Resident Evil 4 (2005)

RE4 appears to be a fine game, perhaps even a great game. It certainly did a lot of work to revolutionize how third-person shooters are designed and played, even today. So, I don’t dislike the game because it’s a bad game; I dislike it because it’s a terrible Resident Evil.

https://unwinnable.com/2025/12/04/hear-me-out-on-the-pitfalls-of-resident-evil-4/

No offense to the author, but I hate this argument. It concedes to the cynical notion of video games as mere commodities: games within a series have an essence, that fans broadly agree on, and new entries exist to satisfy demand for that essence. First of all, you’re not going to get most people to agree on what the kernel of a given series is. And secondly, even if you could, why is it the responsibility of developers to satisfy these expectations? In many cases subverting expectations could be very interesting. Looking at games like this - as product instead of art - it is the thinking of a Capcom exec, not of a critic.

Did capitalist pressures result in Resident Evil prioritising action over survival horror? Sure, but that’s an entirely different argument.

This game still holds up. It's still the gold standard for 3rd person shooters as far as I'm concerned. I love the combat, the location damage, the enemy interactions, and the adaptive difficulty. This game raised the standard for everything that came after it.

My biggest complaints about the game overall is that I wish the map system was better. You can only see the current area and you can't even change what elevation you are looking at. Also, QTEs are mad annoying and I blame RE4 and GOW1 for making them prominent for such a long time. Finally, there were a few occasions where the camera felt limiting.

Playing this on PC reaffirmed my love for the Wii version, I just love the controls. The steam version is filled with performance issues and glitches. None of them made the game unplayable, but they were really annoying to deal with. Occasional frame drops, crashes, and the game not allowing you to save after beating Separate Ways for NG+ are the most prominent annoyances I dealt with. Overall, still a good time.

What I want our of Resident Evil 4 "Remake"

• find a way to have the combat scenarios designed around the modernized controls. RE4's tank controls worked as they made the player's tactics rely on positioning and aiming at certain body parts for different outcomes. If Leon moved while aiming (which the remake will most definitely do), you lose a bit of that tactical edge.

• Focus hard on the action gameplay. I'm talking arenas of combat encounters, varied level design and enemy placements. Village felt like enemies were plopped rather than crafted so I hope to see improvements there. Resident Evil was always a series that has been exploring ideas from camera perspective to action/horror to make each entry stand out. And the diversion is what made RE4 stand out. So please retain that aspect of the direction.

• Please. No chasers. This is an action game at heart. Not so much a horror game. Just scary-themed. I don't trust Capcom after what they did to Nemesis in RE3 "Remake".

• Get rid of the QTE's. I'm fine with them in RE4, I do not see them as a core aspect of RE4's gameplay.

• Expand on the knife. The knife in the original Resident Evil 4 was such a high risk, high reward factor, so how about we push that even further? Resident Evil 4 was designed around the positioning of the player and the enemies so what if we made Leon throw his knife? Don't give the knife a crosshair which is the risk and the reward is the lethality of the knife. The closest thing I could compare my idea to is Call of Duty. CoD snipers have had either large crosshairs or none when not aiming down sights. Shooting without aiming heavily decreases accuracy, but it takes much less time than aiming and shooting. That was the risk vs reward of Call of Duty snipers. When not having the knife, you can do melee with punches or kicks, but they deal less damage, are not AOE, and can't do stuff like the context sensitive moves such as suplexing or roundhouse kicking. Another layer to add would be retrieving the knife; I'm imagining intense combat situations where Leon throws a knife at an enemy in the crowd, but now since you have lost that knife temporarily, you could risk going through to get it back since you want the knife to conserve ammo or for more deadly tactics or dwiddle down enemies until it is safe. And do not use move assist for melee attacks.