It’s Once Again Time To Step Into The World Of Survival Horror
With Resident Evil 8: Village on the horizon to come out in a couple of months time, we plan to revisit some of the classic games in the series with reviews and other features on the franchise leading up to the release of RE8.
Resident Evil 4 is quite possibly the most famous and well regarded of all the games in the survival horror series, which is saying something as it is a series with several games that are among the most loved games of all time.
What makes Resident Evil 4 stand out form the crowd is that it did so many things that took risks and changed up the already successful formula, and in almost every case were positive changes. Resident Evil 4 not only changed what it meant to be a survival horror game forever, but it also innovated in ways that changed the path of third person action games and shooters where the influences can still be seen to this day.
We’ll get into the gameplay and how it evolved the series compared to the previous games that came before it, but one of the biggest ways it made a statement was with it’s changes to the narrative of the series.
Resident Evil 4 sees you play as the character Leon S Kennedy, who had previously been one of two main playable characters in Resident Evil 2. No longer a rookie cop, Leon is sent on a mission to rescue the Presidents daughter which takes him to a remote village in Spain. This removed the story from the United States setting of the previous games, but even bigger than this, the game doesn’t feature any zombies…at all.
The Resident Evil games had always features lots of monsters such as giant spiders and snakes, and original mutations such as the hunters and the lickers, but the main enemy the series was known for were the zombies. The fact that they were brave enough to create a new game which features a brand new setting and entirely new roster of enemies was a big risk. There was the chance that people would think this was too far removed form the past games. To be fair there are some fans of the series who do indeed feel this way, but what Capcom replace the zombies with was a natural evolution in the series.
The story of the games have always been about evil corporations creating viruses and biological weapons and unlike other series where the story just resets and repeats itself over and over again, Capcom dared to move the story on in this game. Excluding spin offs, remakes or prequels, the most recent main line game in the series that came out before Resident Evil 4 arrived in 2005 was Resident Evil Code Veronica in the year 2000. By the end of that game, the heroes were still declaring that they were going put a stop to the evil Umbrella Corporation who had been the bad guys of the series since the first game in 1996.
Resident Evil 4 had a sizable jump in time and unseen by the players the Umbrella Corporation were now defeated, but in their place other sinister entities were creating new viruses. Yeah in one sense this is just evil company X being replaced with evil company Y and monster making virus 1 being replaced with monster making virus 2, but the ramifications of these changes were massive.
The Resident Evil remake introduced the world to the idea of the crimson head zombies, which were a tougher to beat version of zombies who were more intelligent and could run! Whilst they may have been in development at a similar time, it was Resident Evil that was the first thing to popularise the idea of running zombies before the 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead remake movies. So with Resident Evil 4 being directed by series creator Shinji Mikami, who had previously directed the remake of Resident Evil 1, you can see that he was clearly in the thought that intelligent zombies who could chase you and now even use tools and weapons was where he was heading with the series.
This takes the form of villagers in the game who are infected and later in the game show that they have a monstrous creature within that has taken over their bodies like a parasite called Las Plagas. Unlike zombies who are dead and move slow and are only motivated by the basic need to feed, the Las Plagus villagers are almost in a trance and are controlled by a cult, the Los Illuminados. They can work together, raise ladders and climb up to get you, and at times fire guns, crossbows and most famously use a chainsaw.
The sense of fear that they were able to put into this game was incredible. It’s very easy with a modern eye for people to say that Resident Evil 4 was the start of the action era of the series and that it sacrificed the horror for action, I would say this isn’t true. At the time in which this game came out people had grown used to the pacing of previous games and the feeling was that zombies aren’t as scary any more. Suddenly having the “zombies that could run and shoot you” was very scary. And make no mistake, this is a challenging game to beat.
