Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew Castle, how’s it been going? You sound so ill that I feel terrible making you record this. Are you okay, buddy? Yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine. Like, if Leon can power through the ordeal he faces, I can put up with a mildly chesty cough. It puts things in perspective, doesn’t it, playing Resident Evil 4? Yeah, it does, although I briefly, when you said Leon, I was like, does he mean the guy on GamesRadar? That’s like, I was thinking who, because that’s how awake I am currently. So, yes, Leon S. Kennedy, yeah, that guy sure goes through some shit. If he can, you know, deal with Las Plagas, then surely you can deal with the bath version of Las Plagas, whatever that is, you know? Yeah, I think, if you, I don’t think it’s the kind of illness where if you shoot my head off with a shotgun, like a horrible snake emerges from my neck stump, I don’t think that’s what I’ve got. No, just some light discharge and you need to go to bed, basically, that sort of thing. I wish I hadn’t said light discharge. That’s throwing me out. I’m not gonna lie. The worst thing I’ve ever done, like to myself, in a given lunchtime, right, is- This is so specific. I can’t wait to hear what it is. It’s like I was eating an absolutely terrific whole bagel. Like, you know, they do that one that’s like brie and bacon and then tomato chutney and like- Oh, yes. That’s the one Catherine has. That’s like a five-star bagel. Like, if you made that in Final Fantasy XV, he’d be like, ugh, fucking great or whatever. Like, just, you know, he’d be really impressed. I was eating that and then read a BBC story about the spread of gonorrhea, and then there was like a box-out on like, what are the symptoms of gonorrhea? And reading that while biting into this bagel is the worst thing I’ve ever done to myself, brackets, on a given lunchtime. So, I just want to share that with you, Matthew, really. Will you be able to eat that and enjoy that bagel in the future, or is it tainted forever now? It’s, you know, there might be a slight amount of like, trauma to overcome, but I think I’ll get there again. It’s just so damn tasty, man. You read the box-out on the fucking symptoms of gonorrhea while eating. That’s so, that’s so daft. Yeah, I mean, I just should have clicked off, but you know when you’re just sort of scrolling with the wheel and then like, sandwich in one hand, and mouse in the other, dual-wielding lunchtime content. So that was what I did. But we’re doing a podcast about Resident Evil 4 Remake, Matthew. So we were very kindly sent early code for this by an old buddy at Capcom, Ian Dixon. He’s had our back, which is nice. And so yes, we decided to blast through it. We wanted to do a whole episode on it. We wanted that episode to go live the day the game goes live. We’ve managed to do that, which I’m very grateful for. Really exciting, and how are we going to do this? So the game’s just out. You’ve probably just bought it. You’re there thinking, I don’t want to have the game ruined for me. I totally get it. So two sections of this podcast. First section, the longest section. It will broadly cover how we feel about the game. Top line, very in line with the reviews that are out there, I would say. Then in part two, which I think will be shorter, we’ll talk about some more specifics that are in the game. Closer to spoiler content, but no major spoilers, because I am aware that when you have to go and listen to a podcast, go back and listen to the end of a podcast is a right pain in the arse. The idea is the first part will be very self-contained, so you’ll feel satisfied by the end result. Is that fair, Matthew? Yeah, I think that sounds right. It’s like, this is the campaign, and then the second part is mercenaries. Yeah, very good, very good. That’s a perfect analogy, although this doesn’t have mercenaries in it. That’s spoiler number one. Yeah, that’s not a spoiler to say, right? They’ve said it’s coming later as a free update. Which makes sense, yeah. I can sort of see that. Mercenaries as well at the time was one of those bonus modes where I think that they probably didn’t anticipate just how popular it was going to be, because it’s fairly straightforward. You do have mostly levels from the game, and then Waterworld, of course, and those are very much like, they feel like quite compact, you blast through them a few times. Mercenaries just sort of took on a life of its own, I think, as things went. I think it was a pre-existing minigame anyway, but yeah. I don’t think I’m jumping the gun here, but actually one observation I did have about this, and it made me think about mercenaries, was whether mercenaries and playing a lot of mercenaries since Resident Evil 4 came out originally, if it’s changed our relationship with how we think about encounters in this game. Because when you go into a scene where you’re swarmed with enemies, which is basically what mercenaries is, I now switch into mercenaries mode, rather than necessarily like, oh, shit, I’m kind of in a fun arcade place, rather than necessarily embedded in the highly tense situation suggested by the game. Does that make sense? I sort of see what you mean, yeah. There’s bits of the game where I’m like, oh, this is a mercenaries map. You know, like I can just, I see, you start seeing level design as like an arena where it’s almost that sort of switch of like, no, you’re trapped in here with me. You know, it’s that kind of thing. Yeah, there’s like, you’re like in a giant square with like raised platforms and like ladders and things to hide behind and loads of barrels. And you’re like, yeah, this kind of is a mercenaries map. I think like how it offsets it, not to like jump the gun too much here, is that because you’re like, your ammo feels very regulated by the campaign. Like it’s designed to keep you sort of like up against it a bit with ammo, whereas mercenaries is very much like, you don’t really run out of ammo. You’re constantly being fed ammo by the enemies you kill. And it’s all about momentum. And here it’s a bit more like, a bit more of the survival horror stuff, not weighing it down, but certainly like it’s another factor to consider to not, not to blow through your arsenal too quickly, use all your magnum bullets and then go, oh shit, I’ve got nothing left for the next chapter, kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. Okay, so, let’s get into this Matthew. Section one here, like I say, top line, Resident Evil 4 Remake thoughts, very kind of like review style sort of discussion coming here. Matthew, is it worth recapping our respective journeys with Resident Evil 4 before we get into it, or have we told those stories too many times in this podcast? I think if I tell the anecdote about how I traded in some games to buy this game for a pound one more time, I’ve definitely told that story at least three times on this podcast. I’m not sure it’s an even great story to begin with. It’s about trading in some games. Yeah, and then for me, I didn’t have a GameCube, so I got the PS2 version a little bit later. But it was one of the games, one of several games that I had like a little pause from playing video games for a while. I came back and this and well, Resident Evil 4, the original Resident Evil 4 in 2005 and Metal Gear Solid 3 combined were my two games to make me think, oh no, I just have to play this. This medium has to be what I do now for the rest of my life, basically. So there was that kind of element to it, hugely influential, really dug it and then got so into the kind of minutia of the different sort of like bits and pieces that make it sort of culty as well as big. It was just like big success, but the thing about Resident Evil 4 is I always got the sense it was like a staggered success, like over time it grew because GameCube, I know it’s successful for a GameCube game, but also it’s a relatively limited audience. So it comes to PS2, then it grows again. And then I feel like when it hit Wii, it sold mega well. And then suddenly loads and loads of people, more people were playing it. And so then you got to go years down the line and these HD editions are out there. And so I think its reputation was like, critically it was amazing at first, but I think it took a little while to become like a mega blockbuster. And it means that by the time Resident Evil 5 came along in 2009, it means that like that was a genuine like huge multi-format blockbuster and a massive deal. But do you think that’s accurate that Resident Evil 4 had like this accumulating reputation? Like it was critically beloved, but then took a tiny bit of time for it to sort of like grow in people’s affections? I’m not the best judge of this to be honest, because like in my world, which was reading magazines and writing magazines, it was always big and beloved and cherished. It’s interesting that this idea of it like really taking off on Wii, because I think by the time we reviewed on Wii, and well, I did love it and gave it a glowing review for NGamer, and I thought the Wii version was really good. It didn’t feel like as exciting. It felt a little bit played out. Like we didn’t cover it much as a magazine, even though you probably are right. It was, you know, in terms of people actually engaging with it, that was probably the time to do it and to really dig into coverage. But we didn’t, because we were like, oh, it’s Resident Evil 4. Everyone knows that. So, yeah, magazines have just really skewed my take on that, I think. No, it’s fine. The reason I say that is because I found a destructoid story that says Resident Evil 4 Wii sales, edge out, GameCube version. Right, okay. So it suggests that it just like, you know, replicated its success a little down the line. I agree with you. By the time it came along, people were like right to talk up the control scheme for the Wii edition as being really good. But I had the same thing as you, whereas I suddenly had HD shiny things. And Resident Evil 4 didn’t seem less exciting by comparison, but it was no longer the fresh new thing. So, you know, but I do think that there’s an element of that to it. It being so easy to discover means that its reputation has just grown and grown. But yeah, it was clear from the off that it was a 10 out of 10. And then me and my friend Andrew, the protagonist of Final Fantasy 7, we got hugely into all of the different bits and pieces of this. They’re obviously the merchant, but also of different lines and cut scenes that we repeat to each other. Talking about Mike, the helicopter guy, like we just, we would talk about this stuff. I was literally every three months for the last 15 years, I would say. We’re just, Resi 4 just like was just a massive, massive game for us. And so when I went into games media, it felt like one of my true sort of like core texts of like, if I believe anything, it’s that this is the one of the greatest video games ever made, and then approaching everything through that kind of lens, really. And that may be sort of explaining why I had a slight apathy towards Gears of War when that came along. Anyway, here’s a key question, Matthew, because, you know, I’m a big fan of hearing your anecdote about trading in GameCube games and then buying it for a power or whatever. That’s top stuff. But do you think Resi 4 needed a remake? Probably not in terms of, I don’t think there was necessarily anything in the original game that needed fixing. And actually, I’ve been playing the original game after finishing the remake. And, like, it’s just as compelling, has its own rhythms, you know, it’s kind of a very different game in a way. So don’t think it had to happen. But that isn’t to say that there isn’t something, like, very neat in seeing, you know, a slightly different take on this classic material. Maybe see some of its action conventions updated to kind of how people have built and evolved, you know, the combat system it originally introduced. So I’m like, you know, spoiler alert, I really like this game. Yeah, so like, I don’t know, like, I’m fundamentally happy it exists. If it didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be like, well, one of the great injustices was that they didn’t return to Resident Evil 4. Yeah, I think it’s fair to say I’m probably in the same boat with you there. And I think that, you know, there was an obvious urgency with Resident Evil 2 remake and Resident Evil 3 remake that those were, you know, those were like fixed camera