bethesda is a lucky, lucky, lucky games company. like, insanely lucky, and i'm not even discussing the legal wins they've bagged against mohjang, human head, interplay, id--no, i mean they're lucky in that, twenty years ago, they developed a really impressive open world rpg engine. that was morrowind, and morrowind allowed for all sorts of unbelievably cool, innovative ways to maneuver its wide world: every building could be entered, every npc could be killed, every item could be picked up, and everyone could be talked to. not only that, but objects in the world had consistency--you could drop your armor right where you stood in the middle of balmora, leave for many moons, and come back to find it still very much there... exactly as you left it. and many of those npcs wouldn't ever respawn should you kill them--your actions had consequences. and all of this... absolutely all, was contained in a massive world that allowed you to walk from one end to the other without stopping.

and this is why the bethesda of today is lucky. see, on top of all those features morrowind bolstered was an excellent story with excellent, captivating, un-tolkein-like lore. but with every subsequent open world release came the same sort of open world mechanics birthed here with a regression of that writing, and a regression of the whole "rpg" aspect entirely. oblivion was embarrassing, lore wise--you could tell the devs saw lord of the rings in theaters together on a company wide trip, shit their pants, and thought "oh fuck yeah, let's just do that." and credit, many of oblivion's side quests and character writing is actually phenomenal... at the cost of its bland, grinded down lore. fallout 3 and skyrim follow, and they're written as intelligently as a cliff racer--they fly with style and take no more than one hit to fell. but all of this doesn't REALLY matter--i mean, it does if you appreciate good dialogue and engaging storytelling, but the majority of bethesda's players just want to goof off in a consistent open world, and THAT'S why this company's lucky. they can get away with it. they can write honest to god slop and as long as it feels good to yell at a dragon or lop off a raider's head, they'll keep going.

bethesda is insanely lucky.

anyway, that's why fallout 4 is so playable--it's easily the best feeling combat they've ever sharpened. calling on the talents of former destiny devs, bethesda put together guns that feel varied and unique from one another, that feel damned good to shoot and damned good to connect. the basic gameplay loop of wandering around the wasteland killing all sorts of whatever, looting the surroundings, and moving on... is fun. it is, or else i wouldn't have put as many hours into this as i did. that fun does come with the fattest asterisks you can imagine, however: the experience needs mods. not "improves" with mods, no--NEEDS.

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you have a game where enemies are almost always these ridiculous sponge tanks that absorb all your .308 rounds despite ostensibly defenseless--half these enemies don't wear proper helmets, and it feels stupid. this isn't a human enemy example, but soon after starting the game (with a mod that thankfully skips the default intro), i wandered over to a mirelurk assaulted town called salem. now, killing these things was somehow near impossible no matter what i did, but there was a sidequest there that involved starting up some stray turrets around the city, and i figured i'd knock it out. so, there i am bobbing and weaving through these infinite health lobsters to get all the sentries online, and.... nothing. they do near nothing. you know why? because, in the infinite wisdom of bethesda's developers, all of the turrets are placed high up, aiming down. why is this a problem? well, have you SEEN a mirelurk? let me refresh your memory: they wear giant fucking crab shells on their back, shielding them from damage. so, the turrets did nothing despite waiting around, trying to lead them in front of gunfire, etc, and i eventually get bored and just snuck off to tell the quest giver the job's done. i trek over, walk in--loading screen--and then every single goddamn mirelurk spawns in there. i did eventually wear them down after a reload and what felt like an hour, and--look, i get it. the game has tough creatures that, realistically, you're meant to come back and fight later, and that's fine, but following the mirelurks was a scuffle with some atom worshippers who wore rags around their head and ate ammunition like it was nothing. you can guess what they did to me. you can also guess why i then installed a mod that rebalances weapons.

