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Resident Evil 4

Nintendo GameCube owners got to enjoy it first, but less than a year later, PS2 owners are enjoying it better: not only has Resident Evil 4, the survival horror franchise that first came to unlife on PSone and Saturn, made its PS2 appearance, but to the surprise of many, including me, the game has transitioned almost completely seemlessly from the GameCube to the PS2. The graphics are near-perfect replicas of the GameCube incarnation, and there’s more in the game this time around. A new weapon has been added to the arsenal, a laser-type gun that purges victims of the infection that’s taken them over – kinda. Anyway, it’s a cool weapon once you unlock it. Also, the Ada Wong character is expanded upon with a series of extra side-missions that did not appear in the GameCube edition of the game.

By now, everyone knows the story. You play as Leon Kennedy, the starry-eyed rookie cop from Resident Evil 2; but that’s about the only completely familiar element in the game. Time has passed. Apparently gone is the evil Umbrella Corp. Gone also is the mutant T-virus and – gasp – gone are the zombies! George Romero, bite it, this game has no zombies! Instead, it has – mysterious, smelly east Europeans who have some type of problem going on that, while it’s not making them zombies, pretty much makes them act a lot like zombies. Sure, they’re not out to eat your brains, but these eastern Euros are death-pale, amble after you fairly slowly and want you dead – pretty much like Madonna today, at around age 45. Or Hilary Clinton. Or Mother Theresa, post-mortem, come to think of it. Heh.

Anyway, young Mr. Kennedy is now working for the Feds, trying to track down the President’s daughter, who’s been taken hostage and was last reported sighted in Europe among those unde–err, Vitaly Potapenko smell-alikes. Along the way, he gets ditched by his ride and has to hoof it the rest of the way, which naturally leads to encounters with these Euro-trashed humans. What is amazing about the game is how sharp it looks. The graphics are cutting edge and really stand up well next to such other recent PS2 eye-candy titles as Indigo Prophecy and Metal Gear Solid 4: Snake Eater.

In fact, some of the new game elements will also call MGS to mind; Kennedy is frequently in touch with headquarters and his “headphones” segments with a female dispatcher will remind one a lot of Snake talking to HQ in the Metal Gear Solid games. The choice of eastern Europe is not without precedent; decades and decades before Resident Evil 4 came along, western European authors like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker found eastern Europe to be plenty spooky enough to inspire the likes of classic monsters Dracula and Frankenstein. And heck, even Hollywood’s original Wolf Man, Lon Chaney Jr., was first cursed by a gypsy before he got all hairy and – well, transformed into an eastern European himself. Heh.

That said, and eastern Europe-bashing aside, the setting of Resident Evil 4 is pretty darn wonderful for evoking a spooky atmosphere. This is not the eastern Europe of the modern EEU, but the eastern Europe of Bram Stoker, full of modest but spooky villages, loners in remote cabins, high mountains, deep woods and the occasional monarch who likes to impale his enemies and bathe in their blood. It’ll spook you. It’s also a step in the right direction for a series that has too often seemed like a George Romero-style movie, which aspires to scare you only by shouting “Boo!” unexpectedly or drowning you in a sea of the undead, rather than creating a spooky atmosphere. That’s why Konami’s Silent Hill series has always had one-up on Resident Evil, because of its superior spooky mood.

This time out, while there’s still plenty of action to be enjoyed and seemingly hopelessly outnumbered situations to get into, Capcom has proven it can also create a mood. While Resident Evil 4 might not be quite the achievement in mental terror that Silent Hill 2 achieved, it’s actually quite a bit better than Silent Hill 4: The Room – and that’s still saying something! Walking through the mountainous woods, you never knew if that dog caught in a trap up ahead is infected or just needs to be freed, or whether a bunch of infected villagers are about to drop a large boulder on your path, which you’ll need to avoid.

The only real complaint I can lodge is one endemic to survival horror: not enough ammo. The game, even on easy mode, is stingy with the ammo, meaning you’ll often have to knife your way out of a tight spot and take damage as a result. Of course, there’s not much healing medicine around either, complicating matters. While there are unlimited ammo and unlimited healing cheat codes, to be sure, the game itself hardly rewards non-cheaters. Not only isn’t there enough ammo to really deal with the enemies you come across, but then the game throws collection tasks your way, like shooting down a certain number of pendants in order to unlock a particular weapon. Spend your bullets on those and you may as well never pull a gun against an enemy, unless it’s a boss-level character.

Speaking of them, boss level characters reach an all-new level of sophistication this time out, being far harder and less easy to figure out, while being portrayed in striking detail and gorgeous design along the way to attempting to eradicate you. In nearly every way, Capcom really has taken its survival horror series to the next level; if they can evolve their game this much for PS2, one can only wonder in amazement what Resident Evil 5 will look like on Xbox 360 and, eventually, PS3.

In the end, there’s little argument to be made against the game. Resident Evil 4 was already a GameCube game of the year candidate. Now that it’s on PS2, it’s probably going to reach Game of the Year overall ballots as well. Capcom took a lot of risks with RE4, and I can’t think of one that didn’t pay off well… except for maybe initially planning to release it only as a GameCube exclusive. But that didn’t last long, to the joy and appreciation of survival horror fans everywhere. If you didn’t get the GC version, what are you waiting for? If you like survival horror at all, this is the game to own!

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Tags: Resident Evil 4

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 16th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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