Review
Release Date: 01.11.2005
Platform:
GameCubeDeveloper:
Capcom Co., Ltd.Publisher:
Capcom USA, Inc.Reviewed by
Samuel Altersitz on 1.26.2005
| Review Rating: 10/10 | User Rating: 9.25/10 |
Any one of you who doesn't have a GameCube at this very moment needs to go out and buy one and
Resident Evil 4. Right now. No, seriously, I mean it. Stop looking at this review, and just go out and buy a GC and
RE4. Those of you with a GC and who don't have
RE4 also need to stop reading this, right this second, and go out and buy this game. GO! This review will still be on the server when you return with the game in hand.
Resident Evil 4 is the newest in the famed
Resident Evil Survival Horror series, and, quite honestly, it is the best
RE to date. It is also the second all new
Resident Evil game for the GameCube (
Resident Evil 0 being the first brand new
RE game for the GC).
RE4 brings back Leon Kennedy, one of the two main characters in
Resident Evil 2 (the other main character from
RE2, Claire Redfield, already had her own game with the Dreamcast classic turned PlayStation 2 and GameCube port
Resident Evil -- Code Veronica (DC)/
Resident Evil -- Code Veronica X (PS2/GC))-- who is no longer a police officer after surviving the events in
RE2, but is now in a special branch of the United States Secret Service, assigned to protect the new president elect's daughter.
Unfortunately for him, and for her, she was kidnapped before he was given his assignment, and now he is looking for her. Weeks after her disappearance, reliable intel placed her in a remote town in Spain, so Leon is now trekking through the rural area in search of her. This is where
RE4 begins.
RE4 differs from the past
RE games in that the most common foe you will face is not a zombie, but instead what appear to be living, breathing, if not crazed and super strong villagers. It's a game that takes the basic "supremely rural and backwater" setting from the movie
Deliverance, and steps it up a few dozen bloody notches. Seriously.
This is horror, folks. Zombies are good for shock value, and some minor scares. But this, well,
Resident Evil 4 is true horror. Zombies shock you, but move slow, and don’t say much beyond moaning or the word "brains." These psychotic villagers? They move at varying speeds, sometimes they walk slowly but menacingly towards you, other times they run right up on you. If they see you aiming at them, they will dodge you if they can. They’ll call out for reinforcements if they can, and scream at you while they close in for the kill. They’ll throw axes and sickles and knives at you. And some of them, well, some of them will take your head right off with a chain saw in one fell swoop if they get too close to you. And, to top it off, many of the villagers can shrug off direct gunshots to their heads, with little more than staggering or maybe falling to the ground to just get right back up-- and this is just early on, wait until you see the enemies after just a few hours of playing.
And the setting adds to the horror. No longer confined to a large mansion or a police station for most of the game, Leon wanders the rural Spanish countryside in search of Ashley. While you explore, you’ll notice that the entire environment just seems off-putting, and that helps to add to the feeling of dread. Trees have few leaves in the immediate area, if any. Water is stagnant and filled with insect larvae in troths in the area. Food in people’s houses and shacks are sitting in pots, rotting where it sits. Some areas have dead bodies just piled up in carts, or hanging over a burning pyre, or in one gruesome scene early on (first 10-15 minutes if you play through at a
slow pace) a woman’s body hangs on the interior wall of a small shack-- suspended by a pitchfork rammed through her face. It’s not a pretty sight, folks, and definitely not for the squeamish.
And let me tell you, all of this is done beautifully. Abso-freaking-lutely gorgeous graphics are throughout
RE4. These are some of the best graphics I have EVER seen, bar none. All games should look this good. From the in-game engine cinemas (alas not done in real time-- when they show Leon, his weapon is his basic pistol, no matter what you have equipped, but they do change if you buy a tactical vest later on-- but they look great none the less), to the bark on the trees (yes, you can see the details in the bark), to the fire of torches and other sources, this game shows what the GameCube is capable of in terms of graphics. I’m serious here, folks;
RE4 is simply beautiful.
The only thing that could be said to take away from the graphics of
RE4 is the fact that except for bosses or certain specific enemies, all defeated enemies dissolve from view after they are dead. This is probably done to maintain the great graphics and rock steady frame rate (I've seen exactly one instance when the frame rate dipped at all, and that was with a lot of enemies and some explosions going off right in my face) without taxing the GC's RAM and CPU having to remember where the bodies of fallen foes are. There is also some clipping here and there of enemies through doors every now and then, but nothing too major, normally. Also, oddly,
Resident Evil 4 does not support progressive scan (480p) mode for HDTVs.
