Resident Evil 4

The Good
I completed the first playthrough of Resident Evil 4 on the Xbox 360 two days ago. There are no other games like it on this console, and I often wonder why a GameCube/PS2 game gets a release on the next gen Microsoft console at all. They didn't have to port it for us Xbox gamers. They could've easily made it a Sony exclusive and made us feel bad for not buying the machine that runs it. But they did port it and we get to play it right here on our console of choice. That's the number one reason I respect and support this game, and its publisher.

A few important aspects of the gameplay need to be discussed, for you to understand why it is not like any other shooters out there, and why it's often the superior one.

First of all, there is a map. A clear, informative, immensely useful map screen, that can be brought up with a simple press of the Y button. Locations of secret collectibles are marked right there on the map screen, because the designers understood that no gamer enjoys finding small objects blindly without hints. The average gamer can actually find a large number of treasures and items in this game. Meanwhile in Gears of War 2 and 3 I managed to find a total of 4 collectibles in two games (I looked it up and LOL there are 83 of them), which adds nothing to the experience.

Second important aspect: Resource collection. Let's look at how some other modern games do it, for example Dark Souls. There are chests, barrels, corpses and such everywhere in Dark Souls. But how often do you find something good in it? Not often, not often at all. Once you have a reasonably strong set of weapons and armors, there is almost nothing you can find that will mean much of a difference.

How about a modern day shooter such as Max Payne 3? In Max Payne 3 you will pick up many guns and lots of ammo in the levels. However you don't actually need that many guns, nor would you need all that ammo. The only thing you probably wanna pick up every time is the painkiller. And I'm talking about Max Payne which has a Painkiller mechanism. In most modern games you just heal by yourself automatically.

In Resident Evil 4, things are the polar opposite.

In RE4, there are strong weapons and weak weapons, sure. But having a strong weapon doesn't mean squat, because you cannot fire without ammunition for that weapon. Ammunition cannot be bought with money, but can only be found on enemy corpses, or placed on the ground or inside barrels. Enemies do not respawn. That means the total amount of ammunition in this game is limited. Once you miss it, it's gone forever.

Even healing items are limited. Each level gives you a max supply of about 4 first aid sprays, and some Herbs. If you run out of those, then that's it. I don't believe the game dynamically places more herbs in the levels if you run out of health. You can really run out of healing items and have no way to regain your health, AT ALL.

Let's put it this way: you will want to pick up EVERYTHING you can possibly find in the levels. EVERYTHING is useful in some way. There is absolutely no filler material in the barrels, chests, on enemy corpses, or anywhere else in the game.

I know this because I have fought quite a few battles where in the end, I got absolutely nothing left in my inventory. No bullets. No grenades. No herbs. No first aid sprays and barely alive. It's a great metaphor, like a black hole that absorbs all I've got, a rainstorm that washes me clean.

And the Max Paynes and Dark Souls's in this world have no idea what that feels like.

Now let's move on to talk about the third aspect of gameplay - the headshot system. Too many games do this wrong. In your average shooter, you can accidentally get a headshot when you aren't actually aiming for the head, or you can aim for the head on purpose but the enemy moves right before you can headshot them. Neither is good shooting gameplay.

Prior to RE4, the absolute best example of "headshots done right" came from a YouTube walkthrough of the XBLA tower defense game Orcs Must Die. The guy in the video was like, "look at me headshot these orcs", and every single time, he managed to get a headshot, for real. I eventually tried it myself and found that I could do it too, if I knew where to aim and how to adjust the angle.

The idea is that, if you want to get a headshot, you can. And that's exactly what's going on in my Resident Evil 4 playthrough. By the fifth world "Island", I was good enough, and confident enough, to be saying, "look at me headshot you, headshot, headshot", and each time I say that, I really get a headshot. There's no other shooter gameplay as satisfying as this. The headshots are out of this world. The crisp sound, the animation of heads being chopped off, the controller vibrating in my hand, all contributing to a full headshot experience that will always remain a highlight of my gaming life.

