'Resident Evil 4 Remake' Is Truly Remarkable [4K Review]

don't be mad at me I never played the original Resident Evil 4. I know I know I'm terrible let's just say I was raised in a household where a game like Resident Evil 4 uh back when it released would have been viewed as the height of evil so I just was never going to play it I never stood a chance and by the time I got really into gaming After High School and into college this game was frankly a decade old and to be honest there were a lot of other games that piqued my interest including games like Resident Evil 7 and eventually Resident Evil 8. so the point is I never really felt the urge to go back and play this game that I heard a lot of people talk Kylie about and that was by all descriptions pretty clunky for modern Gamers to enjoy but then the news came out about Resident Evil 4 remake they were going back and rebuilding this game from scratch for modern audiences needless to say a lot of Hardcore fans of Resident Evil 4 were extremely excited to get to go through this game once again and people like me who never played the original were very into you know to see what all the hullabaloo was about was this game actually that good or are people just looking back on it too fondly with their Nostalgia Rose tinted glasses and I will be real with you I get it I get it now I played the Remake and I can really understand and appreciate what made this game not just special for the time but made it groundbreaking for the time a lot of the things they did in Resident Evil 4 would go on to be used as narrative and gameplay mechanics and tricks within Naughty Dog Games within Sony Santa Monica titles and they became Staples of linear narrative Adventures that focused on thrill on adventure and high value cinematic set pieces a lot of what makes our industry so incredible today owes itself to the original Resident Evil 4 title back in 2005. and in this video I'm gonna offer my quick thoughts on what makes this game really special and a couple of the other things that I think maybe don't work too well but to give my SparkNotes opinion I think this game is pretty remarkable and I can understand why it's been so heavily lauded over the last 18 years and why it will continue to be praised as one of the the best thriller action games ever made and don't worry we're gonna get into discussions about combat and gun choice and selection and stuff so I'm sure you're going to see lots of gameplay that if you are a hardcore fan of Resident Evil 4 it will make you cringe because I'm choosing weird weapons as somebody with no experience in this game but just bear with me we'll talk about all of that I actually think it's pretty interesting that somebody like me can go into the game with a brand new fresh perspective having no baggage or Nostalgia bias towards this game whatsoever and can still have a really remarkable experience without knowledge of what the meta guns are what the best loadout is what are the tricks to getting this boss taken down quickly I can just go in experience it without any bias and still have an incredible time because let's be real sometimes they do these remakes and it's like really awesome for the people that were excited for the Remake but for other people it's just like super lackluster I think of Red Faction gorilla remastered yeah that's what they called it you are made of stupid I loved Red Faction gorilla and I was really excited to finally get a chance to replay this game I hadn't played since high school but then when we eventually got it I was like oh well you know for me this is awesome but for literally every other person on the planet it's probably really not something they really give a crap about but with this game I think everybody new and old fans alike can get something out of this and it's pretty remarkable but of course real quick thank you to our sponsor manscaped manscaped is the global men's Lifestyle brand that's disrupting the beard and hair trimming Market I think it's really important to be well groomed so I was very pleased when manscaped offered to send me 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remake and Resident Evil 3 remake and of course the demo for this game to offer my quick and dirty opinions on each of these I thought Resident Evil 7 which was my first experience to the Resident Evil franchise was really really cool it was a cinematic terrifying game that was more of a suspense thriller than it was a typical action game Resident Evil 8 clearly took a lot of inspiration from Resident Evil 4 as I can see now having played through the remake of Thor however I didn't feel as though it landed quite as strong as Resident Evil 7. specifically with the last hour or so which seemed to try and replicate a Call of Duty game more than stick to its roots as a Resident Evil title Resident Evil 2 remake I thought was remarkable for a handful of reasons Chief among them was its faithful adaptation to the original from what I could tell and also its high production value and very well crafted environments sound design and suspenseful pacing Resident Evil 3 remake I thought was utterly atrocious it was insultingly short for how cheap it was and I thought it represented perfectly a lot of the ills and problems with modern day triple a big budget remake game development it was a soulless rushed out project that was as short as it was uninspired and it really really ticked me off but then we come to Resident Evil 4 the demo comes out and I decided to try it it's of course the sequence in the village with all the villagers Chasing You chainsaw guy it's a very notable and iconic sequence for many players who have been in the gaming industry for a long time however like I said I didn't really get into gaming until the early 20 teens leading into the mid-20 teams because prior to that I was like obsessed with chess and I went around the country playing in chess tournaments all through middle school and high school and everything so I never got the chance to experience these games in the early to mid 2000s so I never had any sort of nostalgic bias towards this sequence of course I've seen it all over the place in all sorts of videos people talk about it all of the time even before this remake and for good reason it's a really stressful