Resident Evil 4 review

Unlike Resident Evil Village, RE4’s plotline isn’t a series of unfortunate events. Leon, the charming cop from Resident Evil 2 is back and is more confident than in his last outing with the zombies in Racoon City. Resident Evil 4 evolves Leon’s personality from an unprepared cop to a roundhouse-kicking super agent. He’s the guy the government sent to rescue the President’s daughter! So yes, expect more action sequences in this title but RE4 manages to do so without losing the nuances of its survival genre roots.

And so our hero embarks on a monster-hunting journey. You won’t find literal flesh-eating zombies here. Remember the ones with perfect jawlines and eye popping charm? Those are in Raccoon City. Moving on, Leon lands himself in a mysterious village in Spain where Ashley Graham (President’s daughter) was last seen. She is kidnapped by a mysterious cult that’s into black liquids (definitely not Old Monk) for mind-controlling its host. Axe-bearing villagers and cult zealots come rushing at the sight of Leon meanwhile some monsters occasionally show up for intense boss battles.

Weapons are not drip fed to you like Resident Evil 2. You can buy and sell weapons from a merchant a few hours into the game and can dispatch enemies fairly easily too (super agent, remember?). However, the villagers usually come at you in numbers so you’ll always be counting bullets with subsequent heads for it to go through. Later, shooting the enemy’s head off can also morph them into literal monsters and some have fleshy barbed tentacles whipping in Leon’s direction. If you’ve watched Parasyte on Netflix, those enemies will look very similar.

There’s a weakness in every enemy for you to exploit and enemy variety is pretty interesting too. Although, the spooky parts of the game come in the second half of the campaign. Resident Evil 4 also doesn’t try to jumpscare or strip you of your gear to force a horror experience. Rather, it uses its well-paced story to guide you through the bad and the worse parts of this Spanish village and uses enemy variety and level design to indulge the horror.

All Resident Evil games have good mini-puzzles but this one has more clever ones than others. Backtracking and completing side missions is always a good option to earn more cash and upgrade weapons faster. Inventory management is still hella fun in the series because it's not cumbersome nor is it littered with unwanted items. Got rifle ammo but don’t have a rifle? Sell it and buy something else.

Leon can also parry most attacks using his combat knife but we barely used parry or block against the enemies. Running around and using mouse precision for clean headshots feels more satisfying for my game style. However, the combat knife has a health bar which you can repair at the merchant. It’s a clever way to stop us from exploiting the parry button. The knife can parry a chainsaw, so yes it’s a good nerf for this little tool.

It’s not a walk in the park by any measure. The game gets more challenging as the story progresses. In some chapters, you will have to protect and escort Ashley around the map which will make encounters special and also difficult. Any stray bullet that catches Ashley can serve as a notice period for your duties and the enemies are clever enough to snatch her at first sight. You’re clearly not dealing with brain-munching zombies here. These villagers and zealots are mind-controlled and can sometimes burst their noggins for a power-up.

Resident Evil games have some of the most carefully crafted maps and sections that interlock with each other seamlessly. As a reviewer, the sheer quality of Resident Evil’s interconnected maps always surprises me and RE4 serves up a bigger and better map than its predecessors. From swamps to villages, to elaborate dungeons and colossal castles, you’d be surprised every time you encounter a new area to explore. Each of them is filled with side objectives, puzzles, loot and new enemy types.

Graphically, this is a very stable game and it performs surprisingly well on PC too. It doesn’t have Intel or Nvidia’s upscaling and anti-aliasing support, only AMD for now. Surprisingly, it's not very demanding for our reference Nvidia RTX 4090. The thing runs without any problems on the highest settings with hair strands set to high and subsurface scattering set to max as well. Make sure you turn on body dismemberment for maximum carnage. We got a steady 130FPS and sometimes 150FPS as well. Only occasionally dropping to 100 at graphically demanding scenes.

Resident Evil 4 is everything we love about the RE reboots. It’s story-driven, a wee bit scary and thoroughly enjoyable. Even the bits where the game turns into a full fledged action game, it never overstays its welcome. We gleefully shot monsters with a cannonball and nervously ran holding our breath from impenetrable hulking monstrosities. There are puzzles and recurring level designs where the game makes you take a detour from a section to open a gate. It can be a bit predictable but the execution is always fun.