perspective games from the 90s that were not revisited by Capcom, even though obviously the first game was remade very lavishly back on GameCube. And I think everyone sort of dreamed of seeing that version of Resident Evil 2 and 3. That isn’t what happened, of course, because so much time moved on, that they basically had to update them to our modern standards and make them proper third-person games for the camera and stuff. But they were such successful versions of those games that I think that it gave me, well, two was, three is more up for debate, obviously. But it did give me the sense that by tackling four, it was in quite safe hands. And if nothing else, I least was curious to see how they would do it, you know? So there was that element to it, even though if I didn’t necessarily think I needed it. There was a tiny part of my brain that thought Resident Evil 4 was like an end of PS2 GameCube generation game and those, it just looks muddy, like, you know, you just kind of wish there was a crisper HD version of it to enjoy. There’s a tiny bit of that to it, I think, when you look at it now. That’s not to say I think it’s, you know, like it’s an ugly game or anything. I think when I was playing the Oculus version that was released just like, just over a year ago, that I still thought, oh, actually, I love the aesthetic of this still. It’s still really, really holds up. But certainly there’s something about, you know, you just have to, you just, you’re curious. Like, what would this look like in HD? What would this look like if someone gave it a proper sort of shot in the arm? So didn’t need it necessarily, but curiosity, absolutely, you know. So, so Matthew, top line, what do you think of the remake? I think it’s still a really amazing action game. It’s a different kind of action game, a bit faster on its feet. It definitely behaves more like a modern game, you know, some of the kind of key changes to the combat, which we’ll get to in a bit. I really dig. And that, like, moment to moment, that’s what was getting me through. I was just having loads of fun doing the actions. Like, this is just fun. This just fundamentally works and fundamentally does it for me. Like, I love this particular, like, ecosystems of enemy types, weapons, interaction settings, like, this is just my jam. And I guess the other strand to it is just being interested in seeing, like, how it does and doesn’t change. And that maybe makes it more of, like, an academic exercise than, like, unnecessarily viscerally lost in the moment. I mean, there are scenes and there are changes and there are things which elevate certain bits and make them so exciting that you aren’t thinking, oh, this is different. You’re just like, fuck, I’ve got to deal with this. But that kind of combination of, like, being interested to see, like, what it did next or how it dealt with the original next, but kind of, like, wrapped up in it was never less. It’s never less than just a really great, great action game to play. It’s my take. Yeah, I think what’s amazing about the action in this game is that they have basically the entire dynamics of Resident Evil 4 are here in terms of how you shoot enemies, how when you hit weak spots you have the opportunity to do melee attacks, how they drop ammo so you’re continuously given, like, not tons of ammo, but enough to keep going. It’s like much more of an action game than, say, a third person, proper third person shooter than, say, the Resident Evil 2 remake was, but still carries across some of the real strengths of that Resident Evil 2 remake and, like, the limbs falling off of enemies and stuff like that, and just, like, being a kind of a few steps up in terms of animation, and obviously, and things like that. And then also just the fact that they weren’t afraid to look at the fundamentals of Resident Evil 4’s combat and say, what if we did it this way instead, and all of those changes, I think, which are mostly, like, minor, the fundamentals are absolutely still there. All of those changes, to me, are very sensible, and make it feel really contemporary, exciting, and not exactly the same as the original game. And so I think that, like, it puts it in this weird position where both have a reason to exist. And you have a reason to play both still. And that’s pretty cool. That’s a pretty cool idea as a remake. I agree with you, there’s a certain academic quality to it as well, of, like, also just, like, your own memory being jogged of, oh, I didn’t realise this bit was at this part in the game, and I didn’t realise, you know, that this happened earlier than I thought it did. And then also, obviously, they add some bits too, though not loads and loads. I mean, they have they have remixed some of the order. Yeah, so I guess we’ll get into that, but… Full disclosure, I’ve not played original Resident Evil 4 in a few years now. You know, it’s just, like, locked in my head. And, you know, there were some bits in the game, I was like, oh, yeah, this is classic, but just, like, replaying bits of it now, I’m like, oh, yeah, I can actually see, like, how they have chopped and changed it in little, sort of, subtle ways. The cliché with these is it’s kind of like, this is the game you remember, you know, and then you go back and play the original and see that it isn’t quite how you remember it. But there’s definitely some bits where they’ve… We’ll save that for the spoiler section, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. But top line, I think this is terrific. It’s the… I absolutely blasted through it. It took me 18 hours. I am quite languid with games these days. It takes me ages to play them. Matthew will churn through 50 hours of game in one week and I get through eight because we’re built differently mentally. And so that’s why Matthew managed to finish God of War Ragnarok and I didn’t. But for this episode, it was not really a problem to accommodate this game because it was just… Every spare hour I had, I just played it and played it and played it. And it was the momentum of it and the excitement, just like it captured the joy I had playing the original game in just so many ways and it’s been like probably three or four years since I enjoyed a game this much, just really, really good. So yeah, as a massive fan of the original, I think this is a phenomenal job. I have a few little caveats we’ll get into, but yes, let’s start with what they got right in the remake there, Matthew, what do you think is spot on about this redo? I love visually how they’ve enriched the world, maybe more so in like, I think the opening act which is kind of set in the village and the surrounding area is maybe where you feel like the jump the most because there’s like a mixture of, there’s more visual density to that area because you’re in like the forests and there’s the village and their houses and like, you know, if you know the game at all, where the second and third act take place are a little more kind of like monolithic feeling and there’s like less of the natural world in there so like, you know, I think like the most impressive like, wow, this looks so much better or so different, all really like happened in the sort of first act, all that effect had slightly faded by the time I got to like the castle and stuff. I love the changes they’ve made to the action to make it feel a little more like, it’s not a little more accommodating just to fit like the action appetite of how we play games in 2023, you know, like dumb things like you have a, you know, weapons are mapped to a D pad rather than having to go into your inventory to equip a weapon every time you want to change, which in the original game, going back to that now, that does fucking suck, you know, like anything that pulls you out of the world is grim and I feel like they’ve done a lot of work to keep you in the world constantly and that’s, that’s one of the big changes. There’s no longer standalone item screens. When you pick up items, you just pick them up off the ground. Even like the radio comms, they don’t cut to a separate screen. They sort of overlay over the main game and it’s, it’s that little bit more immersive. I guess when we get to the combat section, we can talk a little bit about how they’ve changed like strafing and not being stuck to the spot because that’s kind of interesting. So I guess to pull out a very specific mechanic, I really love what they did with the knife in this. One of the big things is in the original game, Leon famously has a knife and a lot of your tactics revolve around using the knife to finish people off to conserve ammo and that’s that’s like a big part of how you’re meant to play Resident Evil 4. Like it isn’t balanced for you to just go in, you know, guns blazing every single time. You need to try and like eek every sort of hit point you can out of what you have. In this, they’ve given like durability to the knife so it can actually break. At the same time, they’ve kind of empowered it in certain ways in that you can parry attacks that it couldn’t parry before, there wasn’t a parry move, which can get you out of some like really sticky situations and it gives you second chances that weren’t available to you in the original game, but the counterpoint to that is it’s like another resource you now have to manage, you know, if it breaks, you have to pay to fix it, you can upgrade it and things like that. Even how well balanced the kind of the weapon system and the combat system is in the original, to be able to take something like that and change it quite radically, but without like massively upsetting the kind of flow of it. You know, I didn’t feel like short changed, I didn’t, I was like, oh, I can’t use the same tricks I relied on, which is something I really, really liked about it. I also think they’ve just like little things like the fact that it isn’t, you know, there are chapter breaks, but there’s less kind of like loading screens, it all feels like one more continuous journey, particularly that opening act, I think the area feels a lot more like coherent and the way they’ve kind of like padded that out and kind of made it all feel like one location, like it’s, I’m not saying it feels like open world, like it’s still kind of built from the same parts, but they do some like subtle stuff with like the sort of chapter that revolves around the lake that I think makes it feel a little bit more interesting. So, you know, it’s a bit basic bits just go, the graphics are better and the combat feels nicer. But that is kind of what jumped out to me. I think there’s something to be said for the fact that they, I think like the best bits of the game feel like they, I suppose like it sort of takes the bits you remember and really pulls them out and blows them up. Like the village, like you say, is just such a phenomenal opening. I did really like, I did really love the castle as well. I think that the end stretch of the game is actually like noticeably weaker when you play this. I think that’s partly because it’s not in terms of like the combat, but in terms like the environment, you realize it’s actually like less distinctive. And so when you’re remaking it and you’ve got an island that’s just got a load of like sort of industrial stuff in it, and like some castle bits, they’re just like, it’s not that interesting a space, whereas it feels like they go weapons free with the village and the castle because they’re like, oh, these are amazing kind of ornate locations with like, you know, loads of opportunity for detail and visual effects and stuff like that. So it feels like the good the already great bits get really, really great here. And I love that about it. I think the immediacy thing is a good point. Like the even Resident Evil 5 had the instant weapon switching. They knew it was like, you know, it was something that the original Resident Evil 4 really lacked. So I agree with that. And, yeah, I think like, you know, we’ll get into the combat. But again, I think the combat is I think you’d be hard pressed to say this is worse than the original Resident Evil 4. It’s like, I definitely think it’s better, not just from a modern perspective, but even like if I was just to it feels like all the choices made with the combat were by people who truly love the original Resident Evil 4 combat. Yeah. And you really feel that. Yeah, no, I think the thing I was interested in was like, whether anyone would make the case that by letting Leon strafe now and not rooting him to the