and a mod to allow npcs to die, because there are dozens that can't. and a mod to increase the weight limit, because you are incentivized to pick up all sorts of bullshit necessitating trips to home base. and a mod to turn off enemy respawns considering any cleared out dungeon would be repopulated with the same threats just after three days. and a mod to remove harvey from the entire workshop and settlement elements of the game--surprising how less annoying it is to just clear out a camp and press a on the workshop. and that mod i mentioned that skips intro this game leads with and just lets you start with whatever ROLE you want? well i got that one, too, considering this game series used to be ROLE PLAYING. and on that note, there's one more mod i installed: it silences your sociopathic, unrelatable, insane protagonist.

he's bad. i haven't played as female either back in 2015 or now, six years later, but i have to imagine she's just as. the male is voiced by a snot nosed marvel movie zinger slinging psychopath, and this shows up in his very basic self narration, when you select a basic object, when you talk to basically anyone. his tone makes the player seem like he isn't processing anything happening like a real human being--all disjointed and awkward, and his sarcastic quips ripped straight from suicide squad scripts land real weird when you just spent the last twenty minutes banging physics based pots and pans against dead npcs to see if their heads would pop off. the generally agreed on problem is that the protagonist's voice has to fit all sorts of varied player personalities whether they be good samiratans or xbox players, and it ends up fitting neither and none. what's even more mindblowing is how dramatically improved fallout 4's immersion is when you gag yourself from any further one liners. you actually feel like it's you playing, almost. it still hurts to read what the player dialogue actually says and realize you're only ever getting three options that all mean the same thing.

also, this is just completely unrelated to that point, but i want to focus on this last gameplay element before i dive completely back into the writing: fallout 4 has some weird bugs and design decisions, doesn't it? have you ever gotten trapped trying to cook something or repair items? has your pip boy button ever just straight up been disabled? what's with npcs trying to ride elevators and then suddenly shooting up and falling from the sky like god almost let 'em into heaven but decided against it? back in fallout 3, clicking on a terminal just brings up the terminal prompt, but in fallout 4, clicking a terminal means your character performs this awkward intepretative dance as they draw up close to it, and the amount of time this takes seriously varies. i've sat there for a full minute watching my character dance around props and hazards, tin cans foiling my efforts to read the screen, and then watching myself die because an enemy just walked in in the middle of it and opened fire. there's also this door thing where npcs will enter a building ahead of you and, i don't know, hold the doorknob shut or something? seriously, you'll stand there like a dumbass for twenty seconds looking away from and back to the door until it finally highlights back to green. bizarre, but the very worst, most baffling, evil design decision i cannot understand is the fading out of black that follows loading in. like, i have died just quickloading because the time it took to completely fade in was the time it took for a raider to pincushion me. so, what this means is you have to just hit tab as soon as possible to pull up your pipboy until you can actually see the damn game.

okay, ooooone more point before we full on dive into the writing. let's talk graphics and aesthetics. because honestly... fallout 4 is a gorgeous looking game, i'm serious. the full range of an actual color palette paired with a brilliant dynamic lighting system both result in an aesthetic miles ahead of that ugly yellow, green mess that fallout 3 was. hell, i think there's a line some brotherhood member offers poking fun at that, something about how "you should see how the capital wasteland looks". and you should see it and compare, because they've come a long way: the commonwealth bolsters weather patterns filled with intrigue whether it be foggy, orange hued mornings or radiation storms, and when things clear up and the sun can poke out, god if the game isn't standing tall, hands on hips, going "goddamn would you look at my lighting engine". you ever seen people posting webms of f.e.a.r. to show off its lighting? fallout 4 does it too and with a grander scope--the fucking sun. it doesn't always work perfect downtown, but it's still pretty damn dope. now i'm gushing on these graphical points because, with a game doing so much wrong, you may as well praise what's done right. its these textures and carefully colored, carefully rendered environments that really sell the post apocalypse. if it had just happened recently--not two hundred years later.

