Resident Evil 4 (HD Project) ★★★★★
It’s amusing how Resident Evil 4 starts with a recap of the previous games when absolutely nothing that follows has anything to do with those plots at all other than the name Umbrella getting occasionally thrown around towards the end. The plot actually makes far less sense if you have played the previous games in the series (and, like me, not played any of the sequels). Why is Wesker not dead, why is Leon not reacting at all to Ada not being dead, and who the fuck is Krauser? If you’re coming in without prior knowledge you can assume these characters and their dynamics with Leon are well-established and not bafflingly out of place.
Coming straight from Resident Evil 2 had another problem: Run being on ⨉ and fire being on ◻ kept messing with my muscle memory and for a while when enemies were about to grab me my instinct reaction was to aim and slam the reload button, locking me in place while they were free to get me. Other than that the gameplay, while an obvious departure from the previous games, does, I think, have more commonality than is immediately obvious and that did not necessarily carry over to the general, still-ubiquitous third person action game formula that Resident Evil 4 established. There is still the tension of resource management and balancing supplies of ammunition and healing against current threats, picking off enemies with precise targetting and knife attacks and managing crowds with careful staggering and mêlée attacks, or just blowing crowds away with grenades and and shotgun blasts. It’s a more fluid and dynamic ebb and flow of tension, the game trying to keep you hungry but not starved with its random drops and dynamic difficulty, but trying to figure out how to handle the relentless pressure of hordes of ganados is not a completely alien calculus compared to trying to clear a hallway of zombies by baiting as many as possible close at once and them aiming up with a shotgun blast to try and decapitate as many as possible at once. And while the fixed camera is (mostly) gone the tight field of view still creates large blind spots that need to be accounted for and manage. It’s quite easy for enemies to sneak up on you if you’re not listening out for them. Keys no longer take up inventory space and don’t contribute to inventory management concerns, but keys and puzzles still play an important part in pacing and allowing movements of rest between big fights.
Even tonally the game isn’t as much as a departure as is often stated. As silly as Resident Evil 4 is the first game had mutant sharks, plenty of cheesy lines and a boulder to dodge right out of India Jones and the series had already been trending towards interminable conspiracy nonsense and too much character lore references. Early rereleases of Resident Evil 2 included teasers for Residents Evil 3, 0, and Code: Veronica and was already including intra-Umbrella espionage and double-crossings. Resident Evil 4 just has absolutely no grace about any of it.
Obviously it is still a very different game to its predecessors, but I think the ways in which it is inkeeping with them is what make it stand out from the action games that came in its wake and what makes it so enduring and the HD Project mod does an unbelievable job of giving a fresh lick of paint to the game while being true to the original game. The modders went so far as to track down the original sources of texture references in the game and take new photographs of them in order to recreate the original assets in a higher resolution. The bundled tweaks mod also fixes a lot of bugs and allows a few adjustments to me made for the game, including restoring the fixed camera perspective in the section of the game where Ashley is playable, something that was removed from every version after the original Japanese Gamecube release. It’s a cute little throwback but having just played Resident Evil 2 the controls here definitely don’t feel as good or work as well as the original games. I can see why they changed it in subsequent versions, but without the callback that section feels a bit more pointless.
The only other major tweak I applied was disabling quick time events purely to get past the Krauser cutscene knife fight, which is a pain in the ass and I re-enabled them afterwards. I do actually quite like the reactive
