventory; that entire gun is the size of two packets of handgun ammo. There’s also an assault rifle now, which was never in the original game. The Killer7 has gone from “… Oh yeah, that exists,” to now the best Magnum in the game. The Bolt-Thrower, while not used by me very often, is still a welcome addition to Leon’s arsenal; you can even replace Leon’s knife, and not just with those temporary (and somehow even less durable) ones you find here and there, but with Krauser’s knife too, and a bonus knife you get for destroying all of the Mr. Everywhere bobblehead dolls. I mean Mr. Raccoons. No, I mean Mr. Charlie Dolls. Nope, this time they’re called ‘Clockwork Castellans’, although they fulfil the same purpose. I’m not displeased to see them again but it does seem a little repetitive at this point. I mean, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but still.
The point is, if you didn’t like a gun in the original Resident Evil 4, give it another shot in the remake! Because for all you know, it’s gotten better!
Con: Not all of these weapons – or changes – are good!
… Or worse!
An assault rifle? Really? Just to be clear, it uses rifle bullets, if the name didn’t give that away. So it fires like a TMP (weak gun with very quick fire rate, okay at crowd-control and good for quick stuns) but hits like a rifle… but every single individual rifle shot is enough to kill most enemies if placed correctly. So why would you put any bullets into this thing? Every player I know of this game (which admittedly is only, like… two people) used the bullets that were already in this gun when they found it, and then immediately sold it and never bought it back again.
And I understand that you can’t make every gun good, but if anything, the Striker has gotten worse. It still has a very impressive spread, but its range is terrible, and it no longer gets its massive ammo upgrade to hold one hundred shells when upgraded fully to ‘exclusive’ capabilities. Instead, it’s just a ‘times two’ ammunition capacity, which isn’t even worth it, because its pre-exclusive maximum capacity is twenty-four, and if you can’t kill what you’re shooting at in twenty-four shotgun shells, then… trust me, the extra capacity wouldn’t help you.
Every handgun other than the starting one and the Punisher? Not compatible with the laser-sight, so accuracy is terrible. The Matilda hasn’t been improved; it might be Leon’s ‘signature gun’ but it’s still kind of terrible; its unique selling point is that it fires three-bullet bursts instead of just one, but one well-placed bullet is almost always enough to stun an enemy, so it’s only useful if you’re trying to kill via overwhelming the enemy’s HP with body-shots, or fighting stronger enemies which probably aren’t suited to a handgun anyway.
And since we’re speaking about weapon upgrades; oi, merchant, you cheap bastard, why did you stop refilling my ammunition whenever I upgrade ammo capacity? That was one of the defining little touches of the original that everybody loved. Low on TMP ammo? Upgrade ammo capacity and the merchant will even fill it up to maximum capacity while he’s at it! What a great guy. But not any more. If there was a charm that brought back that effect then maybe I wouldn’t have given up so quickly at the shooting range.
Pro: The expanded role of Luis and Krauser
That image isn’t a spoiler or anything, he just bit his lip. Or he very messily ate a jam sandwich.
I know that this isn’t a perfect way to gauge how well-utilized a character is in a story, but if I just do a quick YouTube search; yep, Luis Sera, Leon’s friend in the village who provides him with medicine to suppress the Las Plagas growth, has a whopping nine minutes of screentime. And eight of these minutes are just him awkwardly describing himself as a ladies’ man. He’s fine, he perfectly fits the ‘camp horror film’ mood that Resident Evil 4 was going for, and I have no serious complaints. No-one does; Luis is awesome. In the remake, Luis gets twenty-seven minutes of screentime, and his character is way more fleshed out and interesting.
He’s also… I’m not sure how to say this – or why I am – but in the original game, he could have wandered in off the set of a Hugo Boss perfume commercial. Now, he’s handsome, but in a slightly untrustworthy sort of way, which fits the character perfectly, since he is, after all, extremely suspicious. But you see more of his motives, his backstory, his genuine guilt over what he did while working for Umbrella, and how he hides this with a charming, seemingly laid-back attitude. He also gets much more of a presence in Separate Ways, showing that he works just as well in a double-act with Ada – who is less distrustful of him but more coldly professional – as he does with Leon, who he even accompanies for the twin El Gigante fight now.
But Luis in the original game was never as underutilized as Krauser; a seemingly important figure from Leon’s past, who every player reacted to meeting with a bemused “… Who? Who are you and why are you trying to stab me? At least I remember Ada from the second game, you’re just… some guy. Wearing a stupid beret.” The remake gives Krauser more scenes, more foreshadowing, and a much bigger impact on the story because he is now the one who kills Luis. Before, it was just Saddler, who was wandering around the castle asking for directions before disappearing completely, but now, Krauser is the one who does him in, which feels a hell of a lot more personal, and gives Leon and Krauser a confrontation before the island.
