It's crazy how they were able to make the best Resident Evil game EVEN BETTER. A game so great that the only thing that can rival it is its own. Once a masterpiece always a masterpiece. Thank you Capcom looking forward to Code Veronica remake.

RE4’s unique combat hook of gunshot to stagger enemy > powerful melee attack is technically present, but is scuffed, if not broken. The roundhouse kick isn’t dependable because head shots don’t consistently stagger enemies, or even make them react. Even with an upgraded Red9 I would sometimes land three head shots on regular enemies only for them to bloodspurt but otherwise not react or go into a different prolonged stagger state that can’t be followed up. You wouldn’t want to use the melee on much anyway since its power, range, and invincibility frames have been nerfed significantly, so why bother risk frametrapping yourself and get grabbed from an offscreen enemy the second the kick ends? Enemies teleport around offscreen now btw.

The nerfed hit reactions also help make guns feel bad to shoot. I’m sure everyone who has played this knows the feeling of getting the shotgun, immediately trying it on the chainsaw guy point blank, and being underwhelmed when he either barely or just doesn’t react at all. Add some very bloomy aiming and you have guns that aren't particularly fun to shoot. Funny enough, in the Mercenaries survival mode the hit reactions work as you’d expect them to and the game is much less irritating for it. You still don’t want to do melee hits due to their low power and the fact that headshots give you a time bonus too, but at least the game manages to hit the indistinct modern third-person shooter combat that they’re aiming for here. Almost as if the devs are admitting this kind of hit reaction is terrible for an action game.

In place of the original’s unique gun > melee flow you get a bunch of generic ideas making a patchwork mess. Underdeveloped crouchwalk stealth to let you backstab an enemy or two before the encounter starts. A parry. Knife and armor durability. Enforced hit and run tactics because you can’t consistently crowd control without shells or nades anymore and The Last of Us is Citizen Kane. I’m sure it’s possible to enjoy this combat but they took a rock-solid combat system and diminished everything unique about it in order to make it more generic and comparable with third-stringers like The Evil Within.

Some say the controls are improved since you can move and shoot at the same time, but I would say the opposite, both in terms of responsiveness and how the game design contorts itself to compensate for them. Once you take a minute to understand the control scheme RE4 Leon is so snappy and responsive I would almost call him arcadey. He runs fast, his turning is sharp. I’ve never had him do anything I didn’t expect him to do. In comparison, Nu-Leon feels like he’s been on a bender. He’s very sluggish and unresponsive. He’s slow as ♥♥♥♥. His running speed seems to change arbitrarily. Sometimes when you turn he’ll keep his momentum or he’ll awkwardly lurch and lose it. Leon just generally feels bad to control in the remake. Obviously a bunch of slowly shuffling guys with axes and pitchforks wouldn’t be able to handle someone who can backpedal and shoot with their gun, so they rush you a lot more. You usually deal with this by hitting the duck or the parry depending on if they’re grabbing or doing something else. So it's less about actual spacing and standing your ground and more about constantly scrambling away and taking potshots, hitting the fun button when needed. Using the almighty moving and shooting to sidestep attacks won’t help due to how aggressively the attacks track, ironically.

Not every section of RE4 was perfect, but I’d still call it one of the most well-paced action game campaigns ever made. Nearly every room has something distinct or interesting about it and you’re rarely ever in one place long enough for it to get boring. The remake carries most of these areas over but changes around a lot of them. A few changes are improvements but more of them are downgrades, like the cage match just being a cutscene (would likely be unplayable with the remakes mechanics lmao), and most are arbitrary changes made for novelty alone. Something like saving the dog being an hour later or Ashley being in the hedge maze has no inherent value or flaw, it’s just something to justify the remake’s existence by being “different”.

The remake also adds what I could only call filler. Expanding the lake is fine on paper, but then it’s just a half hour of driving around to docks on the map looking for nuggets of resource gathering and combat in bland caves and dockside areas. If you have the treasure map it’s literally just driving to icons. Same with the newly added sidequests. A one-off novelty of shooting blue medals in two rooms in the original becomes an expanded series of mundane chores like shooting three rats a room back or killing a dog. You get spinels for doing this to trade for prizes. Besides one slightly comedic mission I don’t think anybody would call this stuff fun or interesting.

Strangely enough minimal changes have also been made to the Island, which is usually considered the weakest part of the game. Arguably it’s worse now that they’ve cut a few of the funner setpieces in favor of some dull ♥♥♥♥ where you defend a wrecking ball. RE4: Rebirth has not ruined the campaign fundamentally, but it has added just a bit of sawdust to it.

The story is secondary to the game’s problems, but it’s worth noting since Capcom promised to improve it. RE4’s story was cheesy and nonsensical, but it at least had charisma and some intensely memorable dialogue and character interactions. The remake’s plot is about the same quality as before, with shallow characters and the villain’s plan not making any sense compared to his actions. Now it doesn’t even have camp to make it likable, any personality has been sucked out and replaced with nothing in particular. The story exists in this no man’s land where all the bravado was sucked out in an attempt to be more prestigious but still not trying to elevate the story beyond a Saturday morning cartoon and paying surface level lip service to the original’s camp. The most you’ll get is weird attempts at sentimentality like Leon assuring Ashley its alright to be scared of bugs inside you controlling your mind. So if you didn’t like the cheesefest of the original story and wanted something more substantial you won’t find it here. Somehow, even the presentation and cutscene direction is flattened from a 20 year old game. Look up a comparison of the scenes where The Big Cheese transforms to see what I mean, his transformation happens instantly and offscreen in the remake while in the original the camera gives him lots of attention as he shows his claws and contorts his body to hype up the disgusting creature you’re about to fight.

I could say something like the game isn’t bad in a vacuum, I’ve played worse. But that’s a meaningless sentiment because nothing exists in a vacuum, least of all a remake. So what we’re left with is a remake that’s worse in just about every way than the original besides minor QoL features like D-Pad weapon switching. It controls worse and plays more generically. The presentation is sauceless as the kids would say. It doesn’t actually fix any of RE4’s major problems like a poor story or having a weak finale. Ironically, I think I would have respected the game more if they had changed more.

I could at least understand if they were trying to pivot RE4 into a proper survival horror game, you can kinda them attempting it in some areas. But this is still a rollercoaster of setpieces with inconsequential puzzles. You’re going to be killing everything down the one path instead of counting bullets or trying to determine the best route to backtrack across the mansion with. So this remake is the worst of both worlds where it's still structured like a corridor shooter but the great combat and fun banter has been gutted and replaced with generic, contemporary ideas. This game is a skinwalker.

If a game makes me want to play it until the early morning, and when I wake up the first thing I want to do is to play that game, then that is a successful game. This game is one of those.