sequence it's difficult and all that is tied up with a beautiful bow of what the hell is going on which makes it again very memorable the first time I tried the demo was actually on stream and I made it I guess uh without dying at least I don't think and it was a close call um not not very good at it if you want to see the full stream clip of that I'll have it linked in the description box below on my live stream highlights Channel and you can check it out there because the first time I tried this I had no idea what I was doing and people made fun of me because I wasn't doing the headshot and then spin Roadhouse kick that apparently is a staple of Resident Evil 4 but after I tried the demo the first time you guys let me know about that maneuver and how it was recommended so I went through again got the hang of it got the shotgun and before I knew it I got the hang of this whole sequence which prepped me and excited me for the eventual release of Resident Evil 4 remake in its entirety to put it simply I was pretty impressed by the demo the controls were super tight the graphics were very impressive the sound design was stellar and the game ran well to boot which really checks all of the boxes you would hope would be checked with a demo I mean we got like a four spoken demo a few months ago or a year ago whatever that game was it's a blur for everybody involved but when we got a demo for that game it actively diminished excitement for that game people went into that demo excited for forespoken tried the demo and ended up canceling their pre-orders because it sucked so bad and they're like oh this is stinky I don't like this but with the Resident Evil 4 remake demo that we got it actually excited people more and people got more pumped for it including myself which is awesome that's kind of what demos are supposed to do so on launch day I downloaded Resident Evil 4 remake and I booted it up over on stream to enjoy it what immediately struck me was just how much they had actually improved the graphics settings and Ultra wide support since the demo itself it's not very often that a game steadily improves in its graphical Fidelity closer to launch but this is one of those occasions where they seemingly kept optimizing and cranking these knobs to the point where I think this is one of the best looking games of the year frankly furthermore as I worked through the opening hours of the game on stream I realized that this was a different kind of title than what I was used to from the Resident Evil franchise Resident Evil 7 is kind of tough to play it's extremely stressful it's quite scary and it's meant to disgust you in many cases it's one of those games that like my wife doesn't like me playing because it makes me like grumpy it's it's like working out without a water bottle it just makes me feel gross and by the end of it I'm like that was fun but I'm angry you know it's one of those games on top of all that the main character Ethan is not super likable like he's there he's more supposed to be an avatar upon which you can project your own stresses and anxieties but he's not like a well-written character I mean we never even see his face really is through re7 and then an re8 you can sort of see his face if you like hack the camera a little bit but all told I don't think it's that scandalous a thing to say that re7 and re8 are not really about the protagonist as a character it's more just a thing for you to inhabit because it's first person after all Resident Evil 4 remake is totally different Leon is a character in and of himself and even though it's certainly more of a b grade story than a high quality Naughty Dog cinematic title Leon is somebody that you will get to know pretty well and pretty quickly pair with that the secondary cast of care characters like Ashley who is likable in her own way and you start to have an endearing though not too serious story that's at the core of this game and listen I know some people maybe were expecting me to be like oh this story is super cringe because it's not very well thought out and the bad guys just the bad guy for the sake of being a bad guy and it's very very minimal in its depth and Exposition and profundity but listen I think that it's honestly okay for some games and movies and books and things to have a b grade story I don't think it's that bad of a thing the problem is when expectations aren't in line if there's a super serious cinematic Style game like the last of us and then it comes out with B grade plot points that stands out and that's a problem because they set the bar here and then they failed to meet it however if you come along and you have a b grade story and you make it very very clear early on hey this isn't that serious we have like a guy with a bag on his head and a massive chainsaw that chases you around and then there's an another guy that has like a bull's head on his head and then he follows you around like you know I get it his face was distorted from the plague and so then he was ashamed so he put the thing over his face but like it's a little outrageous it's kind of a b movie style decision if we're being real but as long as they make that clear and that expectation is established then the bar is here and that's much easier to meet and then if they exceed it at certain points with really good character building sequences where you're running through levels with Ashley building that relationship passively through gameplay again another thing that The Last of Us and other Naughty Dog games would go on to copy or take inspiration from that then overcomes that bar and you'll find yourself actually more impressed with the story than if they shot for a pier and still made it close but failed to meet that expectation and I think this is part of the reason that people look back on Resident Evil 4 from back in 2005 with such Nissan love sure it's predictable sure there's cringe dialogue but it's a fun be great adventure it's okay in my mind part of the reason I think Resident Evil 8 started to flounder for me especially towards the end is because they started to raise that bar and they were trying to tell a more intense serious story of like a father trying to save his daughter who's been put into a bunch of jars and so like it gets weird and then by the end of it they sort of