This also gives more depth to Luis, since he gets a more realistic and surprisingly sudden death, right after the player had probably started to hope “… I know that in the original, he died like three chapters ago, but… is he going to live this time? I hope so, he’s- oh, fuck you, Krauser!” and he’s the one who lands a shot to save Leon when the fight with Krauser ends poorly. It was a fantastic decision to move things around this way and it makes Luis and Krauser feel like important characters to the story, rather than just some side-people with names who Leon happens to interact with. Excellent work. Except…
Con: The diminished role of the villains
… Why don’t the villains call me on my radio any more so we can have fun conversations, trading barbs and sniping at each other? That was one of the best little touches in the original game; Salazar and later Saddler would semi-frequently taunt Leon, while also setting him up for some of the best-worst one-liners you’ve ever heard. “Saddler, you’re small-time.” Chills.
Salazar does still kind of contact you, but not in cutscenes, and over old-timey castle speakers, which are just generally hard to hear – and harder to pay attention to, since you’re running around, smashing crates or preparing for a fight – but also there’s no back-and-forth, since it’s not a conversation. It’s just Salazar taunting you without giving you a chance to respond, like the guy on Twitter who blocks you two seconds after replying. Which, come to think of it, does fit Salazar’s character to a tee. But that’s another thing; while Luis and Krauser got more depth, I think Salazar’s was reduced quite a lot. He’s not a petulant tantrum-throwing manchild anymore, but… without that, what even is his character? Other than “I’m evil!”?
Bitores Mendez – the Big Cheese – does get a touch more development, simply from a file that reveals that he used to be a very friendly village chief, dining with a different villager every night and taking their problems seriously, but other than that, there isn’t much. He does come across as a little more of a religious extremist than in the original, and there’s a welcome – and high-adrenaline – section near the end of the Village where Leon and Ashley need to flee him, through a path of unwelcome Ganados, who fortunately seem to love standing next to explosive barrels, or carts… filled with more explosive barrels. That brief section gives him a real Mr. X (R2make) vibe, and that is a huge compliment.
Saddler is… eh… Saddler was always the weakest of the villains in the original, and he hasn’t really improved. He’s an evil guy, head of Los Illuminados… he’s evil. Removing his radio chats to Leon really hurts his character, because that was the primary method by which he and Leon communicated, and the primary way we saw anything resembling a personality. Now he doesn’t get any moments of laughing off Leon’s terrible one-liners (“A senior moment, perhaps?”) and instead he’s just generic evil cult man. Oh my God, is he just the bad guy from Outlast II? … No, he’s not that bad. But it’s disappointing that while Luis and Krauser got their characters fleshed out much more, Saddler and Salazar got the reverse.
Pro: Separate Ways is much better now
I’ll be honest, I had the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4, which means I didn’t get Ada’s ‘Separate Ways’ campaign; I just got ‘Assignment: Ada’, which was… alright, but much worse. But even when I got the PlayStation 2 version, I never went out of my way to try Separate Ways, because I’d looked it up by that point to see if I was missing anything, and… honestly? I wasn’t. It was a collection of unrelated setpieces which pointed towards moments in Leon’s story where Ada was present, and saying “Hey, wouldn’t you like to know what Ada was doing twenty minutes before this?” The answer, a surprisingly common amount of the time, was apparently going through the exact same areas Leon had, fighting the same enemies, but in a slightly different order. She does sink a huge-ass battleship though, I’ll give her that. It’s not a particularly plot-relevant battleship though.
Separate Ways was rewritten in the remake to actually tell the cohesive story of what Ada was doing while Leon was combing his hair and practising his one-liners in the bathroom mirror. She goes through original areas, has plot-relevant interactions with Luis and Wesker, and generally has her own story now, as opposed to being a supporting character in Leon’s. Better-written, better-designed; the new Separate Ways campaign is style and substance. Most-improved part of the remake, honestly.
Oh, one final nitpick; this isn’t a way in which Separate Ways is better, but a way in which it’s… less-bad, but in the original, they really undercut Leon’s victory against Krauser by having Krauser show up, not quite dead, for an almost identical fight against Ada, and at the end of this, he dies again, with the exact same animation that he used when he air-quotes “died” against Leon too. I thought this was bad, it undercut Leon’s story and didn’t add anything meaningful to Ada’s, and I’m glad they didn’t bring it back.
Con: Moving U3 to Ada’s Campaign is a dick move
… Speaking of undercutting Leon’s boss fights!