spot, like, does that like sap it of some of its tension? Because some of the brilliance of the original is like you sort of every, every time you want to shoot someone, you kind of stand your ground and it makes that targeting that little bit more tense because you’re like, every second I’m doing this is a second I could be backing away instead. Obviously now you can kind of do that both together and it does, that is just how games are, that is how they sort of function. But I did wonder like, has this like changed the character fundamentally of how this combat works? I like, if it has, it’s not in a negative way and I agree with you, like I love, love the combat in this game. But I was curious to see if other people were going to, you know, I wondered if anyone was going to say they’ve really like broken something in letting him move, but does it seem to be the case? Let’s bring forward our combat discussion here because I think it’s probably worth doing because it is truly like the thing that gets right, I think, in this remake more than anything else. It’s just phenomenal. I just love it. And I think that, I think it’s an interesting point about strafing, what I will say is the shooting feels like Resident Evil 2 Remake’s shooting in that it actually, like at first, the fact that you can obviously put on aim assist if you want to, but by default aim assist is off, that actually like felt harder to land headshots than I thought it would. But then you get, then you kind of get used to it, I think, the sensitivity of it. And then you are, it’s like, it’s a bit of a skill curve, you know, it’s, you get better at dealing with it. But that I think offsets the fact that you don’t have the like fixed movement thing, because I do think that like, that was actually something I found relatively easy in Resident Evil 4, like doing headshots and precision shots and things like that. Like it just, it felt like, it felt like it was just super responsive and quite, you know, you didn’t have to be like laser laser precise. I always thought the original almost had a little, a little bit of light gun in it, you know? Yeah. Which is maybe why the Wii Remote like always made so much sense. Because you’re like, you’re stuck to the spot. Here’s a thing, a lot of the combat’s about like hitting weak points or interrupting attacks at the right time with a bullet, which to me is like quite like, is quite light gun thinking. It’s not just about get these shots in as fast as possible. It’s about being quite careful and being able to strafe. You can be a little bit more surgical and sort of sneaky. I think you’re right about like, it’s harder to land those shots and that counterbalances. You don’t have a laser sight at the start of this game, which is part, I would say part of what makes the definitely those the guns it’s attached to. Plus you need to stand on the spot for the rescue or to shrink enough for you to get a super accurate shot. Yeah, and I guess that does like honor the original as well. There is like a reward for for kind of standing your ground. I think the enemies take a little bit more punishment early on as well. It’s in the demo that, you know, there’s sort of a stronger enemy variant earlier on, the ones with the slightly floppy heads. Right, yeah. I don’t remember them being in the original and replaying it now. No, and so one of the big tricks in this game is, in the original too, is like an enemy that becomes something nastier after a point. It introduces that idea from the first enemy in the game. There is now slightly stiffer challenge in that opening stretch. So if you are maybe more capable, I think they throw more at you to counterbalance it. Yeah, I think that’s probably true. The other thing is that it’s not like… I think it’s actually meant to be a bit of a shock to the system when you first see that village bit, because it’s not like… I would say not comfortable with the dynamics of the original, but certainly if I like nine times out of ten, I would always get the chainsaw guy down and then get the… I think you get a big reward for doing that in the original game. And here, I didn’t get anywhere near that, and it turned the chase of the village into a proper chase again. There was no chance I was going to hold off all those enemies. I just had to run. And so I really enjoyed that. I felt like I was on the back foot for the first hour or so at this game, and I found that really exciting before I slowly tuned into its power curve and stuff and got a few more weapons going. That’s really cool because, again, that’s something that the idea of the threat level feeling raised, it really helps. But the other thing is I think the power curve the other way goes further in the sense that your mastery of your armory and how you deal with the enemies spikes in a way that it doesn’t in the original because there’s such a specific approach they’ve taken to the gun upgrade system here that means that your firearms noticeably climb in power and they’ve added like extra tiers to those different guns basically for you to get like there’s like a bonus tier to all of the weapons when you upgrade them right and these normally confer like a damage bonus I think and so that that means that like you know by the end of the game my red nine pistol was an absolute fucking monster basically it wasn’t like it wasn’t like a magnum quality but it gave me fewer reasons to use my shotgun for example but I really love that because it’s like you start sort of like in almost like piddly kind of action. I think that the original Resident Evil 4 has that too, because your armory is always growing. But I think that here, they push it further in both directions. You start on the back foot and then you end just super, super empowered. Works really well, I think. Do you like the weapon upgrade system here? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the key changes as well is that when you sell weapons back to the merchant, you basically get the full refund that you spent on it, so money feels a little less precious. You can be a bit more experimental, so if you get a new shotgun, you can just sell a fully upgraded old shotgun and quickly upgrade the new one too and already make a big dent on it, so I think it’s a lot more open to like, here, have some toys and sort of play with them. I definitely felt that in the later areas of the game as well, like, it wasn’t that it’s like easy per se, but like, it’s just really fun. You feel so kitted up in this game by the end that, you know, you kind of almost laugh at how horrendous some of the stuff is. There’s like a proper Rambo run towards the end of this game, same which is in the original too, I won’t say what it is actually, but it’s just enemies are just getting like evaporated, like left right and center, and you feel like, well, you know, this is just inevitable I’m going to kind of win at this point, I felt like, and it does like balance that out, you know, obviously, the third act has like, quite a famous horror beat in the middle of it, which if not played, kind of won’t spoil but yeah, by the end, it had a, it sort of shifted from the kind of adrenaline of am I going to make it through to like, I love unleashing this stuff on these people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I just think it puts so much power in your hands to like, determine what works about your arsenal. Yeah. But early on, it gives you, is the bolt gun in the original Resist not new? No, that’s new. So I’ve been that off immediately, mate, fucking no, no use for that at all. I think the thinking behind that is that so like, it’s interesting, because that’s basically a weapon that was in Evil Within, which is obviously like Shinji Mikami returning to the kind of Resident Evil 4 template, and it behaves quite similarly to the one in Evil Within. I think the logic behind it is because you can pick the bolts up. It’s like an ammo that never runs out as long as you don’t just fire like the bolts into like places you can’t reach. So it’s meant to be like a bit of a safety net. Also there’s like slight stealth leanings, which I thought were okay. Like, there’s some areas in this game where like you can clearly pick off a couple of enemies with stealth if you want to, or you can just kick off the fight and those three enemies will just be in the mass of people running towards you. It’s got a little bit of like Wolfenstein energy to it, you know, where it’s like you will be able to do a couple of these, but this is not a stealth game like all the last of us. Yeah, all the last of us is perfect example. Yeah, that’s probably a better one because it has the right perspective. But, you know, it’s kind of fun sneaking up with the knife. It damages the durability of the knife less to do a stealth kill. So it’s a way of getting more out of that resource, which is kind of cool. But yeah, the bolt gun, the bolt gun is fine. I used it like maybe like five times. You can attach like exploding mines to the bolts. And I probably use that more just to like knock down certain enemies or enemies whose weak spots I was struggling to kind of hit. I would maybe use that as it was a bit broader. The game would have been fine without the bolt gun. I think the balance, the difficulty is quite nicely tuned. Yeah, it didn’t. I don’t think like the one thing that Resident Evil 4 originally lacked was more weapons. So it almost like didn’t quite fit into the ecosystem of weapons for me. I felt it felt a bit off because it’s so slow to fire, which obviously, you know, you have an infinite ammo as part of the reason why that’s like, you know, that’s why it is the way it is. But I was just like, well, I would rather have the risk reward of finite ammo. And then then have this thing that like fires. Then by the time I’ve reloaded three enemies surrounding me, I’m sort of like, this is a bit pointless. So I just sold it. And I agree with you that the way the game telegraphs to you, you can sell anything and it’s like no consequence is really funny, especially because the merchant says to you, we just want you to do well, mate, or whatever. And I was like, yeah, awesome. So yeah, like I sort of appreciate the valiant attempt to add something, but doesn’t necessarily work. But I agree with you, the other stuff they add does work really well. So the knife, the knife thing is great because you can upgrade the knife like any other weapon, which is definitely not the case in the original. The knife is just functional. But here, like it’s, yeah, you can upgrade the damage. There are, you know, don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there’s more than one knife you can get because you’re picking up all kinds of knives as you’re going around the game. And so, yeah, you upgrade the knife and then you can upgrade its damage and then you have to repair it. But I think that system really adds something. Later on, you can pick up armor, which I think is similar to Resident Evil 2 Remake, I think had that too, Matthew. I can’t exactly remember now, but… I can’t remember. Yeah, I can’t remember. Yeah. So, yeah, that may or may not be factually accurate, but in any case, that’s another thing you can repair. It gives you a bit of a reprieve in battle, that sort of thing. Works really well. Combat, like no complaints, just phenomenally done. Basic combat against basic enemies. All the archetypes are here. They’re great. A few archetypes they have added are really good. I won’t spoil those in case, I can’t remember if any of them were in the demo. I don’t think they were, actually. No, I know. I let people go and discover those and enjoy those. Really good. So Matthew, what did they get wrong or what have they missed in broad terms without getting too specific? Some of its weirder excesses have been removed. There are some colourful set pieces or like puzzles, maybe like individual rooms or obstacles from the castle. I remember that when they aren’t in there, there’s like a little sort of like twinge of disappointment. You’re like, oh, that’s a shame, you know, because there’s so much of the game is in here. It’s kind of impossible to play this game without having like a mental tick list of stuff that you kind of want to see or that you hope to see. And I’d say they hit like 90% of it. The original is so iconic that you can’t help but notice a few missing pieces in places. I also think there are a few set pieces where they’ve reimagined things in a way which is a