Resident Evil 4 doesn’t stack up with the PC’s best, but at least the budget price makes it worth checking out.
In a nutshell, Resident Evil 4 is a slow-paced third person action game that features extremely close encounters with small groups of enemies and a lot of exploration. It also shows off some minor RPG elements like money, inventory and upgradeable weapons. In addition, it has an occasional (and highly forgettable) Dragon’s Lair style interactive cutscene that requires mashing certain buttons in accordance with instructions on the screen. Most of the game is solid and blends together nicely, as long as you are willing to accept one major issue: sluggish controls. Resident Evil 4 was designed around a gamepad, so much that it would probably be impossible to enjoy it with a mouse and keyboard (this may explain why CapCom included no mouse support in this version).
Here is how the control works. You move your character with the left stick and adjust the camera with the right stick. With one of the shoulder buttons or triggers, you go into aiming mode, and then use the left stick to place the laser sight for your gun onto an enemy. While you are in aiming mode, you cannot move. Aiming is slow and clumsy, because the analog control makes it very difficult to line up a quick bulls eye. It’s especially hard if you aren’t used to aiming this way. Enemies usually crash through doors, spawn, or round corners very close to you, so that you have to aim and take down three or four of them at close range while they slowly lumber toward you. Since you can’t walk backwards while you shoot, all of these encounters are tense and challenging. You also can’t strafe in the game, and that makes it hard to round dangerous corners. Despite these issues, the game’s core mechanics can be fun, as long as you accept that the intensity is somewhat manufactured, thanks to the control scheme. The controls are not terrible, but they seem contrived to make it hard to shoot the game’s slow enemies harder to kill. If you could move while shooting or line up head shots with the mouse all day, the game would probably be too easy.
The shooting mechanics are enjoyable, but flawed. Ultimately, this problem is what keeps Resident Evil 4 from becoming a great game. Once you have experienced the cat-and-mouse hunts of F.E.A.R., the visceral brain bashing fests of Condemned: Criminal Origins, or the tactical shootouts of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, it’s hard to be impressed by the gameplay that is offered here. Not all of the game, however, is spent blasting away at enemies. Resident Evil 4 also has RPG-style exploration, inventory, and trading. You can find a lot of what you need by exploring the nooks and crannies in the game, breaking open barrels, or solving simple puzzles. An informative map screen shows you where you are in the world at all times and where you need to go next. It’s a nice feature that more action games should have. Meanwhile, a seedy merchant meets you at certain points in your quest to sell you new weapons and upgrades. Your Diablo-style inventory forces you to make trade-offs when deciding what weapons to carry. You might want to buy that shiny new rifle, but you might have to drop your shotgun to do it, and since ammo is relatively scarce, you have to carefully consider what weapons you are going to use. These elements are all very well done, and they add some cerebral material to the game that most action games don’t have.
Another aspect of Resident Evil 4 that is unique is its setting. The game is set in a dank, dirty, rundown Western European wilderness around late October or November. The leaves have fallen from the trees and everything in the area looks brown and dead. This new take on horror style adds an atmosphere of foreboding in a refreshing way, since most other horror games simply consist of darkness and tight corridors. Enemies are also nicely animated. They shamble towards you slowly, use their weapons convincingly, and, best of all, recoil, stumble, and cry in pain when you score a shot on them. Occasionally, you can pop an enemy’s head with a well-placed shot and it erupts in a George-Romero like explosion of blood while the headless body takes a lifeless step towards you and falls. This style makes the visuals tolerable, because otherwise, the game is ugly and outdated. The PC version of this game is largely indistinguishable from the PS2 version. Polygon counts on buildings and enemies are low, while textures and skins are crude and simplistic. Many of the game’s cut scenes have been pre-rendered in the game’s engine, which makes them look grainy and abysmal. There are some nice aspects to the presentation, but it’s still not an attractive game.
The audio is slightly more impressive than the graphics, but it is still unremarkable. The voice acting and writing are generally pretty good, especially for the main character. Sound effects like weapons fire and footsteps sound competent but not excellent, and enemies holler angry taunts at you in Spanish as they attack you. Overall, the audio is good, but it fails to provide any memorable noises or create a creepy atmosphere.
If Resident Evil 4 has one other major flaw, it’s that the game simply isn’t very scary or suspenseful. Whether it is actually trying to be scary isn’t clear. It feels more like a B movie action/horror flick than something that legitimately tries to keep you awake at night. The character that you play looks like a boy band graduate and that sets the stage for a story that is hard to take seriously. The best horror games convey feelings of dread and isolation. They make you fear the unknown and they show the dark side of not just the supernatural, but humanity as well. Resident Evil 4 wholeheartedly fails in this respect. It is a good, but unscary (and overrated) zombie and monster-blasting gore fest. If you are on the fence about buying this game, then there is one factor that may affect your decision – the budget price. It’s hard to go wrong with an action game that costs only $20 and features 15 hours of solid gameplay. The time spent in the game is very well-paced, and the level design is very good. Resident Evil 4 has a few big flaws, but it is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. Even if you don’t like the idea of aiming with an analog stick or you need cutting edge graphics to enjoy the game, you can’t find another game like this on the PC, and you’re not risking much money to buy it. Good scary games are rare gems. In the past couple of years, the PC has seen a handful of horror titles that decisively trump Resident Evil 4 when it comes to graphics, atmosphere, controls, and suspense. If you are looking for a good scary game, you should play those first. After reading about how amazing this game was on the Gamecube and PS2, it’s easy to be disappointed by how above average it is. However, Resident Evil 4 is still worth playing, thanks to its budget price and enjoyable exploration and shooting elements. If you are looking for a good, tense action game or just something different on the PC, then it is a game worth checking out.