Adding to the style of
RE4 is the presentation of it. The screen is letter boxed for a 16:9 format that you view the game through, although it isn’t anamorphic 16:9; so people on 16:9 TVs will actually see the game in the same stretched mode they see other non-anamorphic 4:3 games. In this regard, it would have been nice if Capcom had offered an option for 16:9 TVs, like how Nintendo and Silicon Knights'
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (
GAF Review) did.
Still, this cinematic presentation really lets you get into the game. You have a slightly better peripheral view, mostly to the right of your screen, which helps to see things out of the corner of your eye. It also gives a real movie-like quality to
Resident Evil 4. Add this in with the astounding graphics, and you have one slick visual presentation.
And Capcom didn't skimp out for our aural pleasure, either. While
RE4 continues the series' tradition of cheesy B-Movie-esque voice acting, the voice acting is done well. The music is fitting, and creepy as well-- especially when you are being attacked by enemies. Ambient sounds also permeate the landscape of
RE4, from birds chirping and crows cawing, to the water flowing in certain areas, to the cows and chickens mooing and clucking respectively, to the sound of the torches’ fire crackles, to the rain and thunder and lightning that happen now and then, the ambient sound is simply superb. Weapons fire also sounds very good, as do death knells from you or your enemies.
It's honestly hard to decide which part of the presentation is better; the graphics or the sound? To be honest, both are superb, and they compliment each other well. The amount of effort and love of game design that went into
Resident Evil 4 is apparent, and the appreciation of the designers at Capcom is not lost on me.
It’s hard, though, to really describe the greatness of
RE4 without spoiling it for people who haven't yet played it. There are other characters from older
RE games that show up, the whole reason the villagers are like they are, why the president elect’s daughter was kidnapped, and other things that if told to you would completely ruin the game experience for you.
The gameplay, however, is pure
Resident Evil, with some new twists.
The movement is actually old school
RE, but thanks to the camera angle, this becomes a moot point. Since Leon is with his back to the camera, up is always forward, and you turn left or right and move backwards as well. Pushing down and B give you the quick 180 degree turn around as well. There is no strafe move, however, which would have helped in certain situations where you wanted to come around a corner ready to fire.
Each weapon (except the knife) is equipped with a laser sight. It is by this sight that you know when to fire. But, in a touch of semi-realism, Leon’s hand isn’t steady while he aims. Therefore, he moves slightly while aiming, so you need to learn to time you shots. Basically, you need to look for your laser sight to be hitting your opponent or the object to shoot in order to know when to fire. Nicely, though, is that your laser sight only shows its dot indicator on objects that can actually be fired upon.
Leon not only has his trusty firearms to work with, but also a few hand to hand brawling moves that can be performed as well. For example, if you shoot an enemy in the head, and they stagger but are still close to you, the A button indicator will pop up saying “KICK.” Hitting the A button then will make Leon do a roundhouse kick to that enemy, and it knocks the enemy back. What’s nice about this kick is that if other enemies are too close, they’ll be hit by the kick as well, and the flying bodies also hit other enemies further away if they fly into them-- and yes, this kick (or being hit by a body kicked) does cause damage to enemies, and can kill them if they are wounded enough. Shoot an enemy in the knee or lower leg, and they go down on their knee, and Leon can either kick them or perform a suplex on them to try and smash their head on the ground.
In fact, the A button is your main action button at all times. Holding R allows you to aim your gun, and hitting A fires. Picking up items is done with the A button. Interacting with the environment is done with the A button. Etc. The A button is basically context sensitive to what it will do. And in this sense, the game gives you an on-screen indicator for what the A button will do.
It seems like an oversimplification of the controls to some, but this context sensitivity for what the button does is simply wonderful. There’s no memorization of controls to worry about... you just hit A to do what you want to do.
Leon can also pull out his knife at any time by you hitting the L button. This is useful for breaking open certain crates or barrels, as well as slashing foes when you are low on ammo.