have done it they've sort of stuck The Landing but it's weird and it leaves a weird taste in your mouth and so you just kind of finish the game feeling slightly unsettled and weirded out whereas in this game they just make it clear hey this is kind of a silly story you're you're playing Leon you're going around here shooting zombie creatures and monsters and then you're saving the president's daughter and go have fun just go go do knock yourself out do whatever but moving on from the story in terms of core mechanics we have of course the Staples of Resident Evil games which this game partially established their stealth combat Inventory management crafting various side quests and side activities and of course upgrades to weapons and equipment all of this is pretty standard nothing to write home about however the way that they handled specifically the weapon variability and variety really impressed me speaking as an outsider to this franchise who doesn't have a lot of nostalgia tied up in it it's pretty common for people not familiar with the Resident Evil franchise to think of these games as primarily suspense Thrillers I think the overwhelming success of Resident Evil 7 is in large part to blame for this people just assume that all of these games are the same however there's a big difference between some of these some of them are much more action-adventure focused other are more action thriller some are suspense thriller and then others are suspense horror games and then there's some like Resident Evil 4 who take a lot of little pieces of each of those categories sprinkle it in together although I would definitely argue that re4 is more of an action Thriller game than it is any of those other categories that being said I didn't expect for there to be so much variability within the weapon variety there are a lot of various pistols shotguns rifles knives explosives and all sorts of various accessories that can be attached onto different weapons for various effects don't get me wrong this is no Metro Exodus or anything it's not going to come along and offer a huge number of weapon customizations where you can basically take the weapon from one thing into a totally different thing with a few different attachments that you glue on with super glue and duct tape like it's it's not quite on that level but what is here encourages experimentation and I found myself swapping Scopes out of different guns on various occasions selling this rifle to swap to this rifle or swapping this shotgun for this gun over here over the course of my run through just to see what it was like and also because the game encourages you to shake it up during one of our later streams of the game game Crimson our resident Resident Evil Fanboy decided to come in and tease me for my weapon choices because I was using two rifles and a pistol the reason I was doing this is because I liked the high damage weak point targeting high risk High reward gameplay style that comes with using rifles what I hadn't considered though is the fact that ammo drops and crafting component drops tend to be built and balanced around having a handful of guns on hand that take different ammunition so if you lean heavily into rifles you're probably going to get the same number of crafting materials to make ammo for one rifle not balanced out to fill up two rifles in other words if you want to play this game properly you should try to have a pistol maybe an SMG a shotgun and a rifle on you just have all of them or swap out some combination of those but try not to double up on any of them but again the great thing is that even with that mistake having been made by me while I was playing through the game aim keeping two rifles kind of a long single bolt action rifle and then also a semi-automatic tactical rifle on the side even despite having both of those I still found myself having a great time not running into any major issues while playing the game it just worked the game is actually able to handle mistakes like that pretty well and even if you make a really dumb mistake like taking your knife that can be repaired and leaving it in storage for a set period of time the game will start to give you more breakable knives that you'll discover on villagers that you kill throughout the game in order to balance that out so every step of the way the devs have tried to make sure it sounds bad but they've tried to make sure that this game is idiot proof so even if you're making stupid mistakes you can still get through it and enjoy it and honestly after playing through the game there's a handful of weapons that I never really got to experiment with because I wanted to focus on maximizing the upgrades on various rifles and guns that I liked the feeling of and and so I focused on that but that's where New Game Plus comes in that's where subsequent run throughs come in and that brings me to probably the thing that Resident Evil 4 remake does the best which really helps with the very concept of replay value the pacing of Resident Evil 4 is phenomenal especially with this remake focusing so heavily on tighter level design very carefully curated enemy placement and spawns and they also remind you that every single chapter is going to end with some notable fight this could be a fight against two big troll looking dudes a big encounter with chainsaw guy or a huge narrative boss battle that's very high production value that leads into the next Act of the story I've said before that some games are easy to play um with easy being in quotation marks and in this case I think this is another game that's easy to play it's not necessarily balanced super easy to the point where anybody could just casually Waltz their way through it but it's built in a way and it's paced in a way where you can lose an entire night to this thing without much trouble because the steady drops of dopamine finishing chapters with big cool boss fights or big cinematics or major set pieces it's so carefully plopped in there every 30 to 45 minutes that it keeps you hooked there wasn't a single time in Resident Evil 4 remake where I found myself going oh man man uh just this needs to end this is so boring this sucks even sequences that really dragged on and weren't particularly fun such as the Canon section at the castle which I'm told is