sometimes an idea’s time has come.
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This is incomplete, but it is novel that Resident Evil is now probably the oldest franchise with an unbroken line of canon.
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they did such a good job with leon’s one liners. saying “you twisty son of bitch” to the parasite ganados is so good. also he has one at the very end of the saddler fight that’s just such an mmm chef’s kiss cornball. I love it.
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At the doorstep of the Mendez fight in the RE4make, and I still think the only thing this game and its creators hope to convey about its relationship with the original text is something like “while the original was good, what we have here is just better.” I haven’t been convinced this game is interested in being anything more than RE4, down to the dialog, the pacing, the metrics of the level design.
Admittedly, the combat is where I think maybe this game will end up making its own slight statement about the original. Like Toups mentioned above, the rate of fire on weapons seems to have grown significantly in importance. Classic RE4 big hitters like the Red 9 have weakness to match with their very great strengths, and arguably ineffective weapons like the TMP shine because of how quickly they can fire. The weapon balance pushes you to be much more nimble than you were, or really ever could be in the original.
And because of this the really early village parts suck, when you’re really only able to fight three or four ganados in any combat encounter. That’s just not enough to flex your moves. Knowing how RE4 only ramps up more and more, I hope the later parts prove suitably swamped with enemies to tussle with. It would be bizarre to me if the village in the remake ends up being the least exciting part of the game for me.
I also haven’t really puzzled out all my moves yet. Something about this one obscures enemy reactivity enough that all that I’m basically sure that I can do is shoot enemies heads and then kick them. You can shoot their hands to make them drop things, too, but there’s no reason to do that if you can just shoot their face. I haven’t glimpsed the arcade combo game style of the original in my time with this one. And despite hearing things about “sick RE4make combo videos on Reddit,” I fear that this, besides retooling the importance of rate of fire, is the one place the devs of RE4make decided that they should not slavishly adhere to the original with.
So far, this seems to be just not an interesting remake, though it may be occasionally fun. Compared to RE2make it may even be a bad one.
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the combos are there, and are even more varied than the original. it’s just a different style, but honestly I prefer it because it’s less one-note. 90% of my last OG RE4 playthrough was just headshot, kick, knife, rinse repeat. this game forces encounters to be much more dynamic and less predictable. there are many areas where I got stuck and had to replay them dozens of times, but it never felt stale. you have to improvise even more than in the original, and so I feel like it’s honestly more spiritually true to the original than either remake of 3 or 2.
I’m playing a new game on professional (no special weapons or anything like that) and my god is it wonderfully brutal. nearly every setpiece has required dramatically different strategies and it’s forcing me to relearn the entire game all over again.
a major highlight for me was the twin garrador fight in the castle. on hardcore it already felt impossible, and the strategy I settled on was to bait the garradors into killing the zealots for me until I finally had enough breathing room to sneak attack both of them to death. it felt a lot like using doom monster infighting strats and it ruled.
on professional regular grunt enemies are significantly more aggressive so that strategy didn’t work as well, so instead I put a bunch of money into upgrading the bolt thrower and killed all the zealots using that without waking the garradors. it was so fucking hard but so satisfying to finally pull off. the bolt thrower shouldn’t be slept on, because it consistently gives you the stun animation where they turn their back to you, giving you a free knife kill. and then you usually get your ammo back. it’s a great way to thin out hordes of enemies without aggroing everyone at once while conserving resources.
something I didn’t realize on my first playthrough is that you can kill any basic enemy this way with any stagger animation, you just have to run behind them and backstab them. this also has the bonus of guaranteeing that they won’t parasite on you. basically impossible to rawdog professional without using it.
the deeper I dig into this game the more clear influence it takes from sekiro, in so many ways.
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also I love ada’s new voice actor and I don’t understand why knuckle dragging internet nerds are so mad about it
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on professional regular grunt enemies are significantly more aggressive so that strategy didn’t work as well, so instead I put a bunch of money into upgrading the bolt thrower and killed all the zealots using that without waking the garradors. it was so fucking hard but so satisfying to finally pull off. the bolt thrower shouldn’t be slept on, because it consistently gives you the stun animation where they turn their back to you, giving you a free knife kill. and then you usually get your ammo back. it’s a great way to thin out hordes of enemies without aggroing everyone at once while conserving resources.
