The video games industry's obsession with remakes and remasters is pretty obnoxious. I feel like I'm stuck either playing no new games at all, or playing nothing but games that I played 20 years ago. Of all the remakes that have been made, Resident Evil 4 might be the most unnecessary. Resident Evil 4 is basically the game on which every modern over-the-shoulder shooter is based. The original Resident Evil 4 still plays like a modern game. On top of that, it's been remastered and ported to newer consoles, including having VR versions.
But I never played the VR version. In fact, I haven't played any of the VR versions for the new line of Resident Evil games. I keep hearing that they're some of the best VR experiences on the market today, but I didn't have a VR headset when 7 or Village released, and I just haven't gotten around to going back and replaying those games now that I have a headset. So I decided to give the VR version of RE4's remake a try, after a friend of mine was done with his disc.
So this review is going to be almost entirely a review of the VR version of the remake, since that's how I played the game.
Slower, and more methodical than I remember
I never liked Resident Evil 4. It's frantic, explicitly challenging gameplay full of "gotcha!" encounters, and its parodic tone never really gelled with me. Moreover, I've always blamed Resident Evil 4 for single-handedly killing the classic survival horror genre, which happens to be one of my favorite game genres. It took well over a decade for proper survival horror games to start coming back, but even so, they still aren't quite the same. The slow, methodical pace, and emphasis on resource-management and logistics has been minimized in favor of fast-paced shooter action and frequent checkpointing.
I went in expecting to be overwhelmed and frustrated, which was largely my experience in the original game. I expected that the frantic nature of the game, and all the running around would quickly make me dizzy or nauseous in VR. I honestly did not expect that I would get through the first few chapters before giving up due to the game being annoyingly difficult to the point that it would make me literally sick.
Areas that gave me a lot of trouble in the original game were much easier this time around.
Much to my surprise, that was not the case! I was really enjoying the opening hours of the game. I even starting to wonder why I ever hated Resident Evil 4 to begin with. The VR visuals look good. It was controlling well. I felt in control of the character, and perfectly able to handle the threats the game was throwing at me. It initially felt much easier than I remembered the original being. I breezed through parts of the early game that I remembered struggling with for hours in the original.
Maybe it felt easier because I'm a more experienced and mature gamer now? Or maybe it's because I have since played so many more games that have ripped off so many design elements of Resident Evil 4, that it all feels more familiar? It could also be that the difficulty is toned down for the VR version -- maybe even specifically to prevent the game from literally making people sick. I didn't go back to replay the original before playing the VR remake, so I don't know what, specifically changed. It could be that the design has improved in subtle, borderline un-noticeable ways, such that it's more intuitive to play and figure out the more difficult set pieces.
One big change that I did notice is that I'm able to draw a gun and move around while aiming. That's something that you couldn't do in the original. Moreover, holding onto a gun is a lot more comfortable than it has been in other PSVR shooting games that I've played. Simply touching my finger on the button, instead of having to continuously press and hold the button down, keeps the gun drawn and held. This really helped to alleviate cramping of the right hand.
I appreciated the increased mobility and run-and-gun gameplay of VR.
The immersive VR also allows me to do some one-handed running and gunning that the original never permitted. Hell, the game would even let me shoot 2-handed guns like the shotgun and rifle with 1 hand, or from the hip, or behind my back, which really helps with crowd-control in a pinch. Gunplay is generally really comfortable and responsive. This is especially true for one-handed pistols and revolvers. 2-handed long guns are a bit more iffy, and grenades were a constant cause of annoyance and frustration throughout the entire game.
From all angles
Then I got to around chapter 7 or 8, and I started to remember why I disliked Resident Evil 4. The difficulty started to ramp up. Enemies start spawning in off-screen, behind the player, where I can't see them, leading to a lot more cheap hits and some insta-deaths. The confines seemed to get tighter, while the enemy counts seemed to increase. I started fumbling around with the controls more and more, as I needed to switch between different guns to deal with different enemy types and manage dwindling ammo supplies. The game was forcing me to operate switches or levers in the environment with enemies breathing down my neck. And there were more booby traps scattered around the environments -- some of which I legitimately could not figure out how to avoid without setting them off and taking damage! I started dying more often, and having to redo the same setpiece over, and over, and over again, sometimes replaying the same 5-minute sequence for half an hour or longer. And the game started wasting my time by throwing a bunch of bonus objectives at me that all require back-tracking, despite Leon constantly blabbering on about how important it is to find Ashley as soon as possible, and despite both Ashley and Leon being slowly consumed by the Las Plagas infections.
