Resident Evil 4 In-Depth Review (GCN)

The most recent in the series that made the survival-horror genre popular, Resident Evil 4 takes on every major gameplay complaint that's ever been leveraged against the series and squashes them like bugs. Possibly the best survival horror game of all time, and certainly one of the scariest, it qualifies as a game you should own if you're old enough to buy it. Parents Beware: It earns its Mature rating.

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Game In A Glance:

• Ups: New approach to gameplay eliminates most complaints ever brought against the RE series. This is a truly scary game.
  
  
• Downs: You can’t sidestep, but honestly, who cares?
  
  
• For the Parents: Probably one of the most violent games available on the GameCube, RE4 has foul language, tremendous amounts of blood, and some of the most disturbing imagery on the market. If you’re a parent concerned about the content of what your kids play, this game is almost certainly a pass.

Intro:

Since its days on the PS1, Resident Evil has been in need of a redesign. For one, your main enemies were slow moving zombies that were threatening in much the way a grazing cow might be if it ever decided to eat you. Big, slow moving, and relatively difficult to stop once it realized that it wasn’t a carnivore. Yet a normal human could probably jump in, flick it in the ear, and run away again without much worry of ever being caught. The game designers counterbalanced this advantage by making your character about as threatening as a grazing cow with a gun. Slow moving, and able to shoot things from a long ways away. To make it harder they made ammunition notoriously scarce.

Add some clucky controls for navigating the beautiful but awkward pre-rendered backgrounds, and you have Resident Evil at its core: great atmosphere, great game, and miserable controls. In an overdue move, Capcom has solved the problems that have traditionally plagued the Resident Evil games, and the result is probably the best game in its genre. Creepy, atmospheric, and fun to play, this “fourth” installment might very well be the first in the series where shooting things is actually the highlight of the game.

Story:

What you find in Resident Evil 4 is not only a new approach to gameplay, but a fresh story for a series that has traditionally retold variations of the same tale over and over throughout its history. While there are a number of plot elements that don’t always make perfect sense, it’s amazing how much more interesting the game is when you honestly don’t know what’s going on; there is no Umbrella, these are not zombies attacking me, what the…? The mystery of discovering something new and unknown has been returned to the series, and it makes a tremendous difference to why you play the game.

You take on the role of Leon, charged with finding the U.S. President's kidnapped daughter. Following a lead to a remote European village, he finds himself surrounded by openly hostile, intelligent residents who are decidedly off-kilter. They are capable of talking, accomplishing tasks, and shouting at you in strange languages, yet they’ve ceased performing basic self-maintenance tasks. The meals from past dinners are on the tables in houses, rotting as if forgotten. Bodies of outsiders are strewn about the village - pinned to walls by stakes and cooking over fires - yet the villagers continue to cut wood, tend stoves, and aggressively defend their territory. Finding out what’s going on is part of the game’s appeal.

Characters:

One of the obvious changes is the replacement of shuffling zombies with some of the most threatening bad guys I’ve ever seen. What makes them so is how well they behave in tangent; they climb through windows, retrieve knocked down ladders to reach higher areas, run for help, and attack with a relentlessness detrimental to their own survival. This approach works to convey the feeling of a darkly intelligent mastermind somewhere in the back shadows.

Controls:

Another change is the control scheme. The over-the-shoulder camera provides a creepy experience while allowing much more agile control of the character. Hitting approaching enemies in the head with your laser-sighted pistol is really, really fun, and only gets more so as you progress to weapons that pack more punch. Damage areas are pleasantly specific; shooting a bad guy in the leg will drop him to the ground, but not keep him down, and hitting the head is a means to a faster kill. The character animations are a sight to see, and the way they are integrated into the gameplay gives the world a living, realistic feel, much in the same way that Halo 2 uses in-game character narration. The only major drawback would be a lack of the ability to sidestep. Going around corners is a mater of walking into the hallway and then turning yourself to face the right direction. Since your peripheral vision is limited, you often have to step into exposed areas virtually blind. While inconvenient, this element has caused me no serious problems. Though it’s curious that the developers decided to leave it out, they didn’t design the game in such a way that you’re cursing them for the absence.