To play Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 remake is to witness a development team grappling with a near-impossible task. Enough time had passed since Resident Evils 2 and 3 for contemporary updates to feel viable, and indeed sensible – created in the PS1 era as they were, with their static camera angles and purposefully unwieldy controls. But, even 18 years on, refurbishing their Shinji Mikami-helmed successor, widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, and a game which all but laid the template for the thirdperson action game, always seemed a more daunting assignment. Wrenched between eager homage and an evident desire to innovate, at times it strides confidently into new territory, while at others you can sense the desperation not to stray too far from the original path. It is eager to please in more ways than one: at once respecting Mikami’s vision while doubling down on fan-favourite moments and characters.
Take the opening, which is both familiar enough to stir memories of 2005 and yet sufficiently different to establish a clear agenda. As Leon S Kennedy arrives in a Spanish village – his mission to save the US president’s daughter taking a backseat to the more immediately pressing matter of finding out where his driver, who stepped out for a toilet break, has got to – his first encounter with one of the locals ends as disastrously as it did the first time. Yet this parasitically possessed villager, or ganado, is killed not by the player but in a cutscene. There is no dramatic zoom out through the slats of the window as he spies others approaching. And when we approach the centre of the village and look through Leon’s binoculars, the driver is still alive – just long enough for us to hear him scream as the villagers gather to set him alight. It’s alarming yet perhaps less chilling than before, when the horror was juxtaposed with the dull domesticity of the ganados’ day-to-day activities, highlighting the cold banality of this evil act.
But then we’re spotted and we don’t have time to think about anything else beyond trying to stay alive. This, too, is familiar but different: a few intense minutes that feel like much longer – and that, yes, once again concludes with a church bell that halts the ganado attacks and prompts our hero to wonder if they’re going to bingo. Here, Leon moves slowly enough that being able to advance or backstep while firing isn’t quite the game-changer it could have been; and where once enemies stumbled slowly before lurching forward or breaking into a sprint, they now have a quicker default speed. The anxiety associated with having to plant your feet and commit to a shot has taken another form: ganados are more aggressive in their pursuit, so if you turn and run, expect to see one on your tail when you spin around to take aim. The rev of Dr Salvador’s chainsaw, meanwhile, is still able to freeze the blood – even if this time there’s a way to stop it. As the blade descends, a prompt to hit L1 appears. We duly comply and parry the chainsaw with Leon’s combat knife, not only saving our skin but letting us reload while the bad doctor yanks the cord to restart his device.
It’s preposterous – and in that sense, reassuring. Not just because Resident Evil 4 was a preposterous game, although it was, but because it ties into one of the elements that made its combat so exhilarating. Ammunition might seem in slightly greater supply, but then so are your opponents, and so you must conserve it by either avoidance or deploying other methods of attack. A flash grenade, as before, is a useful way to clear space, enough to either sprint to safety or to wade in while your opponents are incapacitated – and any whose heads explode to reveal more advanced forms of the parasitic Las Plagas will be immediately dispatched. But it leans into the original’s delightfully daft idea that a kick or a suplex can do more damage than a shotgun blast at point-blank range, where aiming for the knees is often better than the classic zombie trope of targeting the head. There is something inherently comical, too, about the way ganados spin around and kneel with their backs to you, as if inviting you to slam their skulls into the ground; allied to the Resident Evil 2 remake’s more pronounced splatter and localised dismemberment, at times it’s like the goriest slapstick comedy ever seen.