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Resident Evil 4 is, in my opinion, the single greatest survival horror game ever made. It's also one of my three favorite games of all time, and has remained so for a long time. It's turning ten next year, and has been ported eight different times, more then most games, and is considered one of the most influential games of sixth generation. It also killed it's own franchise and changed the face of survival horror and third person shooters forever. It's Halloween today, so I decided to talk about RE4 and why I still think it's one of the best games ever made.
The first time I played Resident Evil was in grade six. I was twelve years old and it was a sleepover at my friends house. My parents had never been expressly against violent videogames, having given up around the time my oldest brother bought Diablo 2, but we didn't have RE4 for our Gamecube because my older brother thought it was to scary. My older brother is an idiot. At that sleepover we played most of the first half of RE4, getting all the way to the castle that marks the half way point of the game. I was in love with every second, running away from hordes of enemies, getting my head cut off with a chainsaw, and landing those sweet, sweet headshots with the bolt-action rifle. It was love at first decapitation.
playing it again almost a decade later I was pleased to find that it completely holds up. I recently picked up the PS2 version of the game, although I had also played through a large chunk of the HD version on PS3. I know sometimes people remember games from their past and think the game is great no matter what, but a lot of times these games just don't hold up as well as they did when we were kids. For example, as a kid I played the hell out of Diddy Kong Racing on N64, but trying to play it now I found it was an aggravating experience and horrible un-fun to play. A lot of classic PC games I find are now impossible to enjoy because the mechanics in these games have been greatly surpassed by modern games. But RE4 is like a painting, never getting old, always being awesome.
Built like a tank
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Every interaction with my grandmother.
RE4's controls handle...interestingly. The term "tank controls" usually gets tossed at it, and this is pretty fitting. There's no denying it, your character of Leon Kennedy handles like a tank simulation, moving only able to move forward and backward with no option to strafe. You also can't shoot from the hip at all, and aiming your weapon stops you dead in your tracks. The camera is constantly looking forward, although you have the option to look to your left or right. All of this might sound archaic, but it actually all feeds back into the horror feel of the game. Not being able to see behind you means that enemies can get the drop on you if you aren't paying attention. Having to stand still while shooting means that you have to carefully conduct your combat, firing a few shots, running away, spinning around, rinse and repeat.
What really makes RE4 shine is your interactions with the environment. Not since Duke Nukem 3D have I seen this many intractable objects in a level, all with fantastic animations. The level design in general is fantastic, mixing wide open areas, enclosed arena, and claustrophobic halls all in equal measure. Best of all is that most levels have multiple paths, allowing you further control over how you choose to fend off the hordes of enemies. Part of the fun is figuring out how to utilize the environment to your advantage, finding choke points to set up kill zones and using various objects around the map to thin out the enemy.
Fight for your life
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The Blind Claw, one of the more interesting encounters in the game.
Combat itself is an interesting beast. I already explained how you need to stop and shoot, but I really can't stress how important proper planning becomes latter in the game. Many of the later levels will toss you up against dozens of enemies at once, and you won't always be properly prepared. Much of the game is made up of improvised solutions, like using a shotgun to blast back a group and picking of stragglers with pistol shots, or using kneecap shots to slow enemies down. Thankfully combat never gets stale, with each encounter differing slightly from the last, and plenty of enemy types mixed in at regular intervals.
The bosses of RE4 deserve special mention as well, as each of them is memorable and awesome. While all the boss fights boil down to "shoot/stab the weakspot" how you go about that differs wildly from fight to fight. One boss starts off normal and goes all the way to batshit halfway through, while another one starts crazy and ramps up from there.They all require some planning on the part of the player, and they play out like jigsaw puzzles with guns, making the pieces line up just right before shooting them to bits.
This isn't to say that the common enemies of RE4 are boring. RE4 breaks from it's predecessor by not having zombified enemies. This time around you're fighting the Ganados, villagers from the unnamed European country the game takes place in that have been infected by a mind controlling parasite. The Ganados are smarter then the zombies of previous RE games, able to communicate with each other and operate objects in the world. They can open doors, climb ladders, thrown blades at you, and even use crossbows and explosives. Because of this facing a Ganado is often freakier then the zombies of old, since now they can think and react to your actions.
