Resident Evil 4 Review - PC

Poor Leon, he never gets a break. His first day on the job, he gets stuck in some dive town called Raccoon City, and now he’s stuck in a backwater village in eastern Europe looking for a whiny teenager. The worst part about it is all the damn cultists with tentacle heads. Yes, Resident Evil 4 is back and this time, its motion controlled.

Déjà vu All Over Again

Sure, you could say this is simply another blatant attempt by Capcom to cash in on their laurels by porting a previous success to another platform, and you’d be right. The difference here is that this game is easily one of the best action/horror types ever made. The conversion to Wii controls is also one of the best you’ll find on the system. This release is especially good if you’ve avoided the game up until now, or haven’t played it in a while.

If you’re new to the game, the plot is straightforward. Leon, once a rookie cop during the Raccoon City zombie outbreak, is now a secret service agent sent to an obscure part of Spain after the president’s kidnapped teenage daughter. It seems a bizarre cult has taken her hostage and all signs point to a reclusive town in the country. Unfortunately, things are worse than anyone had hoped, as the townsfolk mindlessly mob Leon at every turn. Eventually, it becomes clear that an evil cult leader is hard at work plotting world domination by infecting the locales with some awful, mind-controlling parasite.

Wii-Mote Carnage

Essentially the GameCube version with all the extras of the PS2 iteration, the Wii Edition’s main claim to fame is the motion sensitive aiming controls. Using the nunchuck to move Leon around feels standard, but the remote is used like a light gun. The effect is surprisingly entertaining. The laser sight is gone in lieu of a targeting crosshair, and although precise aiming can be harder, the overall effect is a visceral and engaging experience.

Other Wii-centric additions include shaking the remote back and forth to run or swim faster during interactive cinematic sequences. The problem with the use of the remote, however, is how tiring the game can be. Holding the controller up during large firefights might possibly get annoying, but during some of the interactive sequences (especially the lake boss battle), having to shake the remote faster and faster just gets painful.

A strange choice in the control design is that you’ll have to hold the trigger button to enter the aim mode, but the nunchuck analog stick is still used to turn and look up and down. The remote only let you aim at anything directly on the screen. Though this seems odd at first, it works well—especially considering how poorly using the remote to turn and look around has been implemented in other games so far.

Cubic Evil

Capcom has really done nothing beyond implement the remote aiming system to improve the gameplay. You still can’t move and shoot at the same time, and, worse, there’s no ability to strafe. Though Resident Evil 4 brought some much-needed changes to the previously static and awkward controls of the series, there’s definitely room for improvement.

The presentation of the game is virtually identical to the GameCube version. Thankfully, it was a great looking game, so Resident Evil 4 still manages to look excellent. Like most Wii games, it suffers from the lack of high definition and more refined textures and characters of other current generation systems. The audio is a high point, however. Excellent overall voice acting, great ambient music, and terrific sound effects heighten the tense atmosphere.

Play it Again, Leon

Taking the original GameCube classic, adding the extra Ada Wong side-story (Separate Ways), and customizing the controls to the Wii proves to be a good idea. Resident Evil 4 remains one of the best horror games around, and while there’s no new content here, the budget price makes the Wii Edition a scary ride worth taking again.

Article by: Jason D'Aprile
Video Produced by: Michael Benson