New to the series is the ability to have pick ups dropped from enemies when they die. If an enemy dies, and you see a little cone-of-light marker where their body was, then they dropped an item for you. Red markers mean ammo, white-blue markers indicate money or treasure, and green markers indicate healing items such as green herbs. These items do disappear after a short time, though. Items found outside of combat (like from barrels) will always have a white marker over them, no matter what they are, and they don’t disappear. And, of course, the ever present shiny objects in the background staple for the
RE series is here as well, so keep an eye out for gems or other things in walls and ceilings and such.
Also new to the series is the ability to buy items, sell items, and upgrade your weapons. Every now and then you will find a merchant just calmly standing in an area, and he can be used for different things. He will buy treasure items off of you, like jewels and statues, as well as unused weapons like grenades; and he will sell you new weapons and upgrade your current ones as well (and buy your old weapon off you so you can make room for the new weapons in your inventory). One thing to note is that even though certain treasures are worth a good deal by themselves, some of them can be combined with other treasure items for even more money from them.
An example is a "beerstein" you can find fairly early on in the game that has three slots for gems, when you find the three gems that go into the beerstien, and combine them all together, you can get a much better price for the item. In this example, the beerstien is worth 3,000 PTAS (the money in
RE4) by itself, and each jewel is worth 3,000 PTAS by itself; combine them all together in your inventory screen, and their combined value jumps from 12,000 PTAS individually, to 20,000 PTAS as the completed beerstien. Use the examine feature of your inventory screen to see what items can be combined with others.
Oh, and treasures don't take up any room in your inventory that you have to worry about, so collecting them is easy. The same goes for keys, they also don't take up any room in your inventory that you have to worry about.
There’s even a mini-game you can play in certain areas that allows you to collect "bottle caps" of figures in the game. These bottle caps look like little toy figurines set on plastic soda bottle caps with holes in the top of the caps. These holes are mini-speakers, though, and you can listen to them and hear them sound like they are making the noise from a tiny tinny speaker.
Also new is the ability to increase your maximum health. By mixing a yellow herb with a green herb (or yellow, red, and green) you can use the new mixture to increase Leon's or Ashley's max health. Trust me when I say this is more important that you can ever imagine.
The biggest change, though? Cinematic scenes aren’t just for watching anymore, boys and girls. Nope. In
RE4 they're just as interactive as the normal game. You may have to dodge in a cinematic scene. And if you fail to do so? Well, you die. But you have to watch the screen as well to know which two buttons to hit and when. The buttons are either going to be L and R at the same time, or A and B at the same time. But, they change around to keep you on your toes. So if you die because you didn’t press A and B at the same time and go through it again, it might be A and B again, or it might be L and R you have to press.
Word of warning:
Never take your hands off the controller unless you have paused the action in
RE4, or else you may just die, even in a cinematic scene.
And, of course, there are bonus missions to do after you complete the game.
Thankfully, there are some improvements to what happens when you die as well. There are now "continue points" to work from. Normally these are positioned after you enter a new area, or have just watched a cinematic scene; so if you die, you aren’t starting over from your last save (unless that was sooner than the last continue point). Also, save typewriters are very liberally placed, and you do not need ink ribbons to use them.
These help because there are some damn hard boss fights to go through. Thankfully, there seems to be save typewriters very close to bosses. Use them.
Also, in a nice touch, the game is fairly long for an action game. Your first time through should take about 25-30 hours, not including how many times you die, Ashley dies in the chapters you have to protect her, or she gets carried off by villagers or cultists. My first time through was an ending time of 29 hours, 6 minutes, and 2 seconds.
Oh, and for those wondering if there's a lot to kill in the game... don't worry. I ended up killing 1,002 enemies on my first time through. Yes, one-thousand-two. It may seem like
RE4 is generous with ammo, but you try killing 1,000 enemies and tell me how much ammo you have left at the end. There were many times I ran around with no ammo for my shotgun (my most often used weapon), and had to deal with just my 9mm handgun. Not easy, especially considering how many hits enemies take with the handgun to stay down.
Resident Evil 4 is quite possibly the best GameCube game to date, and is definitely the best
Resident Evil to date. I'd say that
Resident Evil 4 alone is worth owning a GameCube for if you don’t already have one. It’s that good, folks. It is "teh r0xx0r." It rules. And it consumes me so much, that I did a 12+ hour playing spree on it in one night. And fans of
Resident Evil will probably do the same.