little bit more standard. I could see the similarities between certain encounters more than I could in the original because I think the original sometimes could throw a little, have a bit more of a sort of defining spin on something. They’ve also taken like a couple of things and turned them into more standard combat encounters. It’s quite hard to talk about without spoiling individual bits. Yeah, okay, let’s save that sort of discussion of those specifics for the next one, the next section. But is it churlish to be like when so much of it is in there? Like there’s a… Might as well do all of it. Yeah, but you know, the second it doesn’t do something, you’re like, oh, that’s a huge shame. And you’re like, well, look at what they have done. So like an early one, like the chairlift sequence from the original isn’t in this, which in my head, I always really remembered as part of the whole sequence in the kind of run up to the kind of boss of the village act. And when it didn’t happen, I was like, oh, that’s, that’s the first time the game like massively deviated for me in terms of like a big thing you did in the original that you didn’t do here. I did deal with it, you know, I wasn’t like, fuck this game or whatever. But maybe that like set up like that once I was kind of over that that first like example of it, when it maybe did that again a couple of other times, like it didn’t bother me as much. I was like, oh, okay, so we’re not doing everything. And like I say, like what they do do is so like rock solid, like you’re never having less than fun with it. I, you know, I feel like holding it to that sort of standard was maybe like a bit unrealistic. Yeah, I think that the question I sort of like wondered was, okay, are there parts of this where they’re ashamed of it being a video game a little bit? But then there are so many other parts that don’t tell that story. So that can’t be it. There must be some some other rationale at work when something is missed, because I didn’t know the ski lift. Weirdly, there is one you see in the game, but yeah, well, that’s yeah, it’s there. It’s there to go like, remember that? Yeah, I do remember that. I really like that bit. It was a really good like rifle showcase that isn’t in the game anymore. But then there are set pieces that like take the bones of the original and then go so hard in this one that you’re like, oh, no, they do. They really relish the fact that this is a video game and it’s really silly. Like that’s yeah, yeah, like as which I think, again, we’ll save more discussion that for the next part. But yeah, I think that the bits and pieces they missed, like my memory isn’t good enough for me to be too aggrieved by like the overall number of things they’ve missed because it’s not like totally there. Just to jump ahead slightly here, I guess, I think the boss battles are by far the weakest part of this remake. I don’t think any of them were good because a lot of them do this thing where it’s not just like, I think the first in the original version, it’s just raw firepower if you sink bullets into bosses until they’re done and you’re fighting them in these extraordinary circumstances. So, you know, so there’s the stress of just dealing with your environment and how the enemy is moving is the challenge here. They’re kind of like most of them are gated by you have to run up to them and do a knife attack to kind of move to the next phase kind of thing. And that I think makes the bosses a bit less interesting. Or at least it made me question, were the bosses in the original Resi 4 ever that great? Or was it always about? Was it always about the circumstances? Going back to our best boss battles there Matthew, but like, sometimes it’s not necessarily the mechanics of a boss. It’s like the environment. And Resi 4 did the environment of bosses better than any other game, arguably. I think it’s actually that the bosses are just aren’t much cop in Resident Evil 4. Like, original and this. Because what works in Resident Evil 4 and what is amazing about it is, you know, it’s a game all about like crowd control. It’s all about prioritizing who to attack, what to attack them with. It’s about resource management. Like a boss, like it’s fundamentally one thing you have to worry about. And it removes a lot of that decision making. Like what the boss battles in Resident Evil 4 actually are, it is the village. It’s the house siege. You know, that’s where it’s like, you know the thing we do? This is where we’re going to do it extremely hard. You know, we’re going to come at you so hard with so many things. Can you hold this off? Can you survive for X amount of time? That is really what the boss battle equivalent in this game should be. And it is like those scenes are in there. So the idea of just some big thing that you have to just dodge its attacks and like shoot in its eye. I mean, I guess like the accuracy of the shooting is, is, is an elevated challenge of something that you’re doing throughout the game. But it, I never thought there were much, much, you know, as I was doing them in this, I was like, they’re flashy in this. They’re visually, you know, quite nice to sort of see. The whole time I was like, oh yeah, I never really liked the bosses in these games. I like their designs. I like the ideas of them. I don’t think that’s a controversial take. I don’t think so. But I think that people will remember the bosses fondly. But I think they will remember the bosses fondly probably because of the spectacle. Yeah. Like because people remember the Burning Barn more than what you fight in the Burning Barn, right? Like that’s… You know, I thought, or at least like, you know, I suppose what I’m saying is like the actual mechanics of the fight, you don’t remember, you just remember what it looks and feels like. Yeah. And like, but there are some that in here. Well, there’s like one in this, the Salazar fight, where I thought, this is just quite bad. That’s just such a classic Rezzy thing, though. It’s like such a huge monster with such a tiny weak spot. And it’s moving around arena and it’s just a case of like trying to keep your ammo up and you know, all I can see with their big bosses like that are like all the tricks they use to kind of always give you an out. Enemies that drop little pods that you can shoot and then they’ve got ammo in them and stuff. I just, they’re really like transparent how they work. And I’ve just done too many of those fights in too many Rezzy games. Like Resident Evil 6 has got like 30 boss fights like that, you know, and I feel like, I don’t know, they’re no better, no worse to me. But yeah, I didn’t look forward to after after the first couple, it wasn’t like, oh, amazing. I can’t wait to see another what they’ve done with these bosses. You’re like, oh yeah, these are these are fine. I do quite like the one that involves the freezing tanks. Yeah, that is good. Like that’s got more of a gimmick to it that I’ve enjoyed. That feels, it’s maybe more of a set piece than like a trad boss fight. I think that that speaks to like the original Resi 4 strengths too, right? Which is this, it was an absolute ideas factory, and that whole idea, like if you completely, you could completely strip that character and that set piece out of the game, and it would be, you know, the game would still be acclaimed, but it’s not really, it’s a very self-contained idea for like a horror set piece, and, but it’s just like, it’s like the designers showing off of like, oh, and we’ve also thought of this, where it’s like a one-on-one encounter in this location, and yeah, using these freezing, this freezing idea to like, to do, to deal with them, just really, really smartly done, and like in the original, and then, yeah, I think I agree that that’s actually like well adapted here, so no complaints about that. Yeah. I think I just got like, it was when like a knife icon came up, and it’s like, oh, you have to do this now to progress the fight, and I just didn’t, I don’t want that. Like I did like that the original Resident Evil 4 sort of like let you break it a bit by saying, well, if you just like use four magnum bullets on this boss, then it’ll just go down immediately. Yeah. And I quite like that. I think you still can shoot them when they’re stunned, and it’s like a big melee button appears above them. I don’t think you have to engage with it. You don’t, okay, you don’t have to use that to progress the fight. I didn’t try it because I thought, okay, well, I guess I just have to do this like two or three times. Yeah. I think you can get away with it. I don’t know. I need to sort of experiment more with it, really. Well, again, I suppose like, you know, just to kind of give the bosses their due, they still have the spectacle element, of course, like that is what they have in their corner. Like they feel, for the most part, they feel like the boss encounters, as you probably remember them to a large extent. But yeah, that’s probably the only thing about the game I didn’t really love, to be honest. As well as like, I think the island at the end does get a little bit, slightly too shooty. Like you can see how Resident Evil 5 gets made after that island sequence. It feels very, very Resident Evil 5 to play, you know, this game’s version of that section. Did you get that right too? It’s very, very shootery. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I do, I love the helicopter bit, I mean, without going into it. I think it is cool. Well, and I liked it too, but like it’s just, yeah, there’s just a lot of it in a row and it’s like, it is good, but it’s just, it’s much shootier than some of the other sections which are a bit more in that survival horror vein. I think by that point, it’s not so much survival horror as it is like a pure sort of like gun battle towards it. Yeah, I think that thing you said about like, when we’re talking about the freezing boss and you were like, you know, just the idea that they put everything in and, you know, it’s just like idea, an idea is factory idea after idea. They have removed some of those ideas. Like that is, that is a fact. And interesting, I’m sure you read Rich’s review on PC Gamer, which I thought was great. Friend of the show, Rich Stanton, he was a little cooler on it. I’m still to the tune of 80%, which is like a glowing endorsement from Rich for this particular game, I would say, knowing how much he loves Resident Evil 4. But he felt like it had sanded down too many of the kind of like idiosyncratic kind of edges of the game. And as it goes on, you definitely like, that’s what I was talking about when you’ve got this like tick list of things. And I think the better you know the game, probably the more thorough that tick list is going to be. And like the more room for disappointment there is. Like there are a couple of bits, like I said, the chairlift. There’s some stuff from like the older games, which I remember just seeing in screenshots and thinking, how is all of this in the same game? And like, I had that excitement of playing this and seeing how all those locations were going to look. And when one of them didn’t turn up, there was always like a, oh, that is a shame. And should we talk about QTEs, because I think that factors into this a bit. Yeah, yeah, I think so. So yeah, the lack of QTEs in this game, they don’t, in some cases, they replace them with gameplay. Not many cases, but otherwise, you’re just watching cut scenes instead. Broader point, something on paper, about like objectively, the cut scenes in this and the writing and the acting is better than the original Resident Evil, but I don’t think it is better. I think that like the B-movie tone of the original was well judged and really, really good and nothing to be ashamed of, because Resident Evil, man, is not fucking high art. And I think that like, here, you don’t question it too much in Resident Evil 4 Remake, because the game looks, colour palette-wise, and like just in general, looks exactly as you want it to look. Like it’s visually, like the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes, they get all of the visual bits right. So in your head, you’re like, okay, I’m in Resident Evil 4, and it’s like tickling all those parts of your brain. I think by itself, the dialogue and the story and the acting, it’s like, it’s just fine. It’s just like, yeah, it’s just okay. It’s really coherent, I will say. Like if, like they’ve, the way that they have adjust the story and like some of the