Resident Evil 4 is a much longer game compared to the previous game in the series and it very rarely gives you a moment of peace in it. The variety of scenarios you face that mix up the challenge throughout the game is incredible. Within the first minutes of the game you are surrounded by villagers who will chase you around a relatively small area and stretch your ammo and nerves. This is then dialled up to ten with the introduction of the game’s first chainsaw wielding baddie who is much tougher to beat and is like a boss battle just 10 minutes into the game.
From here you’ll soon meet enemies who throw dynamite at you and areas where you have to make quick judgements whether you stand and fight or just run around long enough that you hope you can survive.
One of the best areas in the game which Capcom have repeated many times since is that soon after you rescue the President’s daughter Ashley, you find yourself in a cabin with fellow survivor Luis Sera, and are surrounded by infected. You can quickly barricade yourself into the cabin, but even if you do this you are just sitting ducks with this huge sense of dread as you know that it’ll only hold out the enemy for a short while. This sequence is an endurance test for your nerves, ammo and health supplies and is super challenging on your first play through.
You also face against the ginormous El Gigante monster who is literally like a giant troll, and then find yourself against not one, but two more chainsaw wielding villagers…at the same time! And what’s more, you’ll face all of what I’ve described here in what is still relatively early in the game.
Like I said, the game continues to innovate and as the game progresses you’ll battle invisible monsters that can climb on the ceiling and can only be spotted by watching carefully for Predator like disturbance in the bend of light. You’ll also meet enemies who cannot see you, but have excellent hearing meaning that like the lickers from Resident Evil 2, you’ll be best off to walk slowly around the enemy rather then run. And what’s more these monsters have to be shot in their backs which is easier said then done, and they feature huge metal spikes on each hand that would put Wolverine to shame.
So with wave after wave of different monsters to fight, you do get a lot more ammo to play with on this game then you did on previous Resi games, but I’d argue that this proportionally isn’t too different in this regard as it’s very possible to have stacks of unused ammo by the end of most Resident Evil games. What makes this one different is that for the first time in the series, you’ll get rewards when you defeat baddies. This can be in the form of health or ammo items, which in one sense could be logical as the smart baddies may be carrying items of use, but you’ll also be able to pick up cash.
In terms of survival horror games this actually takes a cue from the criminally overlooked Dino Crisis 2 which had a similar system of earning currency for defeating enemies, and just like on Dino Crisis 2, this currency can then be used to upgrade weapons and buy supplies.
Resident Evil have always had it’s fair share of things that don’t really make sense in the real world, but you just accept that it is how the game works, and the most prominent of these was the magic item boxes that allow you to store items in one room and retrieve them from a completely different box in a different room. You don’t question it and just get on with it. In Resident Evil 4, Capcom introduced the Merchant character who you would meet at various points throughout the game and could buy weapon upgrades from.
The game also removes the magic item boxes and instead gave you an item management system which is a little bity like a game of Tetris. You would open your menu and only have so many squares of space on a grid. Different items you get in the game then take up different amounts of square, so for example most items of ammo would take up two squares and guns could take up 4 or 8 blocks for smaller guns all the way up to the Rocket Launcher which takes up about 8 or 10 blocks.
This means that you’ll often have to make tough choices of what items you carry or not. You could buy lots of different weapons but then not have space for all the ammo for all the guns, or not have room for health items. One blessing with this new system is that unlike the older games in the series you can hold an unlimited number of keys or non ammo/health items and it won’t take up inventory space on the item grid.
It would add tension on older games if you had to choose between holding a key needed to open a door and hold a shot gun that you may need to get past zombies in your path towards said door.
The combination of this grid item system and merchant to upgrade weapons from give the game one of the most fun features of it. The further you get through the game the more you’ll have been able to upgrade. This can mean that depending how you play, you may have a more challenging time then other players. If you take your time to gather all the items and cash you can feel comfortably powerful by the end, but if you aim to get through it quickly and without much conflict you’ll find that you have less powerful weapons to face the bosses of the game with.