It was all the things I always hated about Resident Evil 4, plus literal headache, nausea, and neck pain from the headset and VR motion. All that being said, the VR remake still never reached the levels of frustration that I suffered in the original. Again, maybe I'm just better than I was then. Perhaps all those years of playing FromSoft games have hardened me up considerably?
VR headaches
As I alluded to before, not everything in the game is as intuitive as aiming and firing a gun. For example, grenades can be difficult to use and are unpredictable -- almost to the point of being useless. Accurately throwing a grenade requires a lot of practice, and (based on my experience) you basically have to toss them with an under-hand motion. Any attempt at an overhead throw resulted in my grenades exploding at my own feet. The under-handed tosses were a bit more reliable at close to medium range, but remained incredibly inaccurate at longer ranges. I wasted so many grenades trying -- and failing -- to take out groups of enemies on the other side of an arena.
Grenades are difficult to equip and use.
It took me a long time to figure out how to switch which grenade is equipped. You don't do it from within the attaché case inventory screen for ... some reason. I don't know why you equip everything else from this screen, but you can't assign which grenade is equipped. About a third of the way through the game, I finally looked it up, and it turns out that you have to press the Circle button while holding the grenade in order to toggle between different grenade types. I'm sure the tutorial probably explained this, but between playing the tutorial at the start of the game, and progressing through multiple chapters until I actually had multiple types of grenades to switch between, I had forgotten. The control is so un-intuitive compared to all of the rest of the game's relatively intuitive VR motion controls.
Because it's a bit cumbersome to take off the headset in order to go lookup the answer online, I just muddled through for a long time, and kept telling myself that I would look it up later. But I kept forgetting to. I even tried asking Alexa a couple times, in an attempt to get an answer without having to take off the headset and bust out my laptop, but she kept saying "I can't help you with that".
There was another similarly un-intuitive moment midway through the game, in which a bonus mission asks me to deface a painting. The note says "hitting it with something might do the trick." Well, shooting it with a gun doesn't work, nor does slashing it with a knife, or blowing it up with a grenade. I spent like 5 or 10 minutes searching the room for something that I could pick up and throw at it, before looking it up online and finding that the only way to complete this quest is to throw an egg at the painting. But I had accidentally killed the chicken in the room. So I had to reload and fight my way through the enemies to the painting again, only for the egg to splat on the ground below the painting because accurately throwing things in VR is more difficult than it seems, and the game offers no assist or auto-aim for this particular bonus objective. So I had to reload again, and fight the enemies again. This time, I just stood right in front of the painting to throw the egg, so that there would be no way that I could possibly miss. And yes, that worked. Finally.
You need surgeon's hands to make some of these shots in VR.
There are a few things that are made more difficult than they should be. Because the game is VR, precision aiming is dependent on the stability of your own hands. As such, shooting the Blue Medallion collectible or doing long-range sniping might be more difficult than it needs to be. I didn't see anything in the way of aim stability assists, so if you have a shaky hand, you're going to struggle with tasks that would be much easier in the standard, non-VR, version of the game.
And then there are a handful of setpieces that just don't make sense or work very well. The second boss fight against Krauser was one of the worst boss fight experiences I've ever had. First, there is a gauntlet of seemingly unavoidable booby-traps. I could not figure out how to not take damage during this section, and had to use up almost all of my healing items before being able to begin the boss fight proper. I'm sure there is a way to avoid these traps, but I sure as heck couldn't figure it out. I couldn't duck under the wall mine lasers, and there's no jump button to let me jump over them. I couldn't walk up to the wall mines and disable them. Shooting them from a distance didn't seem to do anything.