excesses they’ve removed, it does make it feel like of a piece, like if this game was exactly as it was, as it is now, this remake, except it had like one bit where you mash the button to run away from a boulder, that boulder sequence would feel weird, you know? It would. It would be a good game, but that’s the case, I’d say for like, if you keep, if you had, if they had kept all the QTE like weird stuff, basically the original game handed over its, its like silliest moments or moments that were beyond the core mechanics, the QTEs, that is the beauty of a QuickTime event. It lets you do basically anything outside of your normal control scheme. And by removing that, like you give yourself like the discipline task of making this big coherent action experience that never really breaks character and this doesn’t. But you do lose the weird spikes and that’s, that’s something like Rich definitely dinged it for in the review and like, I am sad. The QuickTime events aren’t that heinous that you couldn’t have put in one or two just as like a, here we go. We know this is fun. Yeah, I agree with you. I like the QTEs. Like we talked about this, but like, yes, they were, they got overused in the late noughties, but you know, they were, the reason they kind of got mega popular was, okay, Shenmue was like the, I think like created them, but this was sort of like the best possible form was in Resident Evil 4. So I’m not sure it’s anything to be ashamed of. It’s not like they took it out of the VR version. You still do it, but you use the move controllers, whatever they’re called on the Oculus, they’re pretty good for that. And so yeah, I think that like, it doesn’t replace it with anything better, because you have cut scenes where like some of the action happens. But it’s not like it’s more stimulating, it like actually takes some of the theme parkiness out of it, which I think is a slight weakness, but not something like I would mega ding the game for, because I think it’s so strong in other areas. But I think it is like, I think it does speak to the larger tonal project with this as a remake of like, it’s silly, but it’s not as excessively silly as Resident Evil 4. Yeah, I almost wish there was like a mode that unlocks, that like, put that stuff back in for your second run through, because I’ve been doing New Game Plus with it and you know, you can just loop back into the game with everything you finished the game with. Playing Resident Evil from the start with the arsenal you have at the end turns it into like, the dumbest thing ever, because you just merc everyone with like, you’re just like, fuck it, I’ve got fully upgraded Magnum, I’m just, the chainsaw guy turns up in the village, you just shoot him once on the head and he’s dead, and you’re like, well, this is dumb. That run through could absolutely sustain like, a few dumb quick time events added, you know? By all means, give everyone your initial authored version of the game, where it is a bit more slow and steady, but like, just throw in some like, curve balls or something, because I do miss that stuff. It also means the original has a reason to exist, you know, it is an alternate text, you know, it is the rare example where two things can co-exist, it doesn’t happen very often in adaptation. No, in fact this… It is this and the prestige. The book and the film, both excellent in their own ways. Yeah, it did make me think that should I go back and play the VR one some more, because I have got it right there on a modern platform, it is probably its best possible modern form, and you know. Right. And it is just, and it is like, oh yeah, you know, the little bits and pieces I do miss, it is like it was fun to do the boulder in that, as discussed in a previous episode. It is a rite of passage to work out how the fuck you like dodge that boulder the first time it happens using a new control scheme, and on VR I had no idea what the buttons were, so that took a few attempts. But it is, you know. I forgot the boulder happens twice in the original as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is so funny, it is like, here it is again, it is like, it is back. The other thing I thought was interesting about Rich’s review is he dings the castle sequence, which is like the middle section of the game essentially, for essentially being a bit like a slight shadow of its former self. I think that one thing that is interesting about this is that it almost treats the environments like continuous environments in the way that it did like the police station in Resident 2 Remake. Whereas I think there was so much momentum in Resident Evil 4, the original, that you weren’t thinking about backtracking that much. I think the village is the only time you ever really think of it as like a continuous space. And then after that, it’s just forward, forward, forward, forward, forward. And so here, here you can you find yourself in a position to jog back to the beginning of the castle. And it’s basically just like one long corridor that you can do in about three minutes. And that maybe breaks the illusion a tiny bit from the original. What do you think? Yeah, it’s interesting because the way that they try and like justify it is there is a layer of like treasures hunting, backtracking, you know, it like adds keys to the game where there are things you can’t unlock until you come back to them later. So it kind of announces it quite early on and puts those things on the map. So like if you’re really trying to squeeze every bit of currency out of the game, like you will have to go back. It also uses the sort of side missions, like side challenges, where it will kind of put some new enemies in old areas or it will try and like lure you back. And that stuff mostly worked, but there are a few of them and maybe I felt it more in the castle than in the village. Because like you say, in the village, it kind of naturally loops back on itself. You sort of run through the same places, but in slightly different circumstances, an hour or two into the game. Where in the castle, when it goes, hey, there’s this thing all the way back here, or like there was a locked drawer in this bit of the battlements. And when you go back there, they’ve maybe put in a couple new enemies to kind of shock you along the way. But I was often thinking, like, this feels like a big empty level that I’ve killed everything in. Yeah, yeah. It’s almost a bit like when you play a Lego game, and once you’ve smashed everything up, those Lego levels feel like quite sad and barren because you’ve removed all the toys from them. And it’s just a room that used to have Lego in it. That’s kind of how the backtracking in this game feels like. I mean, the fix is just to like not engage and push forward with it. But I think there’s too much stuff like tempting you back that they needed to repopulate it just a little bit more, I think. I’m not saying like endlessly spawn enemies because that would fuck with like the ammo kind of economy of the game. But there’s something a little more than they maybe have done. Yeah, or it just needs to shut the door behind you and be like, well, you’re on the next bit now. Like it might just be as simple as that. It gives you enough time to question your surroundings, which Resident Evil 4 does not do. It’s just, yeah, on to the next bit, on to the next bit, on to the next bit. And so, yeah, it does like it does seem strange when you just can endlessly plod back through these bits because you’ve taken on a side quest that requires you to do so or something like that. Did you buy the treasure map from the merchant? Yeah, I did. I don’t know if I was right to do that, because there’s like a layer to like Resident Evil 4, the original, and maybe it’s just like of the time where, you know, there were still secrets in games, and, you know, people would be like, did you know that actually you could shoot this thing out of the tree and then you’ll get like an extra diamond, but like every one of those things you discovered felt very exciting in Resident Evil 4. And there is still that layer to it. But you can buy an item which basically tells you where all that stuff is for like the whole area. Either that item is too cheap, or like maybe they should only unlock that item on the second playthrough or something. I mean, I regretted buying it instantly because it turned the map into just, I’m just clearing icons off this map rather than, what was that glint? Oh, holy shit, there’s a thing up there. Yes, I’ve got a bit more currency. I felt like I had loads of money because it just told me where all the treasures are. Completely my own fault, admittedly. Yeah, I think that it’s a weird one because some bits of it, I think like a tiny bit of a steer, maybe not the worst thing for new players, but there’s stuff where like the quest is, find these blue things and then shoot them. People will remember that you could do that in two different areas in the original Resident Evil 4 and then you would get a gun as a reward for it. You would do that, get the gun as a reward. It was a memorable, cool little quest. You had to go and find the blue things yourself. Here, you buy that map and it just tells you where they are. It’s just like a case of looking up or down to see where they put it. Now there’s a couple of things to that. Some of them are placed so abstractly that you probably wouldn’t just find them without a map because it’s like HD era. So it’s like a tiny blue glint in the distance or quite low down. They’re all in pretty cleverly hidden in the original, but you could find them without a map. It was carefully balanced. Here, it would almost be slightly too annoying to do it without a map, because the areas are so big. But also by telling you where they are, that’s not a challenge at all. I wonder if that’s the right compromise. This is really granular stuff. But yeah, it’s really tough. It all factors into usability stuff. People have been dunking on screenshots of the game because of the classic crates and the barrels painted with yellow and all this stuff. Developers always say that you have no idea how abstract these things can seem, like until we’ve given you the guides. If you take those crutches away, you’d be amazed at how flummoxed you might actually be. So talking about what could have been is very, very difficult with a game like this. Yeah. Because I’ve experienced it this way now. So the other thing is that when it comes to the yellow signposting of items, I didn’t mind that so much as somebody’s got slightly fucked eyesight these days. Get your glasses, dude. Yeah, I should probably just do that. But I will say that regardless of how you feel about that as an accessibility setting, it’s not like there’s anything else about the game that’s playing itself for you. This is a game that’s actually, as modern games go, it’s not hard, but it definitely requires skill. So the idea of using that to kick a game for being dumbed down is, it makes no sense because there’s a lot of other things to consider. What I will say is, because this is my last gripe at this game, the world feels less interactive than it did in the original. You would go around, you would see a glint at the top of a hallway, and you would shoot it, and then one of those spinels would drop down, and go sell them to the merchant. You shoot a crow and it would always drop something. Here, the crows don’t always drop something. That’s annoying. Spinels, you actually have to… That’s classic risk reward. The crows in this were just quite strangely implemented, I thought. Sometimes they dropped things, sometimes they didn’t, and I just thought, ehh. It’s still that big cluster though, in that arena, which I love killing that with a grenade. That’s classic, Rezzy. Absolutely. There’s also little things like, you might remember early on in the village sections, there’s like treasure you can, you have to shoot down like a little wooden platform to start with the treasure from getting dirty. Things like that, like, that you take them out of the world and it feels slightly less like you’re interacting with it, and it feels slightly, a tiny bit more movie set-ish than it does maybe in the original. But that said, I also want to praise this game for the times where it does take something and then really runs with it. So I think that, without spoiling it, there is a section where you play as another character that people will remember from the original game. I think that section fucking rules in this game. I think it’s really scary, it’s really well done, it’s got a lot more going on ideas wise. It works really, really well. There is a section in some underground area, I would say, like a set piece that goes so hard in this that is absolutely hysterical and great fun. Oh yeah, and it took one of my least favourite big enemy encounters from the original and turns it into something a bit more doable and enjoyable, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I want to be like, I want to just say that that is true, right at the start there’s a farm area of the village that I had a reveal that I thought was great and they’d slightly rejigged the environment so it wasn’t exactly the same and I thought that worked really well. I think that speaks again to like, I’ve got zero complaints about how the entire first section of the village is done. That’s like maybe the strongest adaptation of a section that they do in this. Really really good. And so yeah, I just had a brilliant time with it. All my granular complaints are just from someone who’s played the original so many times. But then that is the relationship I think that people have with the original Resident Evil. That’s why doing a remake is such a bold thing. It’s such a hurt, so many hurdles to overcome, Matthew. