5 Games in 2005 #2: Resident Evil 4

Thursday, February 9, 2006 » gaming list thought

Hopefully 2005 will be remembered as the year the game industry took a good look at itself and decided to start innovating. OK, that's pretty optimistic. At the very least, it'll be remembered as the year when creative stagnation and sequelmania reached an uncomfortable high. Still, innovation was a popular goal for developers last year, and the large number of creative titles that popped up was at least a sign of everyone beginning to get on the right track. One of the most exemplary of those is Resident Evil 4.

Every developer boasts about how their new game is going to "redefine the genre," but few games actually do. In fact, fans of the the earlier games' horror aspect may feel like RE4 is a little too revolutionary. There are no zombies this time around, and the game isn't really scary at all. It's sort of in the vein of old NES sequels like Super Mario Bros. 21 and The Adventure of Link: It takes the very basic gameplay and thematic elements and builds on top of them in a new direction. And the result is an incredibly fun product that manages to find a balance between addictive gameplay and dramatic presentation.

On the gameplay side, RE4 is hard to put down because the action is pretty much non-stop. In previous Resident Evil games players were encouraged to conserve ammo or even avoid encounters altogether. RE4 hands out enough bullets to let the player take on every not-zombie along the way, but still limits the supply enough to ensure some strategy goes into each engagement. Plus the new Metal Gear Solid-like laser targeting system that replaces the clumsy aiming controls of the older games is easy to get into and a lot of fun. There's also hardly any backtracking through old areas and puzzles are kept pretty minimal, which is great because it means less downtime between one shooting sequence and the next.

Aside from the ridiculous premise (A lone agent sent to rescue the president's daughter?) and the often corny dialogue voice acting, RE4 handles its story very well. I was actually pretty curious about what was up with all the not-zombie villagers, and larger plot unraveled at a good rate. Then there's the matter of the cutscenes. Ever since Super Mario RPG, I've always liked the idea of throwing in some timed button presses to keep things interesting. So naturally I love that there are now "quicktime events" during the (already amazing) cutscenes. These, the display letterboxing and all the contextual actions that pop up during game really do give Resident Evil 4 a strong cinematic feel. If Capcom could just work a little harder at writing a five-star plot and hiring some less hammy voice actors, they could give Hideo Kojima a run for his money.

1 Yes, I know.