4.5/5 ★ – ColeTrain's review of Resident Evil 4.
This game is amazing! I can see why people like it so much, I got sucked in right away when I started playing it. The story is about Leon Kennedy but this time he's gotten quite the promotion since RE2 because now he's working under the President of the United States as a special agent and is sent on a mission to Spain to find the President's Daughter who has been kidnapped by a group of cultists. however when Leon arrives at a village he sees a guy walking around a house there so Leon walks up to the villagers home goes in and shows them a picture of the girl in question asking him if he's seen her however this villager (or should I say a RESIDENT? badum tiss!) Dosen't speak english and isn't one for pleasantries so decides the best way to give Leon a warm welcome is to try to kill him. After Leon returns the favour he gets a call from his handler who tells him that the President's Daughter is supposedly being held at a church in the village so Leon decides that's where he's off to and just hopes he can get there in time before anything bad happens to her. Time to talk gameplay so RE:4 uses the over the shoulder/behind the back perspective like the newer remakes however this is mixed with the stationary shooting of games Like RE: Remake and Code Veronica when you're actually in combat so you'll have to get used to that odd blend of concepts
however if you've gotten this far into the series it shouldn't take you too long to adjust to though. Another change is that you don't have to equip your knife in this game all you have to do in order to use it is hold the left bumper to pull it out then hold the right trigger to slash with it. A new change to gameplay is instead of having inventory slots like in the previous games you now have an Attache Case where you store most of your things such as guns , ammo as well as your healing items like herbs and first aid sprays. An interesting thing about when you get any of these is that you will be shown the inside of your Attache case which has a grid like pattern in it and each item will actually take up physical space of a certain amount of squares on the grid so if you find something useful you're going to have to see if you have the room for it. Thankfully you can move things around to make space for any new items or guns you get along your journey. Speaking of guns acquiring them is a little different in RE4 than how you normally would in the previous games . Instead of coming across them in different sections of the game you can buy them from a merchant.
As far as the types of weapons you can buy from him there's a vast amount of them like pistols, shotguns , smg's as well a new addition sniper rifles as there are actually quite large areas in this game so you'll definitely need one. These are all upgradable as well with damage upgrades , ammo capacity upgrades , scope upgrades for snipers faster firing rates for pistols, stocks for SMG's and more . He also sells bigger Attache cases if you need more storage space and trust me with the amount of stuff you'll have in this game you're gonna need it. Grenades return in this game these great for dealing with large clusters of enemies there's mutiple types you can obtain throughout the game there's standard grenades that are pretty universal for just about anything, Flash grenades for stunning enemies and the best ones are the incendiary grenades that will fry up just about any enemy nice and crispy. Now I'll talk about the good and the bad so to start I quite enjoyed the spanish setting going through the villages and exploring them and also the variety of locations throughout the game is excellent and I never got tired of exploring all the new areas I encountered. I absolutely LOVED the Merchant I loved his design , his voice , his mannerisms everything! He was such excellent addition and really spiced things up from what I was used to in the previous Resident Evil games. I liked being able to upgrade different aspects of the weapons like damage , ammo capacity and more it just really felt like you could make an average gun great and a great gun just awesome. I loved how funny this game was too with Leon making some great jokes giving a more serious game some light heartedness to it . The story overall is great with new twists that made it a nice change of pace from what you'd usually expect from Resident Evil. Now I'll talk about the bad for one this game can get pretty swarmy in some sections which can get kind of annoying especially if you get cornered because there can be a ridiculous amount of enemies sometimes which can make it feel like as if you just kicked a beehive and pissed everyone off just by your mere presence . One thing that really got my damn goat pretty bad was I ran into a glitch in the final stretch of the game where one of the bosses was unkillable because he wouldn't go into the next that phase he was supposed to go into after a certain point which made me have uninstall the game and then reinstall it to fix the problem but I guess at least it was fixable. So another thing that's in this game is Quick Time Events which I don't have a problem with except if they don't work! There was so many times where I would press a button in a QTE and it just wouldn't register randomly causing me a totally avoidable death or unnecessary damage that could have been avoided had the game actually allowed it to work as intended. While I don't think RE4 is the best one I would say it would be pretty high up there still in my opinion and is much better than RE3.