I would even go so far as to say that no other game can pull this off ever again, because Resident Evil 4 may be the last major title to use the LEFT-ANALOG stick for aiming. That's right. Completely against the modern gaming industry standard, this is a shooter played with the left-analog stick alone, a.k.a. the "Tank Controls" scheme. That means when you're shooting, your right hand is entirely focused on the Trigger button, and nothing else. I feel that this allows for a more steady and reliable shot. But we might never know for sure, because Resident Evil 5 no longer had this control scheme, and likely no modern shooter will ever have it again. The shooting in Resident Evil 4 is a product of its time, and due to its incredibly high quality, will forever remain timeless.

The Bad
Not enough female character scenes / storyline. I have no idea why character Ada is in the story at all.

Final boat escape sequence is the worst level in the whole game. The boat controls are quite possibly the worst boat controls the surface of the earth has ever seen.

So Leon rescues the girl, and that's it? Nothing more? Seriously? I know she's probably a minor but game producers should give us what we want and let Ashley become our wife in the end.

The Bottom Line
The first playthrough of RE4 is an essential experience, for any gamer who enjoys guns, shooting, and a mildly scary atmospheric adventure. It is 90% shooting, and the only truly scary parts are in Chapter 5 "Island", other than that it is not only not scary, but also very friendly to the player and provides a very rewarding feeling after every battle.

The Good
Why, it's been ten years since I sat in the dark, trembling, navigating the twisted halls of that horrifying mansion. Yeah, I was a lot younger then, so I guess it was a stretch for me to expect the same level of sheer horror with the fourth installment of this famous series, but the opening scene left me feeling very, very optimistic. No, I guess I wasn't as scared as I once was, but I was more than entertained.

The opening scene leaves you, Leon, trying to make your way through a village of angry, ravenous villagers. Survival horror at its best, this is exactly the kind of game I'd been looking for. They're not zombies, but they're just as stupid, and this time they're armed with pitch forks and knives and torches, and then there's this freaky guy in a hood with a chainsaw!

You quickly find yourself without ammunition, having to barricade yourself in a house, make your way outside along the roof while the never ending flood of angry villagers pour in from the windows and through the door and all seems completely and utterly hopeless.

Wow.

The game goes straight to crap after that, but I'll touch on that in a moment.

There are many improvements over previous Resident Evils, most notably the aiming system. No longer are you bound by the evil camera's placement. Now you view Leon from a sort of "just behind the shoulder" view, and use a laser on your gun to determine where you are aiming. This allows for a lot of very precise aiming. You can use it to easily take the head off a raging villager, or knock the pitchfork out of their hand, or even hit their stick of dynamite, blowing up everyone around them.

The graphics are nice, too. And the inventory system is much more manageable, as well.

The Bad
The Bad? Well, pretty much everything. The game has such a lovely opening scene, I just don't know what happened. The game does a complete 180 at that point. Rather than fighting your way through a hopeless situation where you have no ammunition and angry villagers are trying to kill you and you seriously have to THINK ABOUT HOW YOU ARE TO SURVIVE...you are suddenly given an almost infinite amount of ammunition and hundreds of cult members are thrown at you. It was almost like a really bad version of Serious Sam.

There are no zombies in this game. Not really. Yeah, they walk like zombies, and they groan, and they're not all that smart, but they're not zombies. They're sedated cult members and/or people infected by parasites that cause them to be violent. Violent, but slow. Like a zombie, but not quite a zombie.

The village in the beginning had this creepy guy with a bag over his head and a chainsaw. An absolutely horrifying thing, running from that guy as he corners you in one of the crumbling buildings in the intro...then you realize he's just "Bad Guy #3" and you can just expect him to come by again and again, another lifeless nobody that you have to kill with your never ending supply of ammunition.

The cutscenes look nice, but the dialogue is embarasing. Sometimes I can't tell if Leon was trying to be serious, or if he was just really, really, really bad at comebacks. And the big bad cult leader boss guy was obnoxiously arrogant, or just plain stupid. The fact that by the time you reach the end of the game, and you've killed enough people to fill a small country and he STILL thinks you're a "stupid American" who is no threat to him is just...it's not scary. It doesn't make him seem like a bad guy. It just makes me pity him and wonder how a guy like that managed to get any followers at all.

