Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways ★★★☆☆

Assignment: Ada is a funny thing to exist to Separate Ways of which it is sort of a prototype version of: A mini-campaign staring Ada that ramps up the pressure and difficulty to deliver a very condensed version of Resident Evil 4. It does have a few things going for it: Short and sweet and with Ada dressed in something less silly than her normal dress, I also like how rather than your inventory expanding as it progresses the samples you collect take up space that could be used for healing items and grenades, forcing you to rely less and less on them as get out of jail free cards and feels in some way like a welcome callback to the earlier games. The final boss being Krauser who appears out of nowhere running towards you in a short cutscene because they didn’t want to record new voice lines for this is also very funny and jarring and reminds me more than anything of watching my friend Ruby play through the main campaign with a randomiser and having Krauser repeatedly show up to replace various minibosses, including a dozen of him showing up in the garrador cage match room, though I did struggle with how much damage he takes to put down without having an upgraded revolver to blast him away with.

Separate Ways itself is a fun little condensed version of the game, but its attempts to tie itself into the main story are comical more than anything else. Having to do puzzles in reverse and place the items that Leon will later find is cute, but also calls attention into all the other ways in which Ada running through these areas and clearing them out immediately before Leon comes along to do so again. Sure, there was another gigante there that Ada killed before Leon arrived to fight one in the same place. Even worse is the areas where you can see or hear Leon in the next room fighting off hordes of ganados, while Leon and by extension the player were completely obvious to Ada doing the same thing. Her grenades apparently explode at a frequency that Kennedys cannot hear. Being a side story in a series that doesn’t tend to treat it female characters very well also means that beating the final boss of course results in getting captured anyway and your final moment is running to grab a rocket launcher to throw to Leon.

I appreciate there being a couple of new areas but the level design relies on Ada’s contextual-sensitive hookshot points for navigation that are not very clearly signposted. The battleship area in particular is a nightmare of being unclear where to go while being absolutely bombarded with bullets and bombs that make stopping to take in your surroundings quite difficult.