Who remembers U3, otherwise referred to as ‘It’? Fantastic boss fight; probably my favourite boss in all of Resident Evil 4. Memorably disgusting design, lots of build-up avoiding it while traversing several suspended metal containers, a tight, claustrophobic environment, and it’s also kind of a bullet-sponge making it a tense and drawn-out fight. Not unreasonably so, there are some explosive barrels around the arena, and you can even learn its attack patterns and knife it to death if you want, although it will take a while.
U3 has been removed from Leon’s campaign and added to Ada’s. Which just reeks of wanting to force players who fondly remember the original boss fight to buy the new DLC campaign to experience it. Which is especially a dick move, because the people who so fondly remember a boss fight from eighteen years ago that it could influence them into buying a DLC, are probably big enough fans that they would have done it anyway.
They could’ve also just avoided stealing things from the original game to put in their full-cost DLC by making an original boss fight that was incredible, and I know that they could have done this, because they did. The iconic laser-hallway from right after the Krauser knife-fight makes a return, but as part of an extended stealth section against a horrific stalker enemy who can one-hit kill you. It’s tense and intense and brilliant and it reminded me a little of the Ustanak enemy from Resident Evil 6; one of the few incredibly good things to be found in Resident Evil 6.
I wouldn’t even be annoyed if they cheaped out and had the U3 fight start in Leon’s campaign, and then when he drops it down a huge pit, the player feels paranoid for ages that it’s bound to come back; you could even have the same “Here, we’re giving you a grenade and some extra ammo for Phase Two of the fight, which is clearly about to happen…” and then just… not. Where does the fight end? It ends in Ada’s campaign, where the creature suddenly reappears, catching Ada and the player off-guard. That would still be kind of cheap, but not nearly as cheap, and at least it would play with the expectations of the player, which is always fun. Unless that expectation is “Surely, in a game that is going to sell millions of copies, Capcom aren’t going to be dicks and hide this iconic boss fight in a separate DLC campaign that costs ten dollars.”
Pro: I enjoyed it very much
Let’s get straight to the point; I liked the Resident Evil 4 remake. I liked it a whole lot, I think it was very good, and I think that it succeeds as both a remake, and as its own distinct experience. It retells the story in a much more expansive and in-depth way (for the most part) and although it has its flaws, they don’t do much to detract from the all of the fun that you will have shooting people in the head and then darting forwards at a slightly slower speed than Leon used to run at, and kicking them so hard that their heads explode, which they don’t any more, but you can still make the “BLTKCSH!” noise with your mouth and just pretend.
The Resident Evil 4 remake keeps most of the things that made the original game so great, but adds in new areas with lots of new challenges, new upgrades, new ways to play, new treasures to find, and new fun to be had. Many annoyances have been addressed, many areas that were visited once and then forgotten about can be visited again for more enemy encounters and extra loot, and it’s no longer possible to cheese basically every enemy in the game with the same ‘walk into their range, step back as soon as they begin their attack animation’ trick that made the original game fun, but predictable, and far from challenging once you’d spent an hour or two getting to grips with the controls.
The story is revamped to give characters more presence and emotional depth, and on the whole, while some people (including me) have noted that it takes itself a lot more seriously, that’s certainly preferable to a story which is just beat-for-beat the same tone as the original. Yes, I was disappointed that the giant mechanical dwarf statue no longer chases you, but at least it’s still there… breathing fire. And for every minor thing you miss (except for U3) there are two or three other extremely welcome additions that just make this an incredibly fun game to play.
I don’t know what I would give this out of ten – eight, perhaps? – but even though I would give it a lower score than I would the original Resident Evil 4, that’s not a sign of failure by any means. Standards have improved dramatically in eighteen years, and to rise to the challenge of improving one of the greatest video games of all-time is worthy of praise and respect. Good game, Capcom. Literally.
Con: I’m not going to replay it ten times
In ye olden days of… I’m going to say 2008, then I played the absolute hell out of Resident Evil 4. I got five stars on every Mercenaries stage with every character – and that was not easy with Leon and Ada, or on Waterworld – along with several playthroughs with self-imposed challenges, specific weapons, or… just if I felt like playing something that I knew I would enjoy. I feel like it is worth mentioning that I didn’t even have a Steam account at this time, so the number of games, total, at my disposal, was probably closer to… a hundred than multiple thousands, although back then – and now – a lot of that is just my very impressive Game Boy/Game Boy Advance collection. I also now work a full-time job, and I think I was still in the tail-end of full-time education in 2008.
