Resident Evil 4 review
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Version: 1.0.2
App Reviewed on: iPad Pro
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This review of Resident Evil 4 coming out quite a bit after its release for a very specific reason, which I'll try to articulate as best I can in this piece. The original Resident Evil 4 is a modern classic that essentially raised the bar and reinvented the way 3rd-person action games are made. The game that came to iOS is a remake of this classic, but it also just isn't really that game. It works fine enough on iOS (if you treat your device like a miniature, less capable console), but so many things have been shoved into this remake that it's an unwieldy, bloated, and generic shadow of the game it is supposed to be honoring.
Save the president's daughter
In case you haven't played some version of Resident Evil 4 before, this game takes place on a remote island and follows Leon S. Kennedy as he searches for the president's daughter, who has been kidnapped. Things on this island immediately go sideways and Leon finds himself (once again) facing off against hordes of zombie-like people and other creatures that have been infected with a parasite referred to as "las plagas."
Throughout the game, you pilot Leon as he explores this island and has to fight and scavenge his way through all kinds of places on this island to complete the rescue mission. All of the action plays out over Leon's shoulder and it generally rotates between three different kinds of setpieces: puzzle-solving, open-ended combat, and boss fights.
Infected with new stuff
This version of Resident Evil 4 starts off faithfully enough to the original. Outside of a graphical update, the only new thing you might notice about the opening hour or so are some changes to the combat model that make it less fun, like a durability system for your combat knife and a plain reticle for your weapon as opposed to the iconic laser sight.
The further you get into the game, though, things really get off the rails. Resident Evil 4 has all these new side missions, more weapon types than you can reasonably manage, a system for collecting treasures and slotting gems into them, a shooting gallery mini-game, and--perhaps most importantly--large swaths of story and core gameplay that are just entirely new.
Just play the hits
I could see a situation where the team remaking Resident Evil 4 re-writes or changes the way certain segments of the original game play out as a way to get a do-over on something that maybe could be improved by new best practices or technical know-how, but not much of this new Resident Evil 4 feels like that. Instead, they just feel like changes for changes' sake, and there are so many of them that the game feels like it takes forever to get through.
The irony of this is that this remade Resident Evil 4 doesn't take that much longer than the original to complete. It just feels that way because there is so much tacked-on extra stuff that mostly doesn't feel meaningful, including random setpieces that feel completely detached from what is happening in the story. So, though the feel of tension and gunplay is all well and good, the whole experience ends up feeling like an exercise in mastering these mechanics without really invoking much of the nostalgia or good feelings associated with the original game.
The bottom line
Resident Evil 4 is barely a remake, and in straying so far from its source material it just feels kind of generic. It could have easily just been called "The Leon Chronicles: Las Plagas" or something. Yes, it's impressive that it runs as well as it does on iOS, and, yes, it's cool to see major releases like this come to the platform, but as a re-release of one of the most influential games of the millenium, it pretty much fails.