Resident Evil 4 is hands down the best Resident Evil game I've played so far, it's better than REmake and 0, 3 is great but it can't stand up to a full 3D behind the back perspective, 2 is fine but again, the engine for 4 would make the entire series prior to 4 better, and DO NOT get me started on the stark contrast between Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil: (Insert any number of ports and versions here), there's no comparison, Resident Evil 4 is the best Resident Evil game I've played so far, and it's cross-platform, so you can pick it up for practically every console, GameCube, Wii, PC, PS2, PS3, and Xbox 360 (No DreamCast or original Xbox version unfortunately, the DC was discontinued by then and who knows why there wasn't an Xbox port). I played through the PS2 version for my channel, I'd have liked to get ahold of the Wii version, but unfortunately I wasn't able to. I'll do a short video on the PC version though, or maybe even a full playthrough if I can get the right stuff together.
The story is simple, you play as Leon S Kennedy, one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 2 six years after the events of RE2. Now employed with the secret-service, he has been given the task of rescuing the presidents daughter, Ashley Graham, from her kidnappers somewhere in Spain.
I was going to question why they only sent one guy with a pistol and a knife to rescue the President's daughter and not an entire platoon of marines, but it really doesn't matter. There are very few plot contradictions, and it's easy to follow, plus you don't need to have played any other Resident Evil game since they summarized the circumstances leading up to the game in the beginning and kept the references to other Resident Evil games to a minimum. I recommend that if you only ever play one Resident Evil game, make it this one. It's cathartic, it's easy to learn, but hard to master, it's got a decent amount of replay value, and unlike killing palate-swaps in RPGs no matter how many enemies I killed it never got old, and was usually pretty intense, all things I like in a game. It's not scary though, except if an enemy shows up that you weren't expecting (Which happened once, but once was enough to completely freak me out). The QTEs are sometimes annoying, there was one sequence where the timing is sometimes hard to follow, but they're usually implemented pretty well. The graphics are fine, they're standard for sixth-generation, but if you really feel the need to have HD, there's always the Resident Evil HD Dual Pack, but nowadays a PS2 is pretty cheap, and the game itself can also be picked up for pretty cheap, so if you want to play the game on a budget you're pretty much fine if you get a PS2 and RE4. I can't speak for the price of the other versions, I picked up the PC version for two bucks though, so I'm guessing the game is old enough and common enough that it's cheap no matter what console you want to pick it up for, and it's a good thing to have at least one game out there that's common, cheap, and good. Capcom did a good job on this game, and in some alternate universe this game might have been the only Resident Evil game, maybe called "Resident Evil: Lone Assualt". With a few tweaks to the cutscenes it could have had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the Resident Evil series. *Laughs* Funny thing, they went from having a game that was completely unrelated to Resident Evil (Devil May Cry) as RE4 to having a game that was only MOSTLY unrelated to Resident Evil as RE4, and I'm pretty sure there's a Street Fighter 2010 joke in there somewhere. Both published candidates for Resident Evil 4 were both good and both could have had their own series all together. The controls work perfectly, I wasn't able to find any bugs, and every scenario is survivable with some ingenuity and the right positioning. There are some minor complaints about the menu to be had though, Capcom assigned "Map" to Triangle, and Circle and Square both let you pull a 180 turn or run, when circle could have easily been "Switch guns". One thing I'm going to criticize, and this doesn't mean I don't like the game, is the lack of a fully customizeable control scheme. What if I want R3 to issue orders to Ashley, R2 to fire my guns, R1 to aim, L3 to run/turn, L2 to slash with the knife, L1 to bring the knife out, Square to swap guns, Select for the map, and X for action? The default control-scheme requires you to take your index-finger off of R1 if you're running and want to move the camera, which makes you move your middle-finger onto R1 if an enemy if near and you want to fire a gun, which wouldn't happen if they let you customize the controls beyond the two default ones, the second of which makes absolutely no sense, pressing R1 to bring out the gun you have equipped, and then L1 to bring out the knife is an unnecessary step that just adds time to bringing out the knife, which means you could be attacked in the process of taking out your knfe, why would they have that as an option, but not a completely customizeable control-scheme?. That's probably not an issue with the PC version, but then again PC games tend to have too many hotkeys, so who knows. Also, after a quick attempt at customizing the gamepad controls (I have a PS3 controller hooked up to my PC) I found that the PC version does not recognize L3 and R3 as buttons. That's not a big issue, but I really don't like having to configure Joytokey for every game I want to play.
All in all I liked Resident Evil 4, and I'm gonna give it a 10.0* rating. It's nearly perfect.
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