This game SUCKED it was the worst in the series.
Resident Evil 4 starts off with the rookie cop that starred in Resident Evil 2, Leon S. Kennedy. After the horrifying incident in Raccoon City in RE2, Leon has gone through many years of intense presidential training to become a bodyguard of the President. However, just as he's finishing his training, the president's daughter gets captured by this game's new enemy and taken to a rural and unknown area in Europe, probably Spain. Out here, RE2's Umbrella has no influence: the story has nothing to do with the T-Virus, or anything from the old REs. This plot may sound intriguing at first, but it barely holds up during the game, and can almost be ignored. As RE tradition demands, the story is developed by many files randomly lying around everywhere, conveniently written up in hyperspace and left where you can easily find them.
The thing about the plot is that it hardly has any influence over everything Resident Evil took so long to build up. While I understand that the series couldn't just continue with zombie attacks until everybody was dead, the story here seems more like a jury-rigged time saver than a continuation. Like RE2's G-virus, the plot revolves around some master vial called The Sample. The problem is, while the files portray it as an essential piece of the puzzle that they absolutely cannot lose, it gets far less development then an essential plot device should, and by the end of the game, you'll hardly even know what it is.
This holds true for every aspect of Resident Evil 4. Two of the major characters, Luis and Krauser, both appear out of nowhere, receive no character development, and both leave much earlier than they should. Luis is supposed to be an essential character who looks like he was intended to get a lot of attention, but he just pops in at random times, says a few useless lines, then leaves. Krauser is supposedly an old friend of Leon's, but he just pops in out of nowhere, while the game doesn't bother to explain him. It's like the game assumes you already knew about him. The entire plot will come to resemble these two, in the sense that it is never explained as much as you'd like, and always moves faster than any reader wants. After the genius plots of the rest of the series, this is inexcusable.
That's not the only thing they've stripped off the series, however. When you first take control of Leon, you'll notice that the camera is not at a fixed angle looking down on you, but situated squarely behind Leon's shoulders. I suppose this is a good thing, since you now never have to fire at things that are off the screen and see exactly what Leon sees, but the problem lies in that the controls are the same as they've always been. They're too primitive for a 2005 game, and that's still an understatement. You cannot move sideways, crouch, or dodge in any way. Just move forward, back, and turn very slowly. This worked back in the PSX days because that controller used a D-Pad and allowed smooth transitions between the cameras, but now, you can see that the controls are completely unsuitable for a game of this nature.
Since there is no strafing, your only hope of dodging attacks is to either use a very robotic curving motion or waste ammo shooting the weapon while it's in the air. Well, you could also walk backwards, but Leon does this so slowly that usually the attack will hit you anyway. Leon can never crouch, which means that if someone's firing crossbows at you and you see some cover, you can't use it. This is because the game uses a "brilliant" context sensitive button to do almost all of Leon's actions. This may sound nice to those who are thinking of Ocarina of Time right now, but this means that Leon can only crouch in very specific places and only dodge pre-programmed attacks at certain times, leaving me to simply suck hatchets at all other points of the game. That's ridiculous. I'm the player here, I should be the one to decide when Leon needs to crouch, dodge or sprint. There's certainly enough buttons for it. While walking, the A button and D-pad remain unused, while the C-stick moves the camera, which in practice is a nearly useless feature.
This will only get worse when you realise that our protagonist is a heavily gifted acrobat capable of backflips and excessive forward rolling, yet you see him forced to take the most basic hits, hits that civilians could dodge. I, the gamer, could do a forward roll. So why can't I have Leon do one when a boss slices his giant scissors towards me? You've already shown that Leon is very capable of doing incredibly evasive movements, why not let me use them?
As you can see when you start walking for the first time, Capcom still refuses to take advantage of the Gamecube's analog stick, meaning you can only walk in one speed, turn in one speed, back up in one speed, and hold down a button to run. That might not seem so bad, but that means if you need to turn just slightly, you'll need to work on "quickly tapping the button so as to not turn too far," and if you want turn while running, you can only use one very wide curve, which is a problem since not all turns are that size. This means you will often find yourself stopping and readjusting yourself, which is a pain when baddies are breathing down your neck.
This game also gives you a quick 180 degree turn, which is convenient, but seems to give a Leon even more inhuman feel to him. To pull off the tighter turns, you may find yourself turning in the opposite directions so you can line up and do a 180. It seems kind of weird that Leon can do a quick 180, but not quickly turn in any other direction, as most humans do. Perhaps the C-stick could have been used for this?
