Resident Evil 4 Review

Capcom’s title improves the gameplay formula of the genre. It innovates, polishes, fixes and expands on just about everything you associate with survival-horror.

The enemies, to begin with, are surprisingly smart. They do not stand in the open waiting to be shot. They do not simply follow scripts, like falling out of a hole in the wall and trying to attack you from behind. They exhibit actual intelligence, and have much more complex AI than is available in most other genre pieces.

The villagers (the most common enemies in the game) act realistically. When you begin the game, you will see them going about their business, whether by collecting fire logs or shoveling hay. But if you make too much noise or get to close, they will come for you with whatever weapons they have on hand, be they knives, torches, axes, or pitchforks. They will follow you if you escape into a house. If you barricade the doors and the windows are boarded, they will use weapons to break through the windows. They will beat at the door. When their efforts fail, they will raise ladders and enter through the second floor.

And let me tell you that this makes for some of the most awesome, scary, and intense moments in gaming. To see an enemy kick down the door into a house or climb through the window with his weapon is something you would never expect an enemy to be able to do in a game. When you try to hide in the house, you would never expect them to find you. This just scratches the surface. There is one boss fight where you will encounter a rather large creature. If you run into a shed, he will often see you, and throw boulders or uproot trees to knock down the building in question. And it’s amazing to play and see. When he kills you, you won’t die frustrated, you will die with a sense of, “Hell! I didn’t know they could do that!”

It is this surreally human behavior that both makes the gameplay deliriously fun and almost ceaselessly scary. The enemies aren’t pushovers, and they are difficult to kill not because it takes a lot of hits to take them down, but because they are smart enough to use tactics to extend the battle.

And going back to the subject of the bosses, this game has some of the best. We will not spoil any of these fights for you here, but rest assured, they are all great. You will be floored by the first boss fight, and you will be floored again and again when each following boss fight somehow manages to top the last until the very end of the game. Indeed, the boss fights in Resident Evil 4 are right up there with those of Nintendo as some of the best ever made. They are flat damn genius. They are epic, they are vicious, they are strategic, they are challenging, they are rewarding. The sense of accomplishment when done with the boss fights in this game is something you must experience for yourself to adequately grasp.

Resident Evil 4 ditches the abstract puzzles of the earlier games in the series. The puzzles here no longer prominently feature item-hunting. The puzzles here are far fewer than before and are based more on how you use your environment. For example, there is a section in a castle where enemies are shooting you with cannons and you find a cannon to retaliate. But you must raise the platform it’s been placed on to a point where you can shoot it and then load the cannonballs before you can shoot back. It creates a cohesive strategic element, rather than dividing the game into strict combat and strict puzzle sequences. In another section, you must cross a lake. There are some concrete slabs that almost allow you to jump across, but there isn’t enough room to make it. So you shoot out some barrels that are located higher up, and they will float over to the concrete slabs because of the course the lake is following and some railing blocking them from drifting further downstream. Voila, you have a bridge.

Rather than flipping switches, you’ll be orchestrating an attack on your foes–determining ideal vantage points to fire from and knocking down ladders or blocking doors to keep them from getting to you. Combat has become much more strategic here.