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Like this isn’t this episode isn’t becoming a dunking session. No, definitely not. That may be like one of the last times that we do dunk. So I will say here’s something Matthew did. This did it was anything in this remake that jogs jolted your memory of the original that you’d forgotten. Was there anything where you’re like, oh yeah, I completely forgot this is in the original because it’s been so long. But this reminded me this was a key bit of it. There are a couple of enemy types I’d sort of semi forgotten or that they they’d sort of changed them a bit. There are these sort of insect things which once I was there I was like, oh yeah, I remember these guys. The funny thing was how I instantly slipped into like exactly the same routines that I did in the first one. I have never played Resident Evil 4 where I have substantially used machine guns. Yeah, like I am always pistol shotgun rifle guy. I think I have maybe fired like the TMP like twice ever. I have no idea how that gun fits into it because in my head the idea of spraying bullets in a world where bullets are like so precious, I am like, fuck that, no, of course not. No one would ever use that. So there is like a whole strand of this game, there is multiple machine guns you can buy and upgrade parts or whatever that I have never ever engaged with. And like, it was just funny how I just slipped, you know, when I came to the same point of like, am I going to use this? It’s like, well, so far in the game, I found machine gun ammo once, so no, of course I’m not going to use it. I fucking sold it and just bought a faster reload for a shotgun instead. So is the machine gun good in Resident Evil 4? I have no idea. Well, I think it does in the original, you are coaxed out of it by every chapter end screen telling you what your fucking accuracy ratio was. So, why would I ever use a TMP knowing that I am going to be scored at the end of every single chapter? That was similar to my relationship. I did use it more here. While there is an end of chapter accuracy ratio, you have to press a button to see it and I preferred not to know how badly I did in most cases. But also, you do get some moments later in the game where I think that the machine gun is really good for crowd control. You can also fit a certain scope to a machine gun you get later in the game which you can also use to deal with a certain enemies that I won’t go into. So there’s another reason to use it there. But the ammo clip is so fucking tiny even with upgrades that it’s like it never really feels worth it. This is definitely like the shotgun rifle pistol game. It just is. And then with an occasional little magnum to treat yourself. That’s kind of what the ideal armory is to me. But like you say, you sold your machine gun and upgraded your shotgun. That’s part and parcel of how they’ve designed it right. It’s designed to be your armory the way you want it. Which is really good. Yeah. Actually, on a side note of that, like the fact that they’ve added ammo crafting. Normally when games are like, we’ve added crafting, you’re like, oh great, I can’t wait. But actually here in a game where what ammo you have really changes how any fight can go. Giving you the power to have a few extra decisions in that. Like either use it as a safety net or like commit early to like, yeah, I’m going to spend a little bit more on shotgun or do I spend loads on like Magnum ammo or whatever. That decision suits like Resident Evil 4’s whole deal very elegantly, I thought. Yeah, that’s another Resident Evil 2 remake carryover, isn’t it? Yes, yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think the original Resident Evil 2 as well, I can’t remember now. But yeah, so that’s, I agree that’s a really nice touch. Like this, these touches might seem sort of superficial on paper, but yeah, like that’s like, that’s designed to give you more choice, so why not? Really works well. So Matthew, like was, how do you think this does compare to the other two modern REZI remakes? Because I think that their place was very obvious, as discussed, like of all the games that you would give a modern refresh, two and three seemed like the most obvious candidates, four not so much. How do you think it stacks up next to them? It’s interesting, like I wasn’t really like comparing it quality wise, because I think tonally they’re very like different games. The thing I did really like, and I appreciated a bit more, making Resident Evil 2 in the same perspective as Resident Evil 4, it becomes easier to kind of put Leon side by side with himself. I genuinely got a little bit more out of having played Leon like on his first day at work as a rookie where he’s having a really shit time and he’s like quite competent, but he never really gets to just completely let loose in that game. Compared to how he is in here, it’s just easier to see that jump, that isn’t something I maybe appreciated when I played the original Resident Evil 4. Mechanically, it was so different from the fixed perspective of Resident Evil 2, you kind of took it for granted in a way, you were like, well of course he controls differently, but here, I guess narratively, there’s a clearer through line of seeing how this over the shoulder Leon has kind of like, what a few years of training has turned him into, that I really liked. It doesn’t really change my feelings about Resident Evil 3, which I still think is like a little weaker. And my big problem with that is I don’t think that remake ever found the right way of tapping into its unique selling point, which was Nemesis, you know, they never really worked out how to make it their own or make it worthwhile in the remake, where Resident Evil 4, it really really understands its strength is in that crowd control combat and how to kind of elevate that and make that even more intense and even more exciting. Like they’ve, they’ve, it just feels like, and it’s the team that made 2 also made 4. I just think they’re better at like tapping into like what made their game tick than necessarily the Resident Evil 3 team did. Yeah, I agree with that. And so I think that like, I think 3’s reputation has grown slightly as people have like picked it up for like 7 or 8 quid as opposed to 40 quid. And so it would be like, much like me, I bought it for like, I think 16 quid or something. And in that circumstance, the blaster in a weekend, it was quite fun. But it obviously pales next to Resident Evil 2 remake and this. Yeah, like quite firmly. I think that it’s sort of like, I find it reassuring really that they were able to remake this and then capture just so much of the original energy of it. And like and to just show so much devotion to what was great about the original. Yeah, that’s like it’s a real kind of triumph on that level. I think it’s just it’s not just a tribute. It’s like, you know, we think all of this works. It’s just how exactly do we make it? What what would we change in retrospect to just a tiny bit more polish? And that’s a great approach to take towards something. And it’s like it’s it’s reverent, but it’s not a one to one adaptation. It’s probably the only approach they could take with a remake. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with that. I agree with that. I just I think like it’s made me feel like even better about their collective remake project, I guess. Like the fact that they open in cut scene of this game, you know, when Leon’s talking about like those events back in Raccoon City, it’s showing you like footage and clips from the remake of two. It just it puts it all together. You know, you’re like, oh, yeah, this feels like a kind of complete package. You know, if you’re going to remake these things, it really makes sense to kind of commit to it in this way and kind of bring it all together, especially if you’re coming to the new. It would just feel like so much clearer that through line, given that there is a bit of remake fatigue. I feel intrigued, like, oh, what would they do if they made more of these remakes? What else could they do? You know, it leaves me sort of feeling quite hopeful about this particular team. Yeah. Are there any other Resident Remakes you want to see off the back of this, Matthew? Would it be insane for them to remake one from this perspective? I was thinking that. It would be a bit weird if you go onto the PlayStation Store, you type in Resident Evil, and then you get three different games to choose from, like, to buy. Yeah. But also, there is, like, obviously a big gap between the first one and then the GameCube remake, even though only six years had passed, and now you’re looking at, like, 21 additional years more by the time they finished it. I think there’s an argument for it, especially if, like, your whole strategy is, like, they’re always packaging up, like, two and three on the on the store, and then five and six are all packaged up as well. Like, you do have the fixed camera, Rezzy, but they must be thinking, could we just do what we did with these for that, like, it’s, yeah. That feels like that would make more sense than, like, doing five, and, like, there is no universe, timeline, where they ever remake Resident Evil 6. That just doesn’t happen. Unless they literally, like, make a new game and call it Resident Evil 6, they literally replace it with something. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so, yeah, yeah, so it’s tough. Like, the other option, obviously, is that, like, if they did do Code Veronica, the reason I think they’ll, I don’t think they would do it is because, timeline-wise, it would be strange to, like, take a step back after going forward from, like, two, three, two, four, but Code Veronica obviously has, like, Claire Redfield in it, who is in Resi 2 Remake, so you have that to draw upon, so you can, like, you can link that together. It’s really hard to tell where it might go, and I don’t, I don’t actually think a Resi 5 Remake is completely off the table after playing this. One thing I did wonder was, like, if they could, I’d be interested if they did something, like, maybe, like, merge Resi 1 and Resi 5 and do it as, like, a, this is, like, the big Wesker stuff all happening, like, because I don’t know if Resi 1 would, you know, from this perspective, if you just, like, eat, you know, it’s not, like, a big enough location, almost, you’d eat through it too fast. I couldn’t see it really being a standalone for some reason, like, it doesn’t really quite work in my head, but I could see something about, like, where does this start, where does it end for these characters? Maybe something like that could work. It feels like there’s enough money in it for them, for them to just do the entire series. Like, it’s that, like, yeah. I mean, like, if they do end up remaking Resident Evil 6 as it is, it would be the funniest fucking thing ever. I mean, I would love it. Like, that would be, like, the best thing that could ever happen to this podcast. It would cost too much fucking money, to be honest. Oh, it just, there’s just no, there’s no chance, but. No, but I agree that would be a laugh for us, and isn’t that the reason we do everything here? So, yes, I agree with you. It’s not a crime if it’s funny. The other thing is that, like, I was there thinking, could they just boldly make a new Rezi from this perspective, because I think we all had to accept that third-person Rezi had to go away after six because it shat its pants too much, and it’s like, fine. But also that was- You must leave, sir. You have disgraced yourself in our restaurant. But also, at that point, if you don’t count the two Revelations games, at that point, you had only ever had, like, two sequels to Rezi 4. Like the idea that they just had to completely go away and reboot with seven, and then, obviously, Village has kind of pushed that in that direction more, which actually is very, very similar to Rezi 4. So you actually have the kind of weird thing of, like, a game inspired by Rezi 4 and then a Rezi 4 remake in, like, you know, two years apart from each other. But it’s like, could you just not just sort of, like, get this team to make a new Rezi game that has, like, some of the same characters and maybe a different setting or something? Like, that was kind of what I came out of this thinking, well, these guys sure know how to fucking make a combat system. They know how to make beautiful environments and, like, what happens if they’re just unleashed on making something brand new? I’d like to see it, but I don’t know, man. I wonder if they’ll ever make another third person Rezi. What do you reckon? Oh, I mean, the fact that they put the third person mode into Village after the fact, and the fact that DLC was third person suggests that they’re, like, open to it, like, yeah, it’s kind of intriguing. I mean, like, this team, this remake team, like, almost feel, like, too talented to just make them remake other people’s work, especially now that you are, like, getting through the truly great Rezi’s have been made. Yeah. I feel like there’s too much enshrined canon for them just to go, we’re going to make a new version of five and six that just do different stuff, or, you know, we’re going to fill in that gap differently. Yeah, the other the other reason I think that like, the maybe remaking the other ones after make remaking for doesn’t make sense as far as like the apex of set piece design and imagination and things like that. I think that even if you go back to a haunted house setting, or, you know, Code Veronica’s island setting and stuff like that, I think that for is just such an iconic, ambitious game. And once you’ve gone back, once you try and reverse from that, I think anything does feel less ambitious by comparison. And that’s a tough thing to deal with. So yeah, it does leave it in an interesting position. Okay, here’s a question Matthew. We’re in a weird place with games this year, where three of the most highest rated games so far are remakes of games from the noughties. We’ve got this and we have Metroid Prime Remastered and we have Dead Space Remake. Is that a good or bad thing to you? And are we going to let these games be eligible for our game of the year list at the end of the year? I think they should be eligible. I think if they came out, they came out and that’s the deal. I think you have to take them on an individual, almost like game by game basis. I do not have a problem with them remaking this because A, it ended up being really good and justifying itself and it’s not like they aren’t making new Rezzy as well, you know? Like Rezzy is maybe the rarest case in that it’s feeding you on both fronts and it’s using that alternating kind of development cycle to mean there’s always Rezzy about a year out which is like exactly what I want. Same, yeah, big same. Metroid Prime, it’s kind of tricky because you’re like on one hand fucking great, really good remaster, really well made, having loads of fun playing it, but like does that make up for the sting of like would I rather have Metroid Prime 4? Yeah, you know, definitely. So I get it, like I get the whole, look at, you know, isn’t it weird that these are all remakes? But for me, it’s just it’s series by series. I know when I’m being kind of, I know when I feel like I’ve been shortchanged or like I’m not getting what I want. And in this case, I don’t feel that. Yeah, absolutely. I think that it’s the other thing is that you play a game like this. And one thing I did sort of like ask after reading Richard’s review actually is because it’s sort of like he said that if you came to this new now, and you played it, you just think it’s like what’s I don’t quite get what the third person the hype was about this third person shooter. But it made me think like, there are no third person shooters now. Like it’s got the genre is gone. The genre is dead. Like we accept that if you’re going to do a third person shooter now, it has to be part of a giant open world game or another mechanic and something else. One of the reasons I really enjoy playing through this is because it’s like under 20 hours to complete. It feels really like value packed in that time. And it’s like it’s almost like Rezzy is the last series that could smuggle a third person shooter in by like, you know, because the franchise is so big. And like, that’s that fucking rules. I mean, I just I’d take this there’s no 50 hour open world game you could give me this year that I would take over this no way. And so I’m not like, I think when you look at those remakes, you have to ask, have games have games gotten better since than these since then? And I think the honest answer is not for those particular types of games. Like survival horror has not moved significantly forward since Resi 4 or Dead Space. I think that’s fair to say, like it’s certainly there are some like more interesting like thematic takes on that on survival horror that exists in the indie space, but in the blockbuster horror space, no way. I don’t think so. And then with Metroid Prime, like you say, they have made a new one in like 16 years. That’s just that’s such a long period of time. And so while I could see what people get a little bit pessimistic at this, I think that like, it’s also no bad thing to have these games, these kinds of games back in the spotlight as counter programming to things that just take 50 hours to complete things that feel very bloated and aren’t necessarily as interesting to us. So, yeah, that’s not just me being nostalgia dad, I just think that, I mean, there’s a reason these were great and they haven’t necessarily been surpassed. So fucking why not? That’s how I see it basically. Yeah, no, I agree. I think the only place it’s a minor thing, because I know it is coming, like, there was a time that these Resident Evil games, they like arrived with just such a slew of bonus modes and extra features, and they haven’t quite worked that out in the last five years. Like they’ve always come eventually. Some of it’s been like partitioned into DLC packs, but there is something, there is like a little shame that like Mercenaries isn’t here in this. Something I associate with the Capcom character is like fully featured, like really rich, generous games, and this is still a big campaign, I mean this is like 16, 18 hours or whatever, and then you will want to replay it through with New Game Plus and extra weapons and all this extra stuff, but the original was more impressive in that sense than this, and you know, just no one’s really doing that. Pretty much apart from Platinum, who basically are like still have that kind of bit of Capcom in them, I think, you know, those games are still like fucking stacked with stuff. Even that new Bayonetta Origins has like extra campaign stuff that unlocks at the end that you’re like, even this does it, you know, like they’re there. They value that stuff, and that’s a bit of old thinking I do miss, but it probably doesn’t fit in with our current point, but I thought I’d say it. And that’s fair enough. I think they’re like, obviously the Mercenaries of Mobile will come along, and I think Capcom does still care about that stuff. But it’s also true that when you take Village, for example, I thought that on a second playthrough there wasn’t much reason to go back, because the combat doesn’t have actually the same mechanical sophistication that Resi Force Combat has. I think they’re like, that’s what would keep me coming back to this, is just the nature of the shooting weak spots melee loop is just perfect, and in Resi Village you don’t have that level of interactivity with the enemies you’re fighting, really. It’s not quite as interesting on that level. And so yeah, I think I agree that my relation with those games was I just played them through once and that was kind of it really, and that was kind of all I needed. Whereas I think, like you say, even Five and Six, which are games that retroactively don’t have as great a reputation, Five’s Mercenaries mode, as discussed on this before, is one of the best bonus modes ever put in a video game, like even if you hate Resny War Five’s campaign, the way it amps up everything the combat does really well is incredibly impressive with an array of playable characters that push different buttons, give you different strengths, different ways to play with the enemies in the arena, different ways to kind of master it and keep your combos going. Just fantastic. And so yeah, I agree with you, that maybe feels like part of the DNA that was maybe more crucial ten years ago than it is now for whatever reason. Yeah, I think we will get it. You know that we’re going to be paying, you’re going to be buying separate ways to campaign as DLC, I would imagine. That was like rumoured, wasn’t it? So yeah, I could see that. It just feels like that’s how that looks and works in modern games. That’s true, but again, if they said Mercenaries is coming as a free update, that’s fair. That’s definitely, yeah, anything else is speculation, but yeah. And just to cap this off, I would say that it’s a hard nine for me, pal. I thought this was like very, very good and I can see, I can see why some people gave it not as high as that and I can see why some people gave it a 10. Like it’s, there’s an argument for a 10. Like I’m not sure there’s a better version of this type of thing you can play right now. Yeah, yeah. And it’s really strong. I loved it. So actually something I meant to mention, I managed to hook this up to a proper 7.1 surround sound system and played it on like a projector as well. And this game, maybe all games now sound this good. I haven’t played any other games with that surround sound set up, but the sound mix in this game is fucking unreal. Like the sense of like, like the pouring rain outside, the sound of like the, the, the, emotional surround of like the enemies around you is, is so evocative because like so much of this game is about like, where am I in regards to other people? Is there something behind me? And being able to hear all that, you just feel like orally swarmed. Um, yeah, I was like, man, if I ever have the money, I am buying a good sound system for my house. Except you can’t have a fucking surround sound system when you’re in a terrace. You just can’t, it’s like a crime, like, it’s just not fair to do that to your neighbors. No. Um, oh man, after it means I’m just gonna have to like find a lone house. I’m gonna have to convert a barn out in the countryside just so I can have a surround sound system. You should ask that Dick Lovett car garage at the end of the road, Matthew, if you can just go in there with your speakers one night and just like plug in your TV and stuff. But it was, yeah, really, really impressive, but that might just be all modern games that I just haven’t noticed because I’ve not tried them. Well, I definitely noticed how good the sound design wasn’t this and like that is an area where this game is phenomenal. There are bits of the game where even though there are no enemies there, it, the creek of floorboards, but also the ambient sound makes you think there are always enemies there. Um, and just like, it’s just, there are some areas I did not want to go back to because of just how they sounded. Um, it was just like, it was just not a good vibe to be in, I thought, what if they do spring a surprise enemy on me here? Like it’s, there’s a bit of that sort of vibe going on. Um, yeah, just really, just audiovisually an absolutely phenomenal game. It’s quite funny actually, learning that like, did you realise that all of these new Rezzy characters are based on like real beautiful people that exist and they