But for me, the greatest new idea added to this game comes in that once you’ve finished the game you can start again with all the weapon upgrades you had finished the previous run through with. The benefits of knowing what to expect as you start again plus having powerful weapons really gives you a sense that you are taking control of the same situation which during your first play through felt really tense and intimidating.
And what’s better here is that it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll have enough cash to upgrade everything by the end of one or possibly even two play throughs. So when you can see that you could potentially afford a rocket launcher with unlimited ammo in your next play through you can feel excited to play again and again. This game came out in 2005 and I’ve played it at least once a year every year since then. Sometimes I’ll play with all my upgrades unlocked an sometimes I’ll challenge myself to go back and start the process again, as it’s always a joy to play.
For the purposes of this review I played through the Nintendo Switch version of the game, but it’s one of the games that have appeared on almost every console imaginable since it’s release. And with various tweaks and different editions I have played it on a lot of the different systems.
I’m really happy with the Switch version as it allows for portable play of one of my favourite games ever, but for me the greatest version of the game will always be the Wii Edition. Yes you can get Ultimate HD editions of the game on PS4 and Xbox and PC which add better frame rates and textures, but it can’t be overstated how much fun it is to play this game on Nintendo Wii with motion controls.
The Wii was often plagued with games which forced motion controls in just for the sake of the adding them, and in particular there were first person shooter games which on paper sounded like they’d be great as you could use the Wii remote like a light gun to shoot. But in practice this didn’t really work all that well as what benefit you’d get in aiming with the Wii remote you’d also lose in the loss of being able to easily turn your character as the pointer of the Wii remote replaced the right thumb stick that not only used for aiming but also for turning.
In the case of Resident Evil 4, the game had kept a feature from previous Resident Evil games which is often criticised, but without would have probably seen the game in the same realm as other games that didn’t really work on Wii. The feature in question is that on the earlier Resident Evil games dated all the way back to the first one was that you could not aim your gun to fire whilst moving. This design choice came form that the first game was designed for the Playstation One in an era before ethe dual analogue controller. If the developers wanted players to point their weapons down at dogs or snakes, or up at birds or spiders on the wall there was no way to do that and move the character at the same time as you only had the D-Pad to control the aim with.
This also meant that the developers had to design the game around that you would have to pause and stand still every time you wanted to aim and shoot your weapons. This design choice stayed the same throughout the original trilogy of games as the games would need to be accessible for all PSOne owners even if they had the newer Dual Shock controllers. Add to this that Resident Evil Zero was originally designed for the N64 and that Resident Evil Code Veronica was designed for Dreamcast, which also only featured one analogue stick and not two that would eventually enable the ability for players to aim up and down and move at the same time.
All this aside it’s odd that Capcom, who designed Resident Evil from the ground up for the Nintendo Gamecube would keep the gameplay design that you had to pause to aim even though you now had two thumb sticks available. Perhaps this was kept to keep it familiar to long time players in the face of all of the other changes they implemented. Or maybe it was because they still saw value in the fear that having to stand still to fight would add rather then being able to shoot as you back away or run towards an enemy. Either way, this method meant that on the Wii you would get a perfect light gun style shooting style which worked brilliantly around a game which is designed with stopping to aim and shoot in mind. Also add in that using the knife to slash enemies with swipes of the Wii remote also felt great and that the waggle based Quick Time Events were easier then button mashing and the Wii game does feel the best way to play the game…at least for this player!
The legacy of this game is that it would see the following Resident Evil games such as 5 and 6 focus more on the action although most would agree that it was 4 that did this style of game in the series best of this second trilogy. The Resident Evil Revelations games and the remakes of 2 and 3 would closely go to playbook of Resident Evil 4 whilst also heading back to the pure horror of the original games, but for everything else that has come or gone since, it is Resident Evil 4 which did most to put the series into the mainstream spotlight and perfected the formula which everything else is still trying to live up to.
Resident Evil 4 is a 5 star game and one that every gamer should play at some point.
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