yeah. back to talking about writing. worldbuilding, specifically, because the world fallout 4 takes place in does not make any sense at all and falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. and this? this is scrutiny. the game has received tons of criticism hammering in this point, but the reason poor worldbuilding strikes so many players wrong is because it ruins the believeability of anywhere you're exploring. you feel baffled entering a human settlement and there's just skeletons everywhere that scavengers seem to just step over like calcium decoration, among all the tin cans and trash as well. in certain untouched locations, this makes sense, while in others, it feels stupid. one infamous example of lore fuckery (in which pete hines made a tweet essentially saying "i don't give a shit and neither do my writers"), there's a pre-war vault full of drugs that emerged only after the apocalypse. dumb, but i'm here to describe that circumstances are even dumber than that. see, this vault is full of gunners, right? they've taken over the vault defenses and set up their own sentries and terminals, so they clearly have been here for awhile, okay? now, what's baffling is that, much of the vault is somehow still untouched, even with gunners themselves actually walking among the corpses and trash. and those very corpses all have drugs in their hands and scattered among them. and you're telling me there's not been a single gunner sweep to collect up all those jets and psychos and other valuables? are they under order to leave things exactly how they are? not likely since nearly every gunner i kill seems to have a drug on them. i get this comes across as nitpicking, but the fact that looking at this scenario with, again, any sort of scrutiny makes the entire dungeon fall apart in believability, kind of makes the whole dungeon exploring aspect suck. like, why even bother trying to piece together the story of what happened when bethesda's writers couldn't even be bothered. so, you just mindlessly clear out the vault of gunners, take your loot, and go.

there's more little things that bother me because they're baffling with no explanation, like how i found a farm of two children with a raider camp no more than twenty steps away. if there was a note there that said "i'm actually a good raider and keeping tabs on these poor kids while i sleep in the rain", i missed it. there's a house near vault 111 where a conspiracy nut locked himself away before the bombs dropped. what's in his vault? a fucking copy of the wasteland survival guide, something the fallout 3 player helped make. there's nuka cola machines all over filled with untouched sodas, every cash register seems to be full of both prewar money and bottlecaps, which is... strange, and unexplained. and vault 81 is accessed by making its owners a deal to give them three fusion cores. oh, you don't actually have to prove you have them or discretely dump em in a dropbox, no they just open right up. hey, don't question these things, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

but broadstrokes worldbuilding here, what makes the experience of traversing the wasteland most hollow and theme-park feeling is the actual placement of enemies. let me explain: take a look at fallout new vegas' map, and see how the different factions occupy spaces. you have ncr camps on a logical 'front', with caeser on the other side. for the role of raiders, you have a jail of escaped convicts contained to a circular area originating from their prison. for another role, you have 'fiends' who occupy a large strip of vegas ruins in the west originating from a vault they consider home base. even further west, you've got khans who occupy a very defendable canyon, and ghouls are always in areas that reasonably would be untouched or affected directly by the in-game conflict. what i'm trying to get at is that the enemies you fight, and where you fight them, always make sense. there are good explanations for why you're fighting what you're fighting where you're fighting them, and it makes the world feel... real. now let's look at fallout 4's map: enemy placements are shotgunned against map markers with zero cohesion. bethesda designs the dungeon placements first, and then goes "okay uhh how about raiders here and supermutants here and uhh maybe supermutants here too but uhhh maybe ghouls yeah let's do ghouls here and okay this looks like a good gunner place". it feels asinine, and you wonder how any of these fragmented groups are even able to survive, defend, connect with each other. there's this whole eastern part of the map that's mostly wildlands where you're likely to encounter deathclaws and yau gaoi. cool, and then like, in the middle of it is a raider camp. what the fuck? who are you even raiding, you're the only humans out there! no, what enemies occupy what camps is NOT decided by any sort of logical reasoning and instead, just "we don't want the player to kill raiders in one camp and then encounter more raiders in the next, so we chose the easiest solution" amusement park. this is why people describe these bethesda rpgs as amusement parks. but hey, don't question this, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

