Resident Evil 4 (2023)

One thing I hate in games is having to protect/escort an NPC, which is why the castle part of the game is such a downer for me with having cramped spaces where Ashley can be easily carried off, swarmed by stage B plaga or killed by my own damage.

Update: Once I got used to her it wasn't too bad, just got to be more tactical about my approach to combat.

Played the demo 5 times today. Unlike Resident Evil Village, Remake understands what made RE4 such a special game in terms of combat. All of the moment to moment combat decisions are in tact and the main enemies play into them rather than Village's Lycans' RNG. Even for a fan like me who knows the game very well, the remake still hits you with some surprises. (The tower you can climb up crubling down once you reach the top was a welcome one.)

So far, the only mechanic I know that is not in the remake is how doors work. In the original, if you pressed the interact button twice when opening a door, Leon would kick the door like an action hero. The benefit of doing such makes it so that opening doors is faster and can also stager enemies hit by the door. Doors were also destructible so using explosives or shooting the shotgun through the door provided risks. You could shoot holes through doors to give yourself an advamtage of seeing through doors. Remake doesn't have destructible doors so the strategy behind them is gone. Shooting doors i the remake does nothing to them. Funny how these dinky wooden doors can withstand shotgun blasts.

Yay, another action horror game that I never got around to playing has got a remake, after the dead space remake I'm actually starting to look forward to these types of games and it's not that long until it releases either.

Also gives me something to actually play on my ps5 because right now there is nothing I want to play.

Ok. If that was the way to introduce a Ganados, then I didn't like how it was handled with the first one being one with a parasite. I didn't like the build up here as already, you know things are not right. I liked how in the original, when Leon met the first Ganados, he mistook it for a human. Nothing was really off yet until after that encounter.

Dr. Salvador is really interesting to see here in the "remake". Already, he's more interactible with the environment and it could lead to some interesting group kills for Ganados under cut down environments. I really like it. Makes for the player to try to be familiar with the world around them.

I'm waiting until we see the limb damage system as that was what made Resident Evil 4 one of the very pinnacles of game design. Shoot a guy's hand, their weapon falls off, shoot their leg a few times, they trip over or kneel. Although Village had it with only ghouls, stuns outside of them were solely based on RNG. I've yet to review Village for what it does wrong as a spiritual successor to RE4

I'm still definitely going to play it out of curiosity as the original is one of my very favorite games of all time.

One more thing: THE REMAKE KILLED THE DOG! YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, CAPCOM!