Resident Evil 4 [Remake] – Welcome to Spanish Village Life

Welcome to the beautiful country of Spain. Here you will never go cold, as Spain is the country of the sun! To make sure your vacation here will be one to remember, don’t for any reason anger the locales. They do not like outsiders much. If by any chance this happens, be sure to keep a health-spray handy, and run like hell unless you want to get uncomfortable close to the Las Plagas. And you don’t want that!

Resident Evil 4 (remake) is one of the better remakes that has been made and does not feel like a pure cash grab on our dear nostalgia. However, even if I enjoyed it, I can’t help to feel that in the end, it’s just a huge waste of time narrative-wise – as the franchise treads water in the same old murky pool that we already have splashed around in for years. Regardless, it’s a fun well-made game, with a few niggling issues that stand out from the original. Let’s see what it is all about.

Vacation in the sun
In this Resident Evil adventure, you will play as Leon S. Kennedy. The most badass agent the United States ever had access to. The president’s daughter has been kidnapped, and she is assumed to have been taken to a rural village in Spain. Your job is to locate and rescue her, and if you can, find out what it’s all about.

Being a remake, the story remains the same as the Resident Evil 4 from 2005. It’s the same over-the-top, cheesy story, however, with a tone shift to make it more serious, and gritty. Now, with the narrative being as ridiculous as it is, you can’t change too much about it, except expanding on the lore and making a few adjustments to make it all fit in better (which they did). Where the major tone change comes in, are the characters. Leon, for better or worse has been written in a really moody way, compared to his former self. The cool and slick hero that always had a cool line for everything has been replaced with Leon the emo-simp. 

I exaggerate a bit, of course, but this change in character is very notable. He is much more subdued, and not just as fun, and when he does squeeze out a one-liner, it feels a bit forced, and not that funny. Both Leon and Ashley (the president’s daughter) are written for current-year sensibilities, with a minimum of sexism and crude jokes. Also, the script has to make sure Ashley comes off as capable as to not offend anyone, even if she actually is a damsel in distress. It’s not overly bad, yet much of the charm is gone for something that is supposed to be campy. It’s like having a fun 80-90s action movie remade for zoomers. You just know all of the humor will be drained out of the picture.

Besides what I think of this, the story remains largely as it was, which means they have not skimped out the silly enjoyable things that make Resident Evil what it is – a carnival of the bizarre and mutant body horror. All in all, I had a ton of fun, and the game has plenty of different environments and enemies to go through, either with a knife, round-kick, or bullet. I do think the setting doesn’t always match its initial background, with that I mean, you go from a rural Spanish village to a medieval stone castle to a secret underground lab – which kinda gives me narrative whiplash from time to time. Especially when they want to make it a bit more serious. The location switching, and the whole thing with the mysterious merchant that always seems to be ahead of you makes not much sense, but I guess you will have to accept that after Resident Evil 4. It was at this time the franchise took the step from semi-plausible goofy fun to extreme camp that requires that you leave logic at the door. Chris punching giant boulders, anyone?

Shooting Spaniards
When it comes to the gameplay, Resident Evil 4 (remake) is a clear improvement in most ways, at least on PC, as of now you can play with a mouse and keyboard without it feeling awkward. I remember that the original Resident Evil 4 forced me to play with a controller since the stop-and-shoot mechanic didn’t transfer over to the PC that well. In the remake this is of no problem – you can now even shoot while moving! The controls are tight, and being able to precision aim now with a mouse makes the game much more enjoyable. This is mostly because of all the cool hit-animations when it comes to the infected that play directly into the gameplay. Shoot a guy in the kneecaps and he falls over, which allows you to run up to use his face as a football, or why not just knife him in the neck while he struggles to get back up? Satisfying is the word. Besides saving ammo, the melee system is just incredibly fun and incentivizes you to do trick shots to stagger your enemies to then throw them into each other through some fast and furious kung fu. 

This has the effect of trivializing the horror elements, however, there are a few parts that retain some of that vulnerable state that Resident Evil is known for. For the most part, though, the tension comes from the game throwing a ton of enemies your way, usually under some special condition – for example; protecting Ashley. Overall, it’s mostly an action game, and as said, it does the action parts well! One addition to the formula to spice it up is stealth. I didn’t use it too much in my playthrough, as I often got spotted almost immediately. But, if you are good at sneaking, you can stealth around to take out the infected with a quick shank to the neck. It’s good at saving ammo, and is gratifying to boot!