i keep saying that, and it's because that's the impression i got back in 2015 playing through the assortment of side quests fallout 4 offers with all of them feeling like "go here, shoot, leave" with fat-free window dressing because the substance is never there. this playthrough? i haven't even being doing any, i just go around mindlessly killing and looting like they want me to. hey though, i actually shacked up with a companion i "rescued" from an underground arena--could we have had an interesting sidequest where the player participates in that arena, perhaps forced to, or maybe one where the player searches out new talent to compete for them--no that'd be too interesting. anyway, her character is hilarious, like i can't imagine what whoever wrote her was thinking. she's this scottish tough girl who audibly adores that you don't boss her around (even though, yes i do, i make her open every door and walk infront of gunfire), and she eventually reveals her tragic backstory: for almost eighteen long years, her parents merely tolerated her existence until shipping the poor scot out into slavery on her 18th birthday (for probably, like, 40 caps). eventually, she makes it out and back to her parents' old home, and she kills them both. but the look in their eyes when she pulls the trigger... she feels guilt, and that's why she drinks, that's why she's game to slaughter diamond city villagers alongside me. harrowing. anyway, funniest thing about that story is that the parents waited eighteen years to ship off an extra mouth to feed and protect they ostensibly didn't care for, um... but whatever. this sort of character writing is what all of fallout 4's characters are like. no real depth, no actual thought, just funny wacky marvel personalities with fanfiction.net backstories.

just. nothing makes sense in this game, and bethesda clearly doesn't want you to think too hard about it, right? except, they do. no, they have to, have you seen the absurd amount of notes and terminals and audio diary logs the commonwealth is filled with? bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a skeleton next to a computer with three diary entries. diary one says "i'm so glad i'm not a skeleton", diary two says "uooohhh... i can feel myself becoming a skeleton", and diary three says "i am a skeleton now." bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a ghoul family who dearly miss their two hundred year old child you find no more than 40 feet away from their fucking house. they try. bethesda tries. pete hines doesn't get to hide behind "oooh not interested debating a world with talking mutants" because bethesda tried to flesh out that world of talking mutants--they just did a shitty job. and this'll be the most pretentious thing i say all review, but the reason they did a shitty job is because no one in that writing department has the right influences, and they all look up to the wrong people. you can tell they don't like fallout new vegas and they weren't inspired by fallout new vegas because they make no attempt to break down what made the writing and world of that game work, and i know this because, when bethesda was making fallout 3, they made no attempt to do that with the first two fallouts either.

i could go on, and on, and on but there's little point in hammering in the same points repeatedly as i basically say the same thing over and over again: the writing, worldbuilding, lore, and set design in this game is complete, incompetent ass. this doesn't hold fallout 4 back from being fun, or even good, or really good with the right fat asterisk mods. but it's half baked, it's unfulfilled potential. it could be SO much better. and there's absolutely no pressure at bethesda to address that... because they're lucky. they can write the most embarrassing slop of the entire games industry, and it won't matter, because in 2002 they built a fun open world rpg engine, and they're going to squeeze every last drop out of it--forever.

mark my words. without knowing even a single thing about starfield, two things are certain: it'll probably be fun, and it won't make any sense at all. that's a bethesda open world sized promise.

I've got it for free with my AMD card. I said, fuck it let's try. I installed it on an external HDD because I don't give a shit, to be honest. It ran like shit, then remembered something about it only working on SSDs. I said, fuck it, and I made space on the C drive and tried to move it through Steam. Took ages then I smelled burnt plastic. I forgot to peel off the plastic from the new AMD GPU. Canceled the moving process, turned off the PC, and peeled off the half-burnt plastic. Turned the PC back on then I said, fuck it, I have good internet so I'll just delete the game and download it again because that's gonna be faster than dealing with this broken-ass external HDD. While it was downloading, I set up Cyberpunk 2077 on my girlfriend's PC. Fucking Cyberpunk wouldn't let me lower the Textures from High to Medium. Finally, I somehow did it and the benchmark ran fine. Got back to my PC and loaded up Starfield. Touched a rock, had an orgasm, chose my pronouns, and then I realized that the mouse is weird. Looked the game up on PC Gaming Wiki, disabled the intro videos, set up the mouse properly, and then launched the game. Jumped around for a few minutes, then I realized that the game runs like shit, looks like shit and I don't even care about Bethesda games, so I uninstalled it. I'll see you when the modders fix your game, Todd!

its better than the zeebo port, i guess.

