Resident Evil 4 HD
73/100 (spoilers at the end)
TL;DR: Recommend to gamers, but not horror fans. Playing the first game and the third game before this one is optional, but I would strongly recommend playing the 2nd first.
Synopsis: man travels to a remote Spanish village to retrieve the president’s daughter from a cult.
Resident Evil 4 HD fixed a lot of problems that the 1st game had. Characters are too mute? Now they make lots of noises and facial expressions. Shooting sucks? Now you can actually aim at the heads instead of pray to RNJesus. Story was ass? Now, well, it’s just ok.
Unfortunately, CAPCOM has done what I call “goodharting yourself”. They optimized for mass appeal and against what made their games in the first place. Now Resident Evil 4 is more like borderlands or bioshock infinite than the original, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think they are as good at making action games as the OGs like Gearbox and 2k.
Production value
CAPCOM has included what appears to be late 1930s German propaganda in their game. Remakes can get a free pass for doing stuff like this because it can be plausibly denied as “being faithful to the source material”, but it still feels rather naughty.
The visuals, of course, are incredible. They are better than Hogwarts Legacy’s, and the game runs better than it too (~130-200 fps on medium-high settings with 8GB VRAM and everything else maxed out). Capcom, as always, is S tier in sound design.
No bugs/issues on linux mint + proton + steam.
Story
I don’t know if it’s media fatigue, or if it’s the writing, but I didn’t really care that much for the lore behind the cult. Everything looked interesting in the introduction, but then it devolved into a bunch of cliches: rabid brainwashed villagers, a bunch of creepy symbolsm and occultism. A bit tacky.
I don’t know. Maybe they should’ve added a political angle to the story to give it edge — there’s a lot of potential in early 2000s Spain: anti-EU radicals, Francoists, or the Basque/Catalan separatist extremists. They kidnapped the president’s daughter, didn’t they? Surely you could come up with some cool political plot where the daughter is being held hostage to stop the US government from nuking their separatist Fascist community or something.
That said, the writing here is better than Resident Evil HD as there are no glaring plot holes or weird inconsistencies. That said, the story was still predictable; the deaths in particular. And you don’t want deaths to be predictable.
The characters, besides Ashley and Leon, feel a bit boring to me. You have the femme fatale Ada, the narcissistic womanizing spaniard Luis, and the ZOGNC drone who you contact on the codec. The enemies are introduced/killed to quickly so they aren’t memorable or exciting.
There is still some gold to be found in the writing: Ashley isn’t just some useless whore you have to lug around because she can actually do things on her own and help you. Nevertheless, it still does retain some gruggish gender roles: you are the (strong, stoic, funny, competent) man, and you are here to save the (young, beautiful, clever, agreeable) girl.
Gameplay
One of the reasons why Resident Evil was so creepy was that a lot of areas didn’t have zombies, and the ones that were there were reasonably dangerous. Because of this, when you encountered an enemy you would actually get a little jumpy.
Resident Evil 4 is nothing like that. There are enemies everywhere, and exactly where you expect them to be, and the dangerous enemies and bosses are also placed exactly where you think they will be. The zombies make a lot of noise, so you are never really surprised to find them. This would be fine if they took a page from Bioshock’s book and made their voicelines diverse and weird, instead they zombies just say generic shit like “you can run, but you can’t hide” and “chase them” over and over again in Spanish. Funny, it would actually be much better if the enemies had their vocal cords taken from them and so they couldn’t make any noises at all… And maybe here you could start getting interesting with the writing.
Alternatively, they could’ve taken a piece out of Bioshock’s book and given the zombies diverse appearances or voicelines, which humanizes their dehumanization in an eerie way. This is the inferior path — not having them talk would actually be interesting.
There are puzzles — they are easier to solve because they require less creativity, but not are as cognitively complex overall. This makes them less rewarding to solve, but the rate at which a reasonably intelligent person will solve them is much higher. Hard to choose between the two options, though in the modern day, you probably want to go with the less creative puzzles to not scare off players.
The gunplay, of course, is great. The aiming doesn’t feel like a 3rd person shooter at all, it’s closer to a first person shooter in that respect. All I have to complain about is the classic complaint I have with basically every shooter that is not Deus Ex - the headshots are not lethal enough and you are too tanky.
Other notes:
They fixed the typewriter thing: you don’t need ink anymore and the storage is fused with the typewriter.
There is a salesman that is magically there every time you get to a typewriter, who has an annoying aussie accent and speaks in shopkeeper cliches. Cringe. I really want to see a developer make it so you can request literally anything from your corporation, but if you ask for too much they lose trust in you, and stop sending you stuff. No money or any of that bullshit. If you want to go the comedy route, you could make the salesman the real boss, who is goading you into continuing your mission by selling you stuff that is actually useful and giving you good deals for sales. I mean, how the hell does this guy manage to travel with all of these lunatics around? Does Leon not even find him the least bit suspicious?
Whoever did the voice acting for Ashley did an incredible job.
Default sensitivity for mouse is surprisingly low. Basically every game I play, except for this one, has the default mouse sensitivity set way too high. Maybe this is a rare case of a developer knowing their audience?
No weird titty physics on Ashley. Not realistic, but respectable.
Ashley and Leon didn’t end up together. What a disappointment.
Tips:
It’s suprisingly easy to minmax your settings to have very good visuals but consistent 100+ fps. Just go to the graphics menu and set the settings on the least important stuff (e.g. skin graphics) to medium or low, and set the stuff that actually matters (e.g. shadows) to the highest setting. After a half-assed job of doing this, I went from ~80 fps to ~130 fps with no practical change in visuals.
Don’t buy the revolver. The ammo is impossible to find.
Prioritize upgrading power on your main guns, and then firing speed on the pistol.
You can kill ashley. Don’t do it. It will break your heart.
Also, happy anniversary to Resident Evil 4!
Scoring:
Design (17/20):
Atmosphere: (3/5) - not scary, but looks cool I guess.
Graphics: (5/5) - S tier
UI: (2/2)
Bugs: (2/2)
Sound: (2/2) - extremely crisp
OST: (1/2) - was ok, I guess. Nothing spectacular
Character designs: (2/2) - S tier
Script (17/25):
Character Investment: (3/5)
Character Realism: (2/2)
Character Complexity: (2/3)
Writing: (6/10) - eh
Ending: (4/5)
Gameplay (24/30):
Skill expression: (8/10)
RNG: (5/5) - nothing too crazy
Satisfaction: (8/10)
Optionality: (3/3)
Novelty: (0/2) - weird enemy types are introduced too early, too many enemies in general
Value (10/15):
Skill: (4/5)
Originality: (4/5) - unique for its time (the original Resident Evil 4, I mean), but there are too many games like this in the modern gay - Borderlands, Bioshock, the Deus Ex games, and whatnot.
Thematic elements: (2/5) - nothing to speak of
Enjoyment (8/10):
Did I like it: (8/10) - better than the first Resident Evil, but not by much.