There are almost 600 reviews already but not one sonnet. So here goes:

A brutal axe slashes right at my face.
I knife parry while dynamite explodes
then whirl around and empty clips with grace;
blasting at filthy parasites exposed.

Heart attacks wait around every corner;
each encounter abounds with gripped tension.
Static no more - frenetic, sans torpor,
yet more options to fight apprehension.

This time I have a friend, not a burden;
a teammate that I miss when she is gone.
Each NPC became their own person,
fleshed out, built up, and much improved upon.

Despite a taste for slower paced RE,
this remake scores a big BINGO from me.

there's so so so much to adore about this game and i absolutely want to give it a 10 but there are a few things holding it back for me so im gonna talk about those first.

for some reason a lot of (very stupid) people think that ashley is like really difficult to work with in the original game?? she is exceedingly simple and adds a lot of fun challenge to the experience. and while i think ashley in the remake is an infinitely better and more lovable character than she is in the original, sadly the new commands are a huge step down. instead of "stay put", "hide" and "follow" being your 3 main commands, now you get "stick close", "follow at a distance" and very very rarely will you get to have her hide.

this change now puts ashley in danger at all times and while it is much easier to get her out of said danger, most of that danger could be avoided completely had they just given me the option to have her stay put for a few minutes. on top of the anxiety her staying close can fill you with given she's so much more likable now, she also winds up getting in the way of all the fantastic new side quests pretty frequently.

another issue the game has is difficulty. this may be a "noahs bad at games" kinda thing but when you boot up the game, you are presented with 3 difficulties. the third being hardcore. hardcore is explicitly stated as "recommended for players familiar with resident evil 4 (2005)", and while at the start this is true, the game becomes brutally difficult and punishing later on to the point of feeling frankly unfair. perhaps the text meant for player's familiar with PROFESSIONAL DIFFICULTY in the original RE4, but i wanted an authentic RE4 experience and the game lied to me and i got my ass smacked by sloppy little critters for 20 hours.

the final complaint i had was that my internet is not very good so my ps4 pretty regularly drops wifi for a few seconds, this became an issue because for some fucking reason every time you drop wifi in a single player campaign experience the game PAUSES and tells you it happened. again i am playing a single player campaign experience so why the FUCK do i need to know that?!?!?!

aside from that, the game is great!! doesnt necessarily replace the original as an experience and i cant quite say which version i prefer yet, but similarly to RE1 remake, this is pretty much the gold standard for remakes. very little is cut out and what is cut out was either not noteworthy in the original or repurposed and changed to work better with the modern RE gameplay formula.

characters are all great, music is the best its ever been, the game looks and runs perfect on my ps4, the gameplay is a fantastic compromise between RE2 remake, RE8 and shockingly enough DMC???? lots of character action esque things going on here.

the bosses are all pretty great except salazar, salazar is a bitch and a wiener and i hate him. ashley and leon are so fucking adorable together and ashley is like top 10 RE characters for me now. and the actors all do a pretty fantastic job. if i had to pick a weak link, the guy who plays mike is the WORST, but otherwise everyone does a solid job. ada's new actress can sound a lil shaky here and there but she's doing a good job.

all the monsters are fucking horrifying, the gore is fucking disgusting, the guns all feel great to use (except the crossbow), knife combat is so unbelievably fun that krauser 1 and 2 are my new favorite RE bosses ever, the shooting gallery is a hoot and a half. its all just real great.

i think what i appreciate the most is that they really change the story to work better with the darker tone its going for, but it still has plenty of absolutely silly, campy and corny moments and lines plucked straight from the original.

yeah its great! Idk! video game good make me smile! 9.5/10 until i replay on standard difficulty i guess???

First off before I start I gotta say this game has the best graphics ever. Like to this day. It came out in like 2015 and I played the game on low graphics and it's still the most graphically impressive game ever. Not even just the textures or how the rain perfectly shines on batman's cape or all that stuff but the batmobile can crush things as it goes through and the destructibility is nothing short of awesomesauce. it's insane. OK, now we can get on with the review.

Combat is the best it's ever been. It feels amazing to play, and it better be since they've had like 10 years to refine the formula.
Stealth is also great because of how the AI works and how many awesome gadgets you're given. And because the AI learns the way you play, especially against a certain enemy type you have to shake up your strategies but it still feels fair and you're able to do it in any way you like. It's pretty sandboxy and the artform that I find I can most easily express myself in is batman predator rooms.

But man the batmobile is the weakest part of the game. It's not that it's bad, it's one of the most fun vehicles ever, and the insane destruction is very well done. It's also really fun to race with in the optional mode in the menu, and the skins for it are awesome. Do you know my problem with it? the tank mode is used way too much. And don't get me started on the tank stealth parts. Yeah, you heard me. Tank. Stealth. Parts. Parts plural with an S. You - WHILE DRIVING THE TANK... sneak up behind other tanks. And then you charge up your special tank stealth attack and you shoot. I remember being confused with assassin's creed 4 boat stealth but this is a literal tank. If you asked 7 billion people what the least discrete vehicle is, 6 billion of them would say tank, 500 million of them would say a giant bat-themed tank, and the other 500 million were the developers of this game who all said unicycle.

the story is alright, you can tell Dini's not here and some of the characters feel oddly written. Lots of odd choices and weird things that occur in the story. As well as the story having no real climax. It kinda fizzles out after a cutscene. There are no real boss fights either. There are like 2 in the main story. The side missions were mostly good, except one that feels like they rushed super hard to get this character in the game. Totally wasted, could've been a whole thing instead of that mine disarming one (that 1 sucked).

The game's still great, the puzzles are fun, combat and stealth are the best they've ever been, the graphics are very good, driving and gliding and grappling around Gotham feels natural, all the other playable characters are cool, the sidequests are mostly awesome, but it falls short of city and asylum for me due to the lower quality in story and writing, lack of cool boss fights, overuse of tank battles, and anticlimactic ending,. Thanks for reading. I'll do the expansions now and spend the rest of my life doing the batman 89 races. CYA!

I love this game!!

A Lot of people say "oh the Batmobile takes up 60% of the game" First off I still find the Batmobile fun to use and second that is simply not true. The Boy Aqua (I would check his video out) said he recorded his whole 100% playthrough of this game only using it when necessary and it only took up 19% of the game.

Even then, the stealth and the combat are practically flawless, and I still thought it was a damn good story

The meme, “Be the Batman,” wouldn’t be nearly as big as it was if there wasn’t a nugget of truth. For now, this is the ultimate Batman sim- of course that means experiencing all the power fantasy of being the pinnacle of capable superheroes, as well as experiencing their failures and struggles, and feeling what those failures would mean in the heightened world and stakes of Gotham City. There are choices that hold this game back in terms of gameplay or narrative if you were to look at those aspects individually, but ultimately this is a story that can only be told through the video game medium. First rating on this website so I can stick my opinion flag to the ground and proudly claim this is still up there as one of my favorite video games, even 8 years after the fact.