There was no prompt to jump over or disable these mines, and they were too low to crouch under.
Same with the machine gun turrets. There wasn't enough time to run to the next bit of cover in between their volleys of fire. I couldn't find any way around them without taking some damage, and shooting them did not seem to have any effect.
I thought that maybe I was supposed to lure or bait Krauser into triggering the traps for me. But he only ever came out and attacked me twice during this entire gauntlet, and he didn't trigger any traps during either attack. The rest of the time, he would just shoot at me from above with an exploding bow and arrow. The explosions, by the way, would also destroy the cover that I was hiding behind, damaging me in the process.
The entire thing was just unavoidable damage after unavoidable damage. By the time I got to the duel proper, I had hardly any healing potential left. After several failed attempts at fighting him with the knife and trying to shoot at the glowing eyes on his arm, I took a short break and tried looking up whether there was some trick to beating him that I missed. The internet recommended that I just blast away at his head with a Magnum, so that's exactly what I did. Forget trying to shoot his actual weak spots, or engaging with the fight in the way that it's clearly designed to be played. I just charged him and pumped 4 or 5 magnum rounds into his face at point-blank range, and he died after about 10 seconds.
What an unbelievable joke! I was actually looking forward to this rematch after the first knife fight with Krauser was so good. I couldn't believe how absolutely broken this rematch turned out to be.
I loved the first knife fight against Krauser.
A more serious horror game?
One of the things that did intrigue me about this remake was that it appeared to be taking itself more seriously as a horror game. The atmosphere seems darker, the dialogue seems less campy, and Ashley is a more serious character wearing more practical shorts, instead of being an adolescent sex object with plenty of opportunities to look up her mini skirt. This is something that had the potential to bring me onto the Resident Evil 4 bandwagon. After all, one of the biggest reasons I disliked the original game was how not seriously it took itself as a horror game. Maybe a version of Resident Evil 4 that is more strictly a "horror" game would be more up my alley.
This is somewhat true, but this remake actually stays a bit too faithful to the original. The tone, dialogue, and cutscenes all take themselves more seriously, but this is still a very direct adaptation of the original. Many of the campy one-liners remain; and, to their credit, many of them do hold up fairly well (especially the infamous "bingo" line). But the worse part is that the plot and overall mission structure remain virtually unchanged.
The original game's plot is completely silly and makes very little sense if you stop and think about it. In a comedic, campy game, that was fine. But in a version of the story that is trying to take itself more seriously, the fossils of the original plot seem even more contrived, and they can be even more immersion-breaking or off-putting.
The missions and side quest structure is largely unchanged -- for better and worse.
The entire side-quest design is a textbook case of the dreaded "ludonarrative dissonance". Many of these more involved side quests become available around act transitions, when stakes and urgency have just been increased. Leon will comment to the camera that he can't waste any time finding Ashley, or he and Ashley will be desperately trying to fight off the Las Plagas infection taking over their bodies, but then the game will ask me to stop dead in my tracks to backtrack halfway across a castle to kill some rats, or put Leon and Ashley in mortal danger by fighting an optional side boss, or to throw an egg at a painting. Again, this sort of thing was fine in the campy, un-serious original, but it's far more distracting in a version of the game that takes itself more seriously.
I honestly think that this remake could have benefitted from straying a bit more from the original, redesigning its villain and plot structure, and re-thinking many of its side quests and optional content. After all, we've already had multiple ports and remasters of the original game, so it isn't like the original Resident Evil 4 is difficult to track down or play. Like Skyrim, the original Resident Evil 4 is playable on pretty much everything that has a micro chip in it. If you have a smart fridge in your kitchen, you can probably play Resident Evil 4 on it.
The original game is still around and still playable, so there would be nothing wrong with taking more creative liberties with this remake to create something that is totally different. Capcom had no trouble changing up Resident Evil 2 and 3, so I don't see why they felt it necessary to be so conservative here. Maybe the negative reaction to changes to Resident Evil 3 scared Capcom into playing this one a bit more safe? But, come on, guys! This is why you have to look at context, and not just sales figures and review scores.