greatly improved over what the original was it only lasts five to ten minutes and then you move on to the next area in a lot of ways it shows the confidence of the developers that they can have a sequence which is a pretty major sequence like that Canon section and then they can just blow past it within 10 minutes they don't need to make that a half hour encounter or an hour encounter or a 10 minute encounter that you then experience 15 other times throughout the game they can just put it in there and then move on and that goes back to the original design of 2005 and it still holds true now that sometimes if you just clip along at a good Pace things work out better because players will forget the kind of bleh Parts because they'll move so quickly onto the good parts that being said there is a little bit of repetition here they do recycle some encounters and I know there are various narrative reasons for you running into the bull headed guy a few times maybe it's a different bull-headed guy maybe it's the same one who knows it's confusing same with saw chainsaw guy uh all of those things there are reasons why you probably run into them multiple times but it doesn't change the fact that for the player they're forced to engage in that gameplay activity of taking down this particular enemy multiple times I would say however I actually think it works really well in this game and maybe this is just special pleading or me becoming a fanboy of Resident Evil 4 but I think it actually is very intentional because it shows you how much you've progressed with the first time you take on chainsaw guy it's kind of tough and it's like kind of really freaking stressful and you're freaking out because you're like I can't touch this guy this is impossible but then the last time that you encounter him or one of the other archetypes of the big scary brute guys you're just able to pop them in the head three four times with your attack rifle and then they're down and done and you move on you feel as though you've actually made a substantial significant Improvement in your Loadout and in your ability to deal with these threats in my view this is the exact same reason why games like ring or Sakura or bloodborne name any of the from soft games you want it's the same reason why those games will have you encounter a boss and then run into that boss as a regular grunt enemy in later sections of the game it's sometimes because they're just being lazy and copy and pasting it but other times and I would say most of the time it's done very very intentionally so that you can feel oh remember when I was stressed taking that guy on now it's easy no biggie I can handle this and it's no longer worrisome but all told Resident Evil 4 is really really remarkable and I think the Remake does it justice as far as I can tell I'm very very pleased as somebody who never was really into Resident Evil 4 I get it now and I think that's really the best compliment you can pay to a remake that the Remake sells you on the vision of the original and makes you fall in love with this whole thing for the first time while for others it made them fall in love with it all over again I'm sure there's going to be plenty of discussion by the way of this at the game awards for game of the year I'm personally a little conflicted I don't love the idea of remakes winning game of the year because it seems like most of the hard work for this was done back in 2004 and five while they made this game originally so it feels weird to give it game of the year in 2023 when it's a remake just kind of refreshing the ideas that were made 18 years ago but maybe I'm alone in that I don't know I I don't think I'd be upset if it won game of the year because it's really really good but I'm also a little bit off on it I don't know let me know in the comments what you think do you think that this is something that should qualify for game of the year or if you think that that's something that should only be allowed for games that were specifically created and released for the first time this year it's moments like this where I wish that YouTube did like a poll you could do like a poll in the comment section that would be so cool for moments like this because I really really want want to know but I guess just comment and we'll do there I guess we could do like maybe we'll do a poll on stream come over to stream when this video goes up I'll be streaming at this very moment head to the link tree Link in the description box and come over to the stream and we'll run like an actual poll of whether or not this game should qualify for game of the year because I am actually quite interested in what you guys think but all told this game is phenomenal and I am so pleasantly surprised to have loved it as much as I have I really really think it's remarkable and if you have not played it you absolutely freaking should but I'm gonna wrap it up there and you know what I think I'm actually gonna start a new game plus playthrough of the game just for myself not for a video not for a review or a critique just to enjoy it um which for me is not that common usually I finish games for videos and I'm done and I want to just be alone but this game is so good that I actually am excited to go through it again and try different guns and different approaches and uh that for me is pretty remarkable without a doubt the game did something incredible just wow shout out to anybody down in the comments who knows what I'm referring to there if you're an OG and you know what I'm uh referencing there you know you're an OG I love you dearly but with that thank you for watching check out manscaped in the pinned comment or in the description box below and of course come over to our stream where we're streaming every Monday Wednesday Friday and honestly we're gonna start streaming a lot more because viewership is spiking and I feel like I'd be dumb not to so come over say hi and join us I would love to see you over there but that's it for me much love I'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 100,322

Keywords: luke stephens, luke stephens resident evil 4, luke stephens re4, re4, re4 critique, re4 review, i tried, Resident Evil 4 Remake, re4r

Id: ielm4MGZlTc

Length: 26min 59sec (1619 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023