Resident Evil 4 review

You can just imagine Shinji Mikami sitting alone at home, staring into the screen as the latest Resident Evil title goes through the familiar motions. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the man; his franchise has become stale through the fault of others. And now the creator is tired of his creation.

Nothing shows this more clearly than Resident Evil 4’s opening – and only – FMV sequence. We’re treated to various shots taken from the past three Resident Evil titles as Leon S. Kennedy solemnly narrates the events that have taken place over the last six years.

The Umbrella Corporation, responsible for the creation of the T-Virus and many of the monstrosities that were unleashed into Raccoon city, is suddenly deemed unfit to continue business by the President of the United States. Soon stockpiles are falling and Umbrella is forced to cease further experimentations and close its doors.

No Umbrella

And that’s basically that. The slate is clean and the series can move into brand new territory, which is exactly what it does when the game begins proper. Cheery Spanish dance music drifts over the soundtrack and soon we’re staring into the beautifully realised face of Leon as he sits in the back of a police jeep on its way to a small rural village in Europe.

Leon is now working for a government agency and has been tasked with locating and rescuing the President's kidnapped daughter Ashley. She was abducted on her way to school and nobody has any answers as to why. All they know is that an individual fitting her description has been sighted at certain areas around this village and Leon is deemed fit to spearhead the rescue operation.

Dropped near a ropey wooden bridge by the police jeep your first assignment is to establish contact with the residents and make your way into the inner village. What you’ll no doubt have discovered already is that these villagers don’t seem keen to establish any contact with Leon other than the sharp end of their weapons piercing his flesh.

It’s amazing to note that within a good thirty seconds or so of the game starting you’re already staring into the face of an axe-wielding local as he comes at you. Mikami wastes no time getting the blood pumping with this quick opening section but it also serves to highlight just how brilliant the new controls are this time.

The analogue stick moves Leon as any third-person action title would. There’s none of that original D-Pad nonsense this time with you pressing up and watching as your character turns left. This time things are much more streamlined.

Holding the R button will raise Leon’s weapon and tapping the A button will fire it. With his weapon raised Leon adopts a prone stance and you can aim your laser pointer with the analogue stick. The L shoulder button quickly changes his gun to a knife where Leon can slash away at certain items or villagers if his ammo runs short. The Y kidney button allows you to enter and exit the inventory and Z is the map.

It takes no time at all to acclimatise to this new control scheme and before you know it you’ll be kneecapping villagers and shooting their heads until they explode within minutes.

No zombies

And despite your aspersions about the series moving away from having zombies as part of its key enemies it really is the villagers who stand out the most in Resident Evil 4. Sometimes it’s hard not to imagine how the game would be if it had zombies possessing the intelligence these hostile locals have, but at the same time the fact that they’re unlike anything else in the series gives them much more depth.

They are without a shadow of a doubt a bloody smart bunch too. In one very memorable sequence I barricaded myself in a small house by pushed a chest of drawers in front of the only door leading into the place. But as a chainsaw wielding psycho with a potato bag on his head started chopping away at the door the windows suddenly smashed and I had the other villagers pouring into the room from two sides.

Not just content with that, I ran up some ladders and kicked them onto the floor once I got to the roof and watched as a pair grabbed them and put them right back into place. As this was happening the man with the chainsaw had gotten into this new house and walked upstairs, jumped out the window onto the roof where I was standing and attempted to flank me.

It’s moments such as this that describe the fear in Resident Evil 4 in all its purity. Past titles have preyed on the use of slow builds and sudden scares. Resident Evil is content with hundreds of panic-inducing moments such as this. Sure, the architecture of the locations you visit (seeing as the game isn’t just confined to a village) also do well to invoke a sense of dread but nothing beats the sheer panic as you unload clip after clip into a party of a dozen or so crazy locals.

It’s the term panic that best suits Resident Evil 4. As well as stacking the odds against you at all times you must also contend with the Quick Time Events littered copiously throughout the game. Fans of Shenmue will understand their inclusion here but to the uninitiated there are moments when you have to start bashing the buttons like crazy, or press the right button combination at a key moment.

One of the absolute standout moments comes much later in the game as Leon confronts an old friend turned enemy. It’s the first of two boss encounters with this character but this first situation is relegated to cut scenes only. You watch as Leon engages in a vicious knife fight with the guy and have to tap the correct button configurations at certain moments in order for Leon to block attacks and further the scene.

It’s one of the tensest moments in the game seeing as one false move will see Leon meeting the sharp end of the shiny pig sticker.

There are other moments too of course. In one particularly memorable sequence three villagers push a large boulder down a long path, forcing Leon to do his best Indiana Jones impression. You tap away at the A button as if it’s going out of fashion only for the game to suddenly call out a button configuration at the last second. Miss it and Leon ends up looking like the kind of rug that wouldn’t go amiss in Leatherface’s crib.

No Raccoon City

Part of Resident Evil 4’s charm comes in recognising the various sources that have inspired Mikami throughout the development cycle. The initial stages of the game owe much to Tobe Hooper’s horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with the run-down houses and crazed psychotic villagers. There’s obviously the chainsaw wielding git with the potato sack on his head too. But something tells me Mikami was channelling equal parts Leatherface and Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th Part Two.

Other sources include Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and a couple of ideas from his original script for Day of the Dead, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, The Blair Witch Project and Amando de Ossorio’s gem of a horror movie Tombs of the Blind Dead.

You’re not expected to know most of this however, but there’s no denying how impressed I was to find how much research had gone into the themes of the game. It’s a wonder how influenced the game was when it originally started production seeing as the final Resident Evil 4 is actually the fourth version of the game. What some people may have forgotten is that Devil May Cry was originally born out of Resident Evil 4 when Mikami saw how different the game was becoming.

Speaking of which there are plenty of ideas in Resident Evil 4 that clearly existed in Devil May Cry too, so it’s actually fun to see how much Mikami and the team have retained from the beginning.

No competition

Since the games release in Europe I’ve visited a number of forums all over the net in an effort to accrue the consensus of die-hard Resident Evil followers. What has been disheartening is the amount of posts concerning the Resident Evil that was and the Resident Evil that now is. Many expected closure in this game as well as a fresh start and to some extent that is exactly what you get.

It’s easy to see that Shinji Mikami wanted to create a new vision for the franchise but that isn’t an easy task given the following he’s accumulated since 1996. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one in the same thing, and it’s this design ethic Mikami has tried to maintain. Sure, he’s gone and thrown away the things that people now expect in a Resident Evil title but that fact doesn’t necessarily mean these are things that should be in a Resident Evil title.

Keeping the franchise scary without sacrificing using the same techniques is something the series has lost sight of, and Shinji Mikami is a man who likes to scare people. So it’s no wonder he’s made Resident Evil a virtually brand new experience.

However, in my opinion the puritans should look past the fact that he’s given the middle finger to the past games and commend him for not only having the balls to do something as radical as this, but for making a title that is scary in absolutely new and unique ways. And it isn’t just scary, it’s also action-packed, fun to play, beautiful to look at and huge – spanning twenty hours over the course of two discs.

In paving the way to venture into un-chartered territory Shinji Mikami has done the very same thing he did with the release of Resident Evil nine years ago – he’s taken an established formula and turned it on its head. And in doing so he’s not only created the best survival horror title yet: he’s also crafted one of the greatest gaming experiences on any platform.