Evil Perfected

In the world of horror games, Resident Evil is king. After the series' initial release in 1996, Resident Evil (RE) publisher Capcom realized something that the film industry knew for years, there's big money to be made off scaring people. While video games had made us smile, cheer or yell with frustration, they had never made us jump or scream with fear until RE. The original 1996 game set you in a mansion in Raccoon City, a suburb in Midwestern America. The Umbrella Corporation had unleashed a zombie horde within the labs underneath the mansion and you played as an unaware member of STARS, a special task force from Raccoon City police sent to investigate strange occurrences around the mansion.

The game was a massive hit and thanks to the success of the first game Capcom would release a series of sequels and spinoffs over the next 10 years, some better than others. The first few sequels, such as RE2 and RE: Code Veronica, were met with rave reviews, introducing new characters and new scenarios to the zombie outbreak. However, as we moved into the new millennium the series had begun to grow stale. Other horror series such as Silent Hill and Fatal Frame began providing bigger scares and better games. Also, games across all genres were developing better controls and more compelling gameplay. Resident Evil was becoming an old fashioned afterthought. Capcom knew they needed to try something new. After almost half a decade of development, that something new was Resident Evil 4.

Storywise, RE4 took gamers to a place halfway across the world from Raccoon City. As Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop who was caught up in the events of RE2, you are now an agent for the US Government investigating the kidnapping of the President's daughter.. A terrorist group in an unnamed European country (although all of the enemies speak Spanish) takes responsibility for the kidnapping, and minutes after arriving at a small village in the woods, you are attacked by an army of villagers for no apparent reason. Brandishing pitchforks, axes and the ever iconic chainsaw, the villagers soon mob you, giving you the true feeling of being alone against the world. That is until the gong of a church bell mysteriously drives all the villagers away. As you delve deeper into the village, you find that these are not normal villagers, nor are they normal zombies. They are called Los Ganados, regular people turned into a cult, infected with a rare parasite called Las Plagas, allowing them to be controlled by the cult's leader, the sinister Saddler. The parasites mutate their human hosts, turning what begin as demented villagers into huge, insectoid monsters. As you proceed through the game, delving deeper into the cult's plot, the mutations become more drastic and creatures grow more frightening. You'll also come to learn that the cult's plot just started with kidnapping the President's daughter, with a master plan to spread Las Plagas across the globe.

The demo for RE4 came out a few weeks before the game hit shelves and it was obvious we were in for something new. The most obvious improvement was the game's camera. Older RE games had cameras in set positions, viewing your person running around a room from a static position. RE4 moved the camera over the shoulder of your character, making the action feel much more dynamic as you can only see what your character sees, blocking out any enemies that may be coming from behind. When you would aim, the character would move to the side and fill the screen with your enemies, making it easier to assess the situation and aim your gun directly at your adversaries' weak spots, most likely their heads. Finally, RE4 was the first game made entirely and exclusively in wide-screen, giving you a wider field of view than any game before, making the action much more cinematic and shoving a greater number of flesh-eating freaks on screen than ever before. Also new to the series were quick time events, cinematic events that went beyond just running and shooting where timed button presses could mean the difference between life and death. These events could involve outrunning a falling boulder, dashing out of the way of a runaway truck, or a hand-to-hand precision knife fight with one of the game's biggest villains. All of these gameplay improvements turned RE4 into something new, not just a horror survival game, but a horror action game. You no longer had to run away from zombies because of limited ammo or crappy controls, you now felt like you had the power to take them all on and blow them away. This doesn't mean that the game was any easier than the older games, but you now had more tools to dispose of a lot more zombies than in any horror game before.

Also, the game was a visual delight. In 2005, RE4 set a new standard for video game graphics. The human and creature character models were startlingly realistic and for a Gamecube game. The environments, ranging from the European village in the woods to a massive castle and a complex island laboratory look amazing even by today's standards. Ominous grey skies, striking stormy nights, blazing fires and other visual effects set the scene as you see the shadows and reflections of enemies waiting around every corner. The Xbox 360 launched about 10 months after RE4 debuted, presenting stronger graphic processing but several gamers claimed at the time that Resident Evil 4 still looked better than a majority of the launch games of the new generation. All of the technical aspects of RE4 were top notch and are still impressive by today's standards.

While RE4 may have toned down the horror aspect of the series, it raised the entire series to a new level of quality and went on to be one of the most influential games of the decade. Several games from Gears of War to Uncharted 2 have followed the games over-the-shoulder viewpoint and games ranging from God of War to the brand new Bayonetta have quick time events during their cutscenes. Yet, for all the games that it has influenced, no game since RE4 has been able to match the perfect combination of graphics, action, plot, character development, variety, tremendous boss battles and replayability. I would like to nitpick the game's problems, but they are so few and far between that they don't even warrant mentioning. It's hard to call any game perfect, but Resident Evil 4 is about as close as it comes. Gamecube, PS2 and Wii owners owe it to themselves to try out what this reviewer considers to be the best game of its generation, the best horror-action game ever made and one of the greatest games of all time, Resident Evil 4.