Now, as far as the health system goes, they've stuck with their original health bar, where you lose health as you take attacks. This means that instead of dodging them, you lug around fifty pounds of herbs, then take one whenever you get hit. This was somewhat realistic when your only enemy was the zombie, because you could sort of say that the herbs were a strong painkiller. In this game, however, this doesn't work. Over the course of the game, you'll get hatchets thrown at you, pitchforks stabbed into you, and get shot with a spray of minigun bullets. However, Leon will always get right back up and run off as though he were fine, then taking an herb will magically make your wound disappear, and magically remove any bullets from your body. When you start off, your health bar is at least somewhat practical, as one hit will take you into the 'caution' zone, causing the character to hunch over and run slower, however, you can 'upgrade' your health bar to become tougher than is realistic, and add to disconnected feel of the character. If we could just use some of his moves during the real fights, it wouldn't be impractical to take out healing and have us dodge every attack, however, Capcom for some reason insists on clinging to its primitive ways, making for primitive games.
Sadly, Leon will remain disconnected for the entire game. This is very unlike RE, in RE1 and 2 you could still connect to the character and feel his worry and panic while he stay trapped in a zombie infested building, despite the horrid controls. In this game, you don't control a human, you control a giant indifferent robot. Leon supposedly looks towards his pursuers during fights, but in practice, you might see him do this once, maybe twice, in the whole game. Leon always stays expressionless and looking straight forward, not even blinking when hatchets wizz by his head. Capcom's excuse for this is that Leon is indifferent by nature, but this is just ridiculous. Also, staying true to past games, Leon takes damage rapidly while being strangled. Wait, strangled? That's right, the enemies in this game don't try and eat you alive, only choke you to death. It's incredibly frustrating to be brought down to the danger zone simply because someone tried to strangle you, even though you managed to shake him off. In real life, you wouldn't be injured in any way. Perhaps they could have made a system where if you fail, you get your neck snapped, but no. Capcom has once again demonstrated laziness in Resident Evil 4. Wonderful.
This game, in an effort to stay original and invent something new, has given us what we may call interactive cutscenes. During cutscenes, sometimes Leon will get attacked. When this happens, two buttons will appear on the screen, and you must press them both in time or Leon will die. Aside from the fact that these cutscenes aren't very 'interactive,' they contradict the rest of the game. Leon will dodge the quickest attacks, demonstrating cat-like reflexes, something he can't do during gameplay, and also die from the slightest wounds, such as a knife to his chest. Hello, you've been taking pitchforks this whole game, why succumb to a simple knife? This takes much enjoyment out of the cutscenes, and makes them somewhat pointless. The good news is that it set a trend in videogames, so games like Tomb Raider: Legend could get it right in the future.
And then there are the graphics: They are pretty and real looking, but not what I would call great. I hope you like the color grey, because you'll be seeing a lot of it during your time in this game. Everything in this game is rendered separately, so you'll constantly seeing things 'ghost in' on each other. Enemies through doors, your foot through bodies, even Leon's clothes constantly overlap in very paranormal ways. In fact, many advanced strategies rely on this, telling you to "shoot when you see the enemy's face on the door," or "climb up and down the ladder until the timer runs out, since Leon is invincible during the ladder climbing sequence." You'd think a Game of the Year could have done better, but sadly, this is not the case.
Now, as far as what you'll be doing during the game, you don't get provided with any serious challenges. Go into the next room, kill everyone there, go into the next room, watch an occasional pointless cutscene, then solve an occasional "put emblem A into indentation B" puzzle. Not only that, but the fighting is too simplistic to be what I call 'fun.' The game gives you so much ammo, you could rely on simply shooting them until they're dead. There's never any strategy or originality involved. Just shoot until dead, or if you're good at the game, use the knife.
Not only this, but for some reason, there's a mysterious gun merchant stalking you for the whole game. For very small prices, he will supply you with all the guns and ammo you need. Not only that, but he will "upgrade" your weapons in very stupid ways. The guns had realistic stats when they started off, upgrading them just makes the game too easy and takes from the realism. Why does Leon have to pay to reload the guns faster? How exactly do you get a handgun with a 35 bullet clip? How do you reload a revolver in two seconds flat, and by using your magical powers to load an entire clip in just two bullets? This whole thing was a horrible idea. RE1-3 didn't have a merchant, or any use of currency, and they still excelled, because being lightly armed with little ammo gave you a sense of fear of facing enemies.
