One of my biggest gaming sins is that I’ve somehow managed to avoid playing Resident Evil 4. It was one of those games that I marked somewhere in my brain as a “I’ll get around to this eventually” with every intention of doing exactly that but then a few years on the backlog floated into many more years on the backlog and we ended up here, nearly 18 years after the original game’s debut. Nearly two decade’s worth of expectations and near-universal praise had kinda soured me into one of those “ok, I’m sure it’s not THAT good” types, but after finally just forcing myself to sit down and experience Resident Evil 4 in some form or fashion, my thoughts are…after all this time…..it really is THAT good.

Without having too much context on the original, I’m not the leading authority on what changes were good or bad or how well this game functions as a remake, specifically, but strictly speaking from the perspective of RE4 Remake being it’s own separate thing, it’s an absolute blast. Captured me from the first few seconds of the game and didn’t release its grip on me until it was all said and done.

Moment-to-moment gameplay is super snappy and very rewarding, I’ve always enjoyed Resident Evil’s structure of making players mindful to be conservative with ammo usage because it makes every decision and every shot fired that much more impactful. The balancing act between short-term benefit and long-term consideration works really well here (even if the game is more on the generous side) because of how many options you have to approach a situation at any given time. Parrying and perfect parries are an especially important tool that conserve ammo but do require precision and aggression, it’s a really nice trade-off that also happens to feel like the coolest shit of all time when you execute it properly.

I think “coolest shit of all time” is a nice way to describe the feeling RE4 Remake gave me basically all the time. You’re in an environment where everything is out to kill you, but you almost never feel like you should be cowering away or anything of the sort. Leon is always well-equipped, you always feel capable of tackling whatever obstacle is in your way and the game begins to morph into less of a survival-horror type of thing and more into an action-survival power-fantasy and it’s delightful. Special shout-out to the Chapter 14 boss encounter, just straight up one of my favorite stretches of gaming period.

Any complaints I would have about the game are relegated to really minor nitpicks. I think the audio design is all-around pretty stellar, but the end of combat encounters being punctuated by the combat music playing itself out works against the game’s atmosphere. You start connecting the two wires in your brain as we’re conditioned to do and you always know when there are no remaining enemies, a bit counter-intuitive to a game that should be keeping you on your toes at all times but nothing too egregious.

I’m so glad that I finally got around to playing this, and it definitely ignited my interest in checking out the original sooner rather than later (for real this time).