Rich Stanton says it’s not as good as the original.
That might seem entitled. But Resident Evil 4 was always a slightly crazy game. Where the first game’s mansion was coherent and semi-believable as a setting, Resident Evil 4 takes place in an unspecified European wonderland of bizarre contraptions, shooting galleries, medieval castles, and an endless menagerie of grotesque and toothy experiments. And a lot of it just hasn’t made the cut. One iconic sequence in particular—I’ll not say which as we’ve been asked to avoid revealing certain specific changes—has here been replaced with an utterly anodyne and short section that simply isn’t fit to lace the original’s boots.
This element of the remake begins to encroach more and more as the game hits its second half stride, and I can only describe it as timidity. Where the original felt like it was constantly over-reaching, always surprising the player with new demands, new environments, and wild one-off challenges, this seems content to settle into more of a standard corridor shooter rhythm. The combat is so good that even when the game’s unambitious it is borne aloft on a cloud of shotgun shells, but the further you poke into that soft underbelly the more standard it begins to seem.
Memories are obviously hazy things, but the castle always seemed to me a gigantic playground, filled with back-and-forth warrens and secrets to be uncovered. Here it feels like something designed by Naughty Dog, opulent and gorgeous and fun to walk through, but always with a very obvious big finger pointing out where to go next. I’m not saying the original game was some expansive freeform epic, because it wasn’t. It was every bit as linear as this. But it felt a lot bigger, and kept out-doing itself until the very end in a way that this just doesn’t.