This is great. I was able to maintain the infighting (while randomly learning that flash grenades somehow still stun the garradors) on my Professional run but my Brick Wall Moment was the cabin siege; which was only bested when I decided fuckit and emptied every shotgun round into the nearest head instead of attempting resource management
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yeah the cabin siege was a brick wall for me too, both on hardcore and professional. it works just like the original in that you have to kill a set amount of enemies to progress, but this time it’s broken into smaller phases where a certain kill count gets you a new barricade.
honestly both times I finally beat it felt like miracles, but I was having so much fun with each attempt that I didn’t mind. I think generally the best strategy is to kill them as quickly as possible, preferably before they enter the cabin. there’s an explosive barrel outside the window nearest the stairs, and a well placed outside grenade can get you close to the first barricade. after that the ganados are very vulnerable during their climbing-through-the-window animation, so even once they start flowing in, it does a lot to keep an eye on the remaining exposed windows and headshotting ganados to keep them from entering between dealing with the ones inside the cabin. maximizing backstabs to prevent parasites is critical as well, though I still never found a consistent strategy for when they start breaching the second floor and the bull hammer guy appears. although a general good strategy for the hammer dudes (and heavier enemies in general) is to stun them with a flash grenade and then backstab.
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have they taken the suplex melee away? haven’t seen it yet
i’ve had hardly any time to play this but cosigning the praise, really looking forward to a professional playthrough and really getting into the mechanics and whatever speedrunners are doing
it’s still there but a little harder to set up. it only works on kneeling enemies when approaching from behind
I think they took away the chance that it makes their head explode which was the best part though 
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The way you’re describing the original, headshot, kick, knife etc., is my experience with a lot of the remake. How do you perform other combos? There’s the rapid changing up of strategy you’re describing, I totally feel that. But it’s rare that the encounters (on Hardcore, and only so far) are pushing me to do that sort of stylish play. Most of my time has been setting up far from enemies, shooting them in the head until they die or I get a clear enough opening to roundhouse people into a stack of other dudes, then doing that again.
Edit: this is a ridiculous question to try to answer. I guess I am just wondering if there are other obvious setups, or if it’s all improvisational set ups into these moves I’ve already identified? If so, this doesn’t feel very different from the original, in fact I would say it not at all different and that you could play the original in a similar way, just more slowly. If this game is faster, I haven’t seen it result in a more stylish or intense feeling experience than the original. Where it seems most different to me is just what weapons you can use to initiate the same old setups. Maybe I am underutilizing the knife parries…
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I think the villagers are exempt from taking the trip to Suplex City (like the original) but zealots and soldiers are always up for it
Nah, I suplexed one in the cabin hold out part because Luis did something to get them into that state. I don’t know what he did, but I did suplex one.
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this is a big part of it, but it’s also the fact that when you stagger an enemy hitting them with a melee attack isn’t always your best option, since sometimes you can backstab them if you can get around them instead, which introduces considerably more risk/reward situations. you can also set up staggers by stabbing enemies in the face. there are also more incidental setups like letting ashley get grabbed which sets you up for a free backstab, or catching enemies from behind after dodging a lunge or melee attack.
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Okay I may be coming around on some of this. I keep playing it and thinking about it when I’m not playing it. The dumb ass action hero charm is still present in the new lines of writing, which is something that I wasn’t appreciating before.
I guffawed when Salazar appears for the first time and Leon emphatically asks “who–the hell–are you?”
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Thanks for mentioning the free backstabs when they’re carrying Ashley! Came in very handy.
The part in the castle where Ashley has to go up on the raised platform and turn the cranks took me about 15 tries on hardcore. I had barely any ammo and got lucky on my last attempt as one of the vases dropped some smg ammo
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I just started this and it just feels really bad. idk, if this was something that was on game pass or whatever rather than a game I paid $60 for, I’d never play it again.