Oh yes, fear, the trademark element of Resident Evil. RE4 has very little of it, for the simple reason that you are drowning in enough weapons and ammo to start WWIII as a one man army, and the game uses conveniently placed continuation points every door you pass through. This means that the game doesn't give you any incentive to stay alive, like it did in the past, because dying means you just go back five minutes to the last door. In RE2, you knew that you had to stay alive, because the use of ink ribbons made you put some time between your saves. In this game, you'll find yourself getting killed on purpose just to see the awesome death scene. That's just not Resident Evil.
Not only this, but holding multiple guns is implemented horribly. There is no way to switch weapons on the fly, you must always pause the game, select your next weapon, equip it, then unpause. And for some reason, enemies stand still and wait for you to finish rummaging through your case, then resume when you've got your next weapon.
Not only this, but shooting is completely dull in this game. You cannot move while shooting, or with the knife out. This means that if an enemy is approaching, you have to give him a few bullets, step back, then give him a few more, instead of shooting while moving backwards like most people would. The knife is incredibly frustrating, as you can only use it while 'holding' L. That's stupid, why can't I equip it like I could way back when? This means that every time you want to use the knife, Leon plants himself, puts away his gun, pulls it out, holds it in front of him for a second, then allows you to start slashing. So, what if I find that I'm actually a foot too far away? Guess what, I have to put away the knife, pull out my gun, take a step forward, then put the gun away again and take out the knife. This entire aspect screams 'watered down' and never intrigues you, ever.
So, the shooting is boring, but sadly, you'll be doing a lot of it during this game. Now, in a very Zelda-ish fashion, enemies drop ammo and money when you kill them. Not only is this unrealistic, but having enemies dropping twenty handgun bullets each is just stupid and makes the game too easy, not to mention the fact that currency simply doesn't belong in Resident Evil. This way, you will end up with near infinite ammo and money, so you will never have to conserve, or run past enemies when you're low. You will often find yourself seeking out prey just to kill, because you will actually gain ammo from doing so when he drops it. I prefer to simply kill my prey and run off, not have to loom over them waiting for them to completely disappear so I can see what they dropped.
Yet even though this game pumps you full of ammo during the game, you'll still find it much easier to conserve than the previous games. For one, even though the enemies are supposed to be intimidating and take an unusual amount of bullets to kill, they can still be stopped dead in their tracks by a single handgun bullet. Come on, normal humans sometimes take five, six, or seven bullets to stop. Also, you'll find that the knife is a lot more useful this time around. Like bullets, one slash stops enemies dead in their tracks, making it very easy to kill lone enemies with the knife alone. Combine this with the absurd amount of ammo you'll be getting, and you've got a case literally overflowing with the stuff. In addition to the knife, you can also use an assortment of kicks if you shoot or slash someone in the head or legs. Once again, this is stupid and unrealistic. Why can Leon only kick someone after wasting a bullet shooting him? I'm sure someone as well toned as Leon could kick someone who isn't grabbing his face and wincing. After all, the guy who trained him probably wasn't counting on his target surviving a shot to the face.
When you first get into fight scenes early in the game, you will take note of the soundtrack. Quite simply, it has nothing on the rest of the series. The earlier Resident Evils all had suspenseful, atmospheric songs worth making into albums, but this game will stay silent for the most part. During fights, it will play the same bland, repetitious music for the duration of the game. The 'atmosphere' music thrown in some hallways is somewhat creepy, but still has nothing on the halls of RE2. The use of music is horrible, since you will come to rely on 'musical ques' for the game, since you can always tell if everyone's dead by the music. As soon as you finish the last person, the action music stops abruptly, so you know that everyone is dead.
The sound is somewhat of a mixed bag. In an attempt to spice things up, Capcom included speech for the enemies, all in Spanish. However, the lines are butchered and poorly translated, and the voice actors sound more like highschool dropouts. Not only this, but the words they shout are as pointless as the silence of the zombies in RE2. When an enemy in this game sees you, he will exclaim loudly that you're there. Yet still, he'll be the only one to come after you, while his friends just sit and stare. Not only this, but this also ruins the chance that enemies will sneak up on you. You'd think with the new camera, they'd take advantage of such a privilege to add some suspense, but no. Whenever there's an enemy behind you, he will laugh menacingly for a good ten seconds before attacking, giving you plenty of time to turn around and cap him. That's so unrealistic and stupid, it's almost nauseating.
And so is the entire game, it never gives you suspense, never surprises you, and never entertains you. It has so many cut corners there's hardly any paper left. If you want to see what everybody likes about this game, be my guest. For the low price of $20, you probably won't regret buying it, but just be warned that you'll be purchasing an empty case, with no actual gameplay inside