Resident Evil 4 also allows you to loot GOLD BRICKS and GOLD COINS from the fallen. That's right, Resident Evil 4 has some sort of wacky economy, and Leon isn't too picky with what he grabs off the bloody corpses weighted down with bullets. You can use this money to purchase new weapons and new upgrades for your guns from a strange merchant who has absolutely zero depth and there is never any explanation to why he is there or where he came from or why he shows up in the middle of the cult's sacrificial ceremony. Scary? Mysterious? Intriguing? No, just retarded. At least you can kill him. But you can't loot him.

Resident Evil 4 takes you from Awesome Village Town Intro to Underground Cave to Mysterious Cult Church to Mysterious Cult Mansion to Mysterious Cult Castle to Mysterious Cult Secret Hideout and even Mysterious Cult Island. One muster also wonder who the insane architect was who built Mysterious Cult Castle, what with the sole key to a certain area being the combination of two other keys, one which must be located in the middle of a lava filled dungeon, which would otherwise serve no purpose. Ah, but it wouldn't be Resident Evil without absolutely insane architecture.

The Bottom Line
The game is worth a rental just to play through the beginning areas. Your heart pounding as you run away from a horde of angry villagers, running along the rooftops and through windows and around the farmland in a futile effort just to survive is awesome.

Everything that follows though, it just stupid. It's the same stuff we've been seeing in the last three installments, but with about ten times the amount of zombies -- and they're not even zombies. They're slow, handicapped cult members with the occasional plant growing out of their neck.

Just play Serious Sam. It's more colorful, it controls better, and the weapons are better.

The Good
When I first rented this game I wasn't really interested in it, after playing it for an hour it became one of my favorite games. I rented it 3 times over the past year then I bought it, and I'm still not bored with it.

I enjoyed most of the weapons, especially the shotguns, they just look nice when you fire/reload them.

And the inventory system is nice, seeing as how you can organize everything the way you want it, and purchase larger cases, and not have to go back and drop off items in an item box, or replace them with other items when both might be necessary.

The very beginning of the game is by far the best, the village design and the atmosphere make it the most fun area in the game to play through. Even after beating the game and replaying the main village section with a large number of villagers and a chainsaw maniac with completely upgraded weapons, it still makes my pulse speed up a little.

Being grabbed by an enemy and being able to break yourself free is a pretty awesome aspect, except if your surrounded and you keep getting grappled time after time, which gets annoying/and or health consuming. Being able to kick enemies after shooting them in the head or legs is extremely helpful when there are large numbers of enemies around you, but in the later stages it could make the Las Plagas come out of one or multiple enemies which forces you to burn some ammo up on them.

The Bad
Running around a village with depressing weather and old crude looking buildings and angry villagers is was awesome. Running through a poorly designed castle and island not so much. The atmosphere changes completely from the village to the castle and not in a good way, it doesn't feel very fun going around a castle with either too large of spaces or too small of ones with little room to try and evade some new enemies. The island was especially disappointing, seeing as how the areas varied a lot, you go from a prison to a large area with a large number of infected military dudes with little or no room to hide, and running around and trying to fight at the same time would be futile.

The third person view is an awesome addition except for the fact that it focuses on the view over the right shoulder which makes it hard to see things on the left hand side of the screen, while its not a big deal it can be annoying at times to be attacked because you didn't see it coming.

Being able to upgrade your weapons is nice also, especially after beating the game and having your favorite weapons fully upgraded to use their special "ability". BUT if you replay the game like this then the village part is extremely easy and you go through it in no time at all, but once you get to the castle it tapers off a little and having completely juiced up weapons doesn't really make a difference once you get to the island part and the gameplay slows down a lot after being so quick in the beginning.

The Bottom Line
Overall Resident Evil 4 is the best game in the series so far, and should not be passed by. While not being as nerve racking as some of the older titles, it has the best gameplay and replay value.

As every game does it has a few small setbacks and some that are just plain annoying at times, but this shouldn't make a very big difference when your running around in high detail environments shooting the places up and being awesome.

This is a game I would recommend to purchase, or if nothing else to rent.