But even if I did have the time, and didn’t have as much other stuff to play… would I be replaying the Resident Evil 4 remake? Would I be going for a No Merchant Run, a Red9-only run? I didn’t even play it on Professional, would I replay it and do that? I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that the answer is probably no. And part of that is just the time; and I don’t mean “I have less time than I used to,” but the Resident Evil 4 remake is easily two or three times longer than the original game. ‘How Long To Beat Dot Com’ gives the full completion of the remake sixty-three hours, compared to exactly half of that, thirty-one and a half hours, for full completion of the original. Although they also bafflingly say that the base remake game is only half an hour longer, which I think is nonsense.
The new merchant requests, the shooting range, the constant knife and body-armour repairs, the deliberation over which ammo to craft with your limited supply of gunpowder; all of these things add up to a game which I wholly enjoyed, but… I don’t want to play this game five times. I don’t want to save up enough Spinels for the laser-sight five times. I don’t want to buy the bolt-thrower for the Bella Sisters fight and then leave it in storage for the rest of the run, five times. I don’t want to think “Maybe I should give the shooting range another try!” and rediscover how terrible the TMP’s accuracy is and give up again, five times. And sure, I don’t have to play the game like this – part of what made the original Resident Evil 4 so fun to play is that you could experiment with every run – but… it’s so clearly optimal to experiment less and play in ways that are more consistent and reliable. And that makes the game really fun to play… once. Maybe twice. Your mileage may vary.
Final Pro: But that’s not a bad thing
Do you have any idea how rare it is for a decent-length single-player game – even one of your favourites – to be worth replaying? I’ve played the Uncharted… I don’t like the word Quadrilogy – and judging by that red squiggle, neither does Microsoft Word – so I’m just going to call it the trilogy plus one – the Uncharted trilogy plus one, and while I enjoyed them all well enough… I’m probably never going to replay any of them. And this isn’t just an excuse for me to throw shade at Uncharted; I liked them fine. Would I play any of the ten-to-fifteen-hour experiences again, just for the sake of playing it again? Nope.
But more than that, I just wanted to rebut a claim that I had seen floating around. I understand that the primary reason Capcom decided to bother investing time and money into developing this remake was… brand recognition, and more money. It wasn’t an idealistic choice to improve upon something already nearly perfect. But I’d seen plenty of takes anyway along the lines of “Why even bother trying to remake Resident Evil 4? It’s so good! It is incredibly unlikely that the remake lives up to it.” And I would like to answer, do I think that the Resident Evil 4 remake – huh, I never did come up with an easier way of writing that – lives up to the original?
No, not really. The original was one of the greatest games of its generation, and this is not. But that’s good.
The Resident Evil 4 remake doesn’t live up exactly to the original, and in doing so, it justifies its own existence as an individual work worthy of being judged on its own merits, and at that, it succeeds. It might not be one of the greatest games of its generation, but it’s a bloody good one. If it had lived up to the reception of the original… what would that have even been? Slightly tweaked gameplay features as the same lines play over the same scenes? A HD remaster of the scene where Leon flees from a giant mechanical dwarf? More recent pop-culture references which only become dated even faster, so instead of shouting “LEON, HELP!” Ashley screams “This is, like, the exact opposite of Skibidi!” (That said, Ashley at one point in the remake does say “Skillz” so maybe I’m too late there.)
‘Original’ does not automatically mean ‘good’ – I have listed several new features of this game that I did not particularly care for – but there is an inherent goodness in originality. And the fact that they tried to improve upon such a fantastic game, is a good thing. That they sincerely believed that they could create an experience that could rival or even surpass – and sometimes, it really does – one of the greatest video games in the world, is a level of ambition that should be cherished… even if we all know that artistic integrity and a desire to constantly aim to improve isn’t really why Capcom did it. They did it for the same reason I went back to the water hall in Salazar’s castle, even though I knew loads of enemies had respawned and there wasn’t any more treasure to find; for the Pesetas.
And hey, if Capcom announce in ten years that they’re making a Resident Evil 4 Remake remake, then I will wholly be of the opinion that maybe they should give it a rest and focus on making a spiritual successor, rather than just trying to squeeze even more money out of a cash cow which has already been very thoroughly milked. But for now, I like the Resident Evil 4 remake, I would recommend it, and more importantly, I’m glad that it was made, and I’m glad they tried to improve upon greatness, even if they weren’t always successful.
…
You know, I’ve never actually reviewed Resident Evil 4, and I might as well – we haven’t even hit ten thousand words yet, which is pretty low for me. Buckle up everyone, I can think of at least twenty pros and cons to this one; so back in 1998, Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya; nah, enjoy the rest of your December. And Merry Christmas! (this was originally posted in December 2024)
Thanks for reading!
-Dopefish
The Dopefish 