To not make stealth the new go-to approach to change the original gameplay too much, the durability of the knives is limited and needs to be repaired after a while. Everything involving the knives reduces their health meter, from blocking to slicing and dicing. It’s a pretty good balance, as everything needs to be weighted for consideration, going from encounter to encounter. Especially when it comes to ammo use. So, I’m glad the knife gets counted into this aspect because otherwise, I think it might have been a little too easy to machete yourself through the hordes without having a worry in the world. This would kill the survival-horror aspect otherwise.

When you are not round-kicking infected off ledges, you will be collecting money, or other rewards through exploring or doing quests for the mysterious merchant. These items give you access to new equipment and weapons that cost pesetas. There is also a mini-game involved in this, as some artifacts can be enhanced with gems you collected, and depending on those gems and how they match each other you can improve the selling price. The quests and the collecting are a nice little side-objective to the game that is not needed to do, but is very rewarding if you do. However, this comes with some issues, mostly connected to the modernity of gaming. You see, to get the last upgrade for a weapon, you either get a ticket for your precious spinels that you collected, or you just straight up buy a ticket for real money through Steam for a few euros. Big facepalm moment. Particularly since it’s a remake that plays it true to the original otherwise. Capcom just needs that extra money, becoming a hit is no longer good enough – the dogma of the current times is to suck your fans dry of money and it must be followed to the letter!

Look & feel
Resident Evil 4 (remake) looks fantastic and runs great too. On a technical level, it is almost flawless. Almost, as in when I tried ray-tracing my FPS sunk to the bottom like the warship Vasa. Regardless, without that option enabled, the game still looks excellent, with crisp textures and smooth animations all around. The maps are fairly linear, so that is probably one of the reasons why it ran so well. However, I don’t see that as a problem at all, since the experience is a tightly scripted experience, at least from a story perspective. When it to combat, some areas are pretty free-form in their approach, since you can tackle the “arenas” in whatever way you want. For being linear, it’s still pretty open in its gameplay design, which makes it outstanding when it comes to player interaction.

Another impressive technical aspect is the hitboxes for the characters, especially for the one you control. I have seen plenty of near misses that make me think that extra development went into this to make the hitboxes as accurate as possible. You don’t even need to do a special dodge to notice, just moving about normally, and even hitting the crouch key at the right time can have you avoid getting impaled by an angry peasant. Very impressive work here, Dark Souls level of hitbox magic.

The music and the voice acting are good for the most part. Leon feels more gloomy, as I already mentioned, which gets represented in the voice work, but it’s not bad – he is just not as cool and fun as he was in the original. Where the game falters heavily, and baffles me is the choice of voice actress for the character Ada Wong. Her voice and delivery could be the worst I have ever heard in any big-budget AAA game. She sounds extremely bored and unemotional, and the whole thing just stinks of being phoned in. Ada Wong is otherwise an incredible sultry femme fatale type of character, but her voice actress ruined her whole image here. This was a total miscast of a character, and shouldn’t have happened when it comes to big productions like this. There must have been some kind of politics involved. Truly a headscratcher.

In conclusion
I had a lot of fun with Resident Evil 4 (remake), but I can’t help to feel like it was a bit of a waste of time. Not only for me but as a product of the Resident Evil franchise. It’s interesting to see your old favorite games remade or remastered just out of pure fascination, yet, we have already played these titles. All that development time could have been manifested in a new game that moved the story forward – instead of rehashing old ideas that we already know about. More often than not, the story, or character will suffer, since they get re-written not to offend, which unfortunately happened to this remake. Overall, while we get an entertaining game, it’s a loss (except for those who prefer the new take) since the past will be forgotten (and considered old and outdated) with the new face of the franchise taking president. The characters we love will be put on the shelf, and if we ever get a new game with Leon, it will no longer be the cool quick-witted Leon, it will be emo-Leon.

Oh well. It doesn’t matter what I think, since remakes make big money, and it seems Capcom will continue making them. I just hope they don’t destroy the past of my childhood too much by changing the characters or storylines. I’m curious how they view their franchise though. Is it like Star Trek, being spliced into two timelines, or are the old legacy games and lore being erased and replaced? Anyhow. Do I recommend Resident Evil 4 (remake)? Yes. It’s a fun game, especially if you can find it for the cheap as I did. But as these things go, if you haven’t played the original you should do so. Mostly to get a hum of what is changed, and what might be lost in the future when the current “timeline” continues.

Thanks for reading.

/Thomas