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[Hex Pallett]

I gotta put out my thoughts somewhere before I start doing anything else, because I've been playing RE4 HD a lot lately, and despite the facts that the game's definition of "HD" is totally from 2005, its control scheme is clunky as hell and the user interface is goddamn ugly, I LOVED it. I can't seem to stop playing and it got the gamer side of me terribly confuse.

So I decided to lie down and tried to figure out why, and the following is mu conclusion. I might as well just post it here in case anyone's interested.

To sum things up: RE4 is a game that knows very well what itself is doing. It's aware of itself's strengths and weaknesses, and it did all the patch works necessary to stitch the weaknesses together and made itself an extremely solid game.

Let's start with the control scheme. For those who hasn't played RE4 - or any of the later Resident Evil game, like me - in RE4, your left thumbstick/WASD keys moves you forward/backward and turn left/right, instead of most 3rd person action games that are forward/backward and strafe left/right. Your right thumbstick/mouse only allows you to see around for a bit, and when you aim your weapons, instead of giving you a crosshair in the screen's center, you get to "swing" your aims around the very narrow field-of-view, very much like old on-rail arcade shooters. Oh, and you can't move while aiming.

Everything sounds horribly clunky. In fact the game itself acknowledges that and gives you a separate button to turn 180-degree. I could only imagine it's because of the limitation of early consoles that couldn't render all the 3D goodness fast enough - game was first released on GameCube and PS2 that all sound like antiques in my ears.

However, the game faced those limitations like a MAN and tweaked gameplay elements to actually ENHANCE the experience. When the "zombies" crowd around you, they slow down significantly and spread into a circle, mumbling in an alien language. It gives you a real sense of tension without taking away the time for you to shoot them, and the tension comes from deciding how to most effectively kill them all without wasting your limited ammo, instead of the niche "zombie hoard" that people nowadays are so tired of. The limited FOV when aiming definitely helps in that regard, and I find myself constantly using the turn-180 key to run away, in order to find the best angle to shoot them most efficiently.

And the shooting! While the aiming itself is clearly an aged mechanism, the guns feel SPECTACULAR. A good videogame is all about feedback of your actions - that's why action RPGs have those damage numbers flying off enemies, that's why fighting games give you health bars for bosses and shows you how much damage you've done in bright yellow, that's why modern military FPS genre has invented "hitmark" in multiplayer components. RE4's gunplay has some of the best feedback I've ever seen. Zombies will twist and cry when being shot in the face. They stumble and fall if they're shot in the legs, they drop their axes/flails/pipebombs when shot in the arms, and they fly backward and land on their backs when you shotgun blast them in the chest. They shake and wiggle when SMG bullets shred through their flesh, and their heads pop with a crispy "crack!" when you snipe them in the hears. It's just so satisfying.

Speaking of the sound effects, RE4 gets 10/10. You can hear every bullet hit the flesh, making headshotting and spamming with SMG ten times more engaging. The whiplash-sound and the tingling leg sounds of the plagas are genuinely disturbing, and the rapid footsteps of giant, invisible bugs running through sewers made my hair stand on their ends. And it doesn't stop there. The wind howling through the valleys, the croak of the crows in graveyards and medieval mansions and the groans of ancient, giant contraptions, all complement perfectly well with the grim, gloomy visual style of the game. And the soundtracks, too. My favorite part is those bossfights against El Gigantes, when the background music is essentially horror-movie white-noise, and all you can hear is STOMP, STOMP, STOMP, STOMP, STOMP. Brilliant.

And the game still comes with additional nice touches. The inventory-tetris, the return of Ada Wong, THE videogame femme-fatale and Ashley's panty all add up to the game's atmosphere, creating what many claim to be one of the best survival horror shooter of all time. It's influence can be seen on many later titles, Dead Space being the most obvious one. It's a solid game with everything tied up perfectly, and creates a memorable experience that its own successors have failed to replicate. Too bad.



Okay I'm done, back to work.

Edited by Helmstif, 09 March 2014 - 11:52 AM.