Ranging from crazy to insane
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Occasionally, the game manages to up the creepy factor in the level design alone.
The plot of RE4 can best be described as "80's action horror as interrupted by Japan". Think John Carpenter meets Kōji Shiraishi. The setup is that you are Leon Kennedy, survivor of Raccoon City that has taken a job as the President of America's bodyguard. You're first assignment is to rescue his kidnapped daughter from an insane cult in an unnamed small European country near Spain. That actually the primary plot throughout the entire game, and there's very little deviation, even once things start to go really, REALLY south. There's character to meet, places to explore, and enemies to fight, but your purpose is always to find and protect the girl.
Where it gets weird is in it's presentation. The first third of the game takes place in the villages and farms of the country side, drawing creepy likenesses to films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Children of the Corn. You'll face off against angry farmers, cross snake infested swamps, and kill chickens for eggs. Then it changes quite abruptly when you enter the castle. Suddenly it turns into an escape from the castle, filled with ancient traps, hidden pathways, and at one point, I'm not kidding, a giant stone golem robot. It's a weird shift in tone, but it remains spooky thanks to the feel of being in a haunted castle surrounded by things that want you dead. Then chapter three kicks in and you find yourself in a military base, with a science lab, and there's a chase with a bulldozer, and it's just all very weird and very confusing. You literally escape the game by driving off on a jet ski, followed by a snappy one liner as the island explodes and the sun comes up.
It's constant shift in tone is a bit jarring, but it's not a horror game because it's scary. RE4 is a proper survival horror game, where the horror is your constant survival. There are one or two jump scares here and there, and the infamous Regenerator enemies in the late game are down right terrifying, but most of the horror element comes from you figuring out how to survive every encounter. Even on normal difficulty RE4 is brutal, constantly giving you just barely enough ammo to survive. Surviving a battle is truly rewarding because you feel like you accomplished something. Even better is when all your hard work pays off and you save up enough ammo to go on the offensive, daring the game to throw more enemies at you and you eat through your shotgun shells. It's this constant ebb and flow that really makes RE4 great, constantly teetering between "Oh god, how am I going to get through this one" and "Let them come! I got enough for everybody!".
Legacy of champions
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The always terrifying Regenerator, still one of the creepiest enemies in gaming.
RE4 was a huge success when it came out in 2005. It revitalized a dying IP, brought some real credibility to the Gamecube as a serious gaming platform, and reworked how we looked at horror games and third person shooters in general. People quickly started aping it, from the direct ripoffs like Dead Space or Cold Fear, to games that just used it's ideas of over-the-shoulder camera and set piece moments like Gears of War or Army of Two. Horror games stopped being about scaring people with spooky moments and became more about asking the player to survive an extra-normal situation with limited resources.
It's truly unfortunate that it's own follow ups haven't exactly been stellar. RE5 was a muddled co-op mess of racism, with half baked ideas and a fraction of the game time of RE4. RE6 is...unknowable, Ranging from second rate to outright stupid in terms of story. RE: Revelations was surprisingly good, so I'm interested to see how the sequel -which isn't getting a 3DS release despite the first one being a launch title- will inevitable screw everything up.
Why can't anything match the brilliance of RE4? Perhaps it was just lighting in a bottle, the perfect mix of new ideas, new gameplay mechanics, and a new plot right when the series needed it most. Now it just feels like every RE game is just trying to hard to be RE4, trying to recapture that perfect mix of awesome and crazy that they had once.
We may never see another game like RE4, and given the current state of survival horror, the chances of anything coming close seem less and less likely every year. It's spirit lives on, most recently in it's own spiritual successor The Evil Within, but RE4 is a time capsule, perfectly capturing the exact moment when, just once, everything just kind of worked. As for the game itself? Well, Capcom seems hesitant to let RE4 slip into obscurity, so they keep reworking it and porting again and again. Most recently we saw an updated PC port, mostly as an apology for the original PC version, often considered an atrocity, and there have been numerous rumors about a new IOS port of the game, as well as an Android version for certain devices. RE4 will live on as the perfect survival horror title, a monument to how it should be done.
