og re4 is a game i think i always had an abnormal amount of issues with. sure, it's good, but it also felt like it was stuck in a very weird middle ground with respect to action and horror. the gunplay and movement is clunky enough to work in a survival horror setting, but make no mistake; re4 is not a survival horror game. everything about re4 besides the actual moving and shooting is action, through and through. even the horror aspects are thrown to the wayside more and more as the game goes on, and you end up in something more reminiscent of a less fun version of 50 cent: blood on the sand than of any other horror game i've ever played. which is why the controls feel like a complete mistake/misfire to me. they can't serve to enhance the horror, since the horror's barely even there in the first place, so they're just a weird vestigial structure from earlier iterations of the resident evil formula. even silent hill 2 let you opt out of tank controls, 4 years before this released, and it's also the kind of game where i would be okay with forced tank controls. its not really a secret that re4's development was a mess, and the movement and shooting feeling like they should belong to an entirely different game was probably the loudest remnant of that development. besides devil may cry existing lol
re4r, however, makes re4 the horror-themed action game it's always wanted to be. gunplay that is actually fun. weapon quickswitch. you can vault over short walls. you can not only move and shoot at the same time, but you can also move and reload too. engineered for fun.
these sorts of things in any other modern shooty action game would be completely banal and expected additions, but re4 didn't have them, and now it does. add onto that:
actual incentives to backtrack,
a shooting gallery that i actually wanted to do this time,
the knife (which adds a lot of fun buying strategy in the early game),
and a bunch of other stuff i'm probably forgetting right now, and i feel 100% confident in saying that this is the better version of re4, even if the original probably has/will have more historical importance in the long run.
it's not all perfect though. up until the island i was just about ready to give this a 9 (considering i only give around only 4% of the games i play a score higher than an 8, this is pretty fuckin good!), but then you're slammed with a couple boring stealth sections, and some of the only examples of real ammo scarcity, in the single-most guns-blazing part of the whole game. this feels weird!! whether or not it's a good kind of weird is an exercise for the player, but i don't personally like it. just as you've finally built up your arsenal, you can't use your rifle because no ammo is dropping for it? silly. the last third of re4 always wasn't great and it seems the remake didn't do much in terms of remedying it.
there's also some shlocky charm that's lost (rip salazar statue and "your right hand comes off?") which i think is bad but i also think some people are making a bigger deal than it is. it's just different. unfortunately, this also is another factor to why i think the island isn't great here--in the original when you're first playing it you're struck by the absurdity of being thrown into this weird fuckin COD-ass zone in the middle of an overcast day immediately after the castle for the last couple hours and the bizarreness of it kinda does the heavy lifting, on at least a first playthrough. in re4r the island is just kind of bland. but maybe og re4's island was much more trite on release than it is now, looking back, as a sort of novelty. look, mom! it's got a grayish-brown gears of duty section!
that's not to say the new island is bad--it's still pretty fun--but it loses the magic of the village and the castle. the game stops being "holy shit this is the best action game i have played in years" and it goes to "this is a serviceable action game", which i think is just a little sad.
aside from that: one of the strongest 8s/weakest 9s i have played in years probably. incredibly fun, and i've already got a hankering for a ng+ run (which i think will probably solidify if i think this is an 8 or a 9), but so far this is definitely the best game i have played in 2023 so far. get owned, umineko
re4r, however, makes re4 the horror-themed action game it's always wanted to be. gunplay that is actually fun. weapon quickswitch. you can vault over short walls. you can not only move and shoot at the same time, but you can also move and reload too. engineered for fun.
these sorts of things in any other modern shooty action game would be completely banal and expected additions, but re4 didn't have them, and now it does. add onto that:
actual incentives to backtrack,
a shooting gallery that i actually wanted to do this time,
the knife (which adds a lot of fun buying strategy in the early game),
and a bunch of other stuff i'm probably forgetting right now, and i feel 100% confident in saying that this is the better version of re4, even if the original probably has/will have more historical importance in the long run.
it's not all perfect though. up until the island i was just about ready to give this a 9 (considering i only give around only 4% of the games i play a score higher than an 8, this is pretty fuckin good!), but then you're slammed with a couple boring stealth sections, and some of the only examples of real ammo scarcity, in the single-most guns-blazing part of the whole game. this feels weird!! whether or not it's a good kind of weird is an exercise for the player, but i don't personally like it. just as you've finally built up your arsenal, you can't use your rifle because no ammo is dropping for it? silly. the last third of re4 always wasn't great and it seems the remake didn't do much in terms of remedying it.
there's also some shlocky charm that's lost (rip salazar statue and "your right hand comes off?") which i think is bad but i also think some people are making a bigger deal than it is. it's just different. unfortunately, this also is another factor to why i think the island isn't great here--in the original when you're first playing it you're struck by the absurdity of being thrown into this weird fuckin COD-ass zone in the middle of an overcast day immediately after the castle for the last couple hours and the bizarreness of it kinda does the heavy lifting, on at least a first playthrough. in re4r the island is just kind of bland. but maybe og re4's island was much more trite on release than it is now, looking back, as a sort of novelty. look, mom! it's got a grayish-brown gears of duty section!
that's not to say the new island is bad--it's still pretty fun--but it loses the magic of the village and the castle. the game stops being "holy shit this is the best action game i have played in years" and it goes to "this is a serviceable action game", which i think is just a little sad.
aside from that: one of the strongest 8s/weakest 9s i have played in years probably. incredibly fun, and i've already got a hankering for a ng+ run (which i think will probably solidify if i think this is an 8 or a 9), but so far this is definitely the best game i have played in 2023 so far. get owned, umineko
JunKami
1 year ago