An old woman stumbles towards you with a raised pitchfork in her hands. You stab in her in the face, causing her to stagger backwards in pain. This gives you enough distance to pop her kneecap open with a 9mm bullet, and she falls to her knees in agony. The woman's head is now at the perfect height for you to spin-kick it into the piranha-infested waters like a toxic football, separating from shoulders that gush powerful jets of blood. The sheer force of your kick causes her husband to stumble, tripping a landmine in the process. The mine incinerates the dock you're standing on, and the rest of the woman's family with it; they melt away into chicken eggs and pesetas. The threat neutralised, you pick up your phone and tell your operator the name of this Spanish village is an unpronouncable mouthful. Bullets pierce the screen and you're praised for how effectively the family was slain.

You return to Resident Evil 4 for a lot of things, but I think the paragraph above succinctly describes the core loop that we all keep coming back for on the GameCube, the Wii, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, the PC and the Oculus Rift. The scenario might change, the enemies might change, the weapons might change, the graphics might change, but you are always controlling a baying mob in the cleanest, nastiest, most efficient way you possibly can. Bonus points if you can make it look goofy as Hell in the process.

Playing this right after Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, it's plain to see how this game was originally a forking point between the two series - both games are essentially the same implementation of a core idea, but choose to tackle combat from different angles of genre. At their best, the two games emphasise close management of an advancing enemy pool using a fairly limited toolset that flows naturally into the other aspects of itself: Knife to pistol. Pistol to kick. Kick to grenade. Grenade to egg. The movements feel primitive, awkward and unintuitive at first, but soon reveal themselves to be expertly crafted for natural achievement of a precision-flow state, racking up minor-yet-satisfying hits to keep a crowd under control while setting up scenarios where bigger and badder moves can be unleashed at the appropriate time. Put Leon in a red trenchcoat and I bet he could manage at least a few floors of Bloody Palace.

This replay of the game was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger coworkers last week when the topic of the Resident Evil games came up. As someone who spends a lot of time talking shop to people about people like Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya, it's easy to fall into the trap of evaluating these games as beautiful little puzzle boxes to be mechanically solved and understood - but spend ten minutes with someone who likes Resident Evil because they watched all the movies, and you'll discover that there are actually people out there who think Resident Evil 4 (in its current un-remade form) is as much stupid nonsense as your average Carry On film. I hate these people, but I do understand where they'e coming from - when this game originally came out, I bought it for my brother on his 14th birthday despite knowing he was deathly afraid of zombies and spiders and guns and all that; even worse, he was the type of person who said things like "you wouldn't actually say that" when Arnold told him to stick around. Resident Evil 4 was essentially his worsetest nightmare. I was selfishly buying a bowling ball for Marge, but unlike Homer, I never came to regret my heartless decision. Resident Evil 4 really is just that good.