this remake is an exercise in futility. almost everything new is bad and everything good about it is from a 20 year old game that remains superior to this. part of what made the original special is that it was isolated from the rest of the franchise, and in every sense of the word this remake's number one priority is to homogenize it with everything else while still being "resident evil 4" in the most half-hearted, pathetic way possible.

the tone of this game wants so desperately to be melodramatic and self-serious in line with the other remakes but understands that it loses all appeal if it doesnt still portray RE4-isms, so in one scene nu-leon will say "Fuck... this has to be different... shit..." and in the very next he'll do The Bingo Line or go "Whoopsy daisy, looks like I just kicked you in the head" a million times during combat because otherwise it won't get a 4.6 average on Backloggd. it wants to be new but feels to obligated to be old because it is literally a remake so the entire thing feels wholly disingenuous.

resident evil 4 was also an action game and the modern RE remakes are more of an exercise in frustration than anything, so nu-4 tries to mix both worlds without really having the engine to back it up. the amount of times leon would be stunlocked by an enemy breathing on him is enough to make a man insane, and the enemy states in this game are also much more vague than the original. the idea is that if you should them in the head or leg you can perform a melee, but sometimes enemies just wont be affected by these things at all and the player is left entirely out of control.

there are plenty of new additions that fans of a PS2 action game are sure to love also, such as
- Cut content sold later as DLC
- Weapon degredation, and speaking of which
- Stealth Kills (who asked for this)
- Parries (but dont use them, because your knife will break. also the game makes it super unclear what you can and cannot parry besides having a brief parry prompt in the corner, so its as if the game still has quick time events)
- That thing where instead of mashing to get out of grabs, you just stab them. This is really pointless since it also breaks your knife but enemies grab you so much more here that fuck it, you can have my knife
- Iconic new Side Quests such as "kill 3 rats" and "kill 3 snakes"
- Unlockable charms that give wonderful bonuses like 5% higher chance of enemies dropping green herbs or shotgun bullets
- A crouch button(??)
- A new enemy thats practically the same as Salvador but more frequent and nearly unstaggerable so hes really just an ammo toll, thanks

this game is just so phony in so many ways. lots of little things are worse. the regenerator music is louder and they become a standard enemy instead of having their own special moments. characters talk more and have less to say. arguably every single boss encounter is more "cinematic" instead of being dynamic, like Mendez hiding in the background to pick up big red barrels for you to shoot instead of just being a boss fight. the game in general is more cinematic and even has one of those fucking sequences where you just hold up on the left stick while a psuedo-cutscene plays. in MY resident evil 4

i fail to see any way that this remake is trying to do anything besides rewrite history, let alone one of the most historically significant games ever made. i shudder to think of the amount of people who will say "resident evil 4" in reference to this and this alone. it does wimpily try to emulate the original, so it can still have its moments, but otherwise adds positively nothing to the industry and has effectively only harmed the reputation of the 2005 game. im glad people love it as much as they do, and i wish so dearly that they would be inspired to see what the original is all about too, but chances of that are low. this is new, and thats old. morir es vivir, morir es vivir

To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.

To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.

A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.

To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.

Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.

So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.

Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.

Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.

The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.

There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.

Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting

Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.

And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.

Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.

It reminds me of a time when the world wasn’t so fucking retarded. The story is great and the culture it was trying to parody really resonated. The cast and the main protagonist are up there with RDR2’s, and Niko might just have taken the spot where Arthur used to be. And the celebrity cameos were a treat.

Such a sad and drab game when all the glitz and glamor of crime and making money settle, what we’re left with is a shot of Liberty City, a place of grey industry, and overt consumerism that robbed Niko of a happy life after his saga. I got this feeling of seeing the city for what it was and the American dream was no where to be found.

When I got to the end (revenge ending) it glitched after 3 attempts to remedy it I could not spend another 15 minutes doing the shooting section again so I just YouTube’d it.

I don’t think the controls are as bad as people say but they’re not great. I enjoyed the shit out of it but understand that people dislike because of the controls and the same old rockstar formula they’ve used since gta 3.