basically just map them into the game? Did you know that? Oh, what? Like, so there’s a guy who looks like Leon? Yeah, I don’t know about Leon’s, but I like, there’s a girl who just is Ashley and she’s just like on Instagram. And it’s like… Surely not old fucking Benito or whatever his name is, the village elder, like he looks how he looks originally. They didn’t find an eight foot tall bald man with different coloured eyes on the scene. No, I’m assuming not, but like the make, I think there is like a real life Jill Valentine and there is like, yeah, but I did look up like they were like, oh yeah, and Ashley is based on this person. I think I have seen the Jill Valentine one, yeah, that’s, that’s, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is funny because they’re just like, we have gone out and found the most photogenic people possible and scanned them into our game and they are our characters now. Then we like just put different sort of hair and clothes on them. It’s quite, that’s quite funny to see. But yeah, like it’s the photogrammetry thing they do. It does mean that everything has this like real palpable reality to it. But at the same time, like the, there’s so much effort made with like filters and the colour palette to make it feel like old Resi. It’s just, just an amazing art style. Just incredible. Okay, Matthew, should we take a break and come back with some spoilery stuff? Yeah, let’s do it. Okay, spoilers begin after this. To those of you who will never listen to this next section, I bid you farewell. Have a good time. We have a Patreon. Goodbye. Bye. Welcome back to the podcast. Oh, pull up a seat, have a cigar, have a bit of whiskey. This is the relaxed spoilery zone a little bit. So… I am not a cigar or whiskey guy. Neither am I, to be honest. That’s like, open a box of matchmakers, drink a Rio. Yeah, for me, a cloudy double IPA for me. Yes, I’ll have that. So yeah, like, I want to talk some spoilery stuff. Capcom had some quite big restrictions for the review period. So I suppose we thought we’re probably not gonna come back and discuss spoilers in other times. So it makes sense to have some here. And also, it’s not so long a game that I think that like, this podcast would come out that you’d forget about it if you played it and you wanted to hear what we thought. So why not talk about spoilers a little bit, you know? I think we’ve been pretty good with spoilers in that first section, Matthew, apart from the ski lift thing. And I don’t know if we really spoiled anything. I mean, it’s just spoiled in that it’s not in there, you know? Yeah, yeah. If anything, you’ll enjoy the game more knowing that you’re not gonna have that disappointment that I had. Yeah, so let’s start with the missing bits, Matthew. Because this is where my memory is a little bit hazy, but the ski lift is missing. The moment where Leon sits on the throne. Now, I saw that in our doc last night, you went to tag that. Is that in the game? And I missed it. It is, but in a different place. It’s more of an Easter egg now. Oh, fuck. I missed it. It’s like the fucking shield and tunic all over again. I can’t believe I missed this. Fucking hell. You can sit in a throne and he does say the same thing. Okay, okay. Well, fuck that. What else is missing from Resident Evil 4 Remake that you noted? The room with the ceiling that comes down with the spikes. Oh yeah, fuck. That’s not in there. No. My memory of the castle is like, something interesting happened in every room. There isn’t the laser corridor from the island. Yeah, I noticed that. And that’s quite iconic. Cause just a QTE, so I guess they thought we don’t know how to do this. Visually, it was so like different to the rest of that island. You know, that’s why I think that island feels like a little less interesting. Cause you suddenly aren’t in this quite like weird, almost like sci-fi environment for a bit. Yeah. Some of them are like, they’ve changed to other things. They’ve changed the tone of them so much that they’re basically entirely different. The statue, for example. Yeah. Obviously in the original, you get chased by a giant sort of mechanical statue. Quite blockbuster-y and like rad. And in this one, it’s just like a small statue that sort of sprays a bit of flame in places. Yeah. It was a bit very, yeah, very undercooked, I would say. Yeah. Rich definitely called that in his review. And I think he was right to. Cause when you see it, you’re like, oh, that’s a shame. You know, like that thing used to be amazing. And look out, that’s, as I joked to Rich in a text message, I said, that statue’s a real bust, literally. Very good, very good. Yeah, there you see. That’s how funny I am off mic. So there’s stuff like that. Maybe this isn’t quite the same thing, but like the fact that they changed the insects from being invisible to camouflaged meant they weren’t as interesting. I remember the sewer section with the invisible bugs having like a real character to it because if they were invisible, here it was just like, oh, I like shooting these bugs. They die in a really satisfying way, but that felt more like just fighting the people. It just felt like another room with another fighter. Another fight in it rather than like, oh, I’m specifically in this weird, invisible enemy territory. Yeah, I think so. I also did that, like all of that bug section have more of a crescendo than it has here too. It just sort of like, Peter’s out here. You destroy those nests as an optional objective and that’s kind of it. Like, wasn’t there something more in the original? Am I misremembering that? I honestly don’t remember. Neither do I. It’s just two forgetful El Gigantes struggle to recall for a Resident Evil 4. Dos forgetful El Gigantes. Dos forgetful, thanks. So those were like, I guess those were like the biggies, which when you say them out loud, don’t really sound like much, but it’s enough in that original game, like it did everything, you know? And there are some other like little changes where they’re just less characterful. The fact that you don’t like snipe the glass of wine in the painting, like there is a painting puzzle now, they have changed what that puzzle is, and that’s like fine, but like that was just a very weird note to it. There’s no bit where Ashley is incarcerated and you’re picking off dudes to the sniper rifle, that’s not in there. Yeah. Where she’s like locked, she’s like chained up and you have to shoot the chains off of her and stuff, like that’s, she’s like tied to the wall, you know the bit I mean? I remembered more you and Ashley being apart a bit more in the castle in general. There’s not actually that much of you and Ashley together in this game. Cause I think it’s like very well done for the most part. It’s a much simpler mechanic. She doesn’t have a health bar. She gets picked up and then you have to shoot the enemies before they take her away. That’s quite similar to how it worked in the original. You can still get, still get to hide sometimes. That’s really what- Yeah, that’s less of that though. I feel like the original, like it had like more big bins you could put her in and you could also tell her to stay put, which was basically you could hide her somewhere safe. Yeah. Say stay here and I’ll go into the area and the game does remove that, which I think is like the crucial difference. That’s definitely true. There’s also like the, I remember the, so one area of the game I think is like actually not quite as good as the original is in the bit where you fight the two chainsaw women in the arena-ish kind of like, it’s sort of like a very fortressy weird bit. It’s quite cramped in the original. Here it’s a bit more open and not that tense. It’s a lot more kind of running away and then just shooting people from a distance and it didn’t quite have the same tension. I think that’s one of the first times you really have Ashley and have to protect Ashley properly. I remember that being quite hard in the original. Here it’s a bit, didn’t work quite as well for me. So I think that in general, the Ashley and Peril idea isn’t as key to this as it is to the original, which is interesting. But yeah. There’s a slight argument for this as well, this remake, that the difficulty is in general a little bit strange in the sense that I think all of the bosses are pretty easy in this game. But the combat on standard mode to me felt actually quite perfect. Like it was exactly as hard as I wanted it to be. It was, there were parts where I died, but it was never unfair. You know, there were times I ran out of ammo and I had to keep making ammo and keep things kind of moving. And I think the difficulty on that level is quite perfect. But the Ashley stuff, she got carried away twice. And I think that’s all that ever really happened to her in my playthrough. So that’s interesting, because I think one of the questions you got from our listeners about this remake was, is the Ashley stuff, is she quite annoying or whatever? I didn’t find her annoying in the original, to be honest. I thought the mechanic was, as escort missions go, it’s actually one of the few good ones from that period. But it’s even less of a hassle for you as a player, right? Yeah, they sort of simplified her. Fair is the wrong word, because like you say, I don’t think the original was unfair. But her behavior and your interactions with her have almost been simplified a little bit in that, you know, she doesn’t have a health bar. So if she’s incapacitated and then she takes another hit, she dies. So you know, if she’s incapacitated, that’s when I really have to worry. That’s when I have to get off the floor. The instructions, you can keep her right next to you or tell her to keep a bit of distance. So that’s just like, if there’s an enemy who is right up in your grill with a chainsaw, she might get clocked by that. So that’s maybe a time when you’d send her away. If she is away, you maybe haven’t got close eyes on her to stop her from getting picked up. So I can see why they’ve kind of changed that. When I was reading about those changes beforehand, I thought like, oh shit, I’m gonna, it feels like, it sounds like we’re gonna be escorting Ashley like a lot more. And that you’re not, you won’t be able to be able to like cheese it and like hide her in places. And that isn’t true, but like, she is, she’s somehow like, somehow more present, but also easier to keep alive. So, you know, I’ve likened that elsewhere to, it’s the sort of same thing that they did with the knife, where you’ve got this new fundamental weakness it didn’t have before, but then it’s so much stronger in other ways. And as long as you just learn to like manage that balance, it will probably end up being in your favour more than it was in the original. Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s fair. Yeah, interesting, isn’t it? The, as mentioned, like the Ashley, the section where you play as Ashley is fucking great in this. It was cool. I did wonder, actually, when I was playing it, I was like, I wonder if there is going to be this temptation to like give every Rezzy like a House Beneviento, like a big horror beat. And this isn’t, it’s nowhere near as scary as that, but it’s quite spooky what they do. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it’s quite cleverly done and she has like a tiny bit more of a way to fight back than she did in the original, which is a really smart choice and that mechanic works really well. Yeah, yeah, it’s, I don’t mind that because, yeah, it’s like, it’s obviously, you’re just blasting your way through the enemy so much of the time that a little tone change is very welcome. So, yeah, nicely done here. If you find the armor dudes is actually like reasonably good in this too. Like they’re quite, their weak spots pop out and then they’re just, they feel threatening, but they are, they are fun to kill. Oh, they’re really fun to kill. What I really liked about those armor guys as well is when, when like Ashley can sort of stun them with like a light and you see they sort of shrivel into the armor, but you can see their little eyes sort of swiveling horribly. That’s a really good bit of like enemy design. That’s very like evocative. There’s a very, there’s a really funny side quest in this where you have to go and like fight a really powerful version of one of these armor guys. And like, right, the game literally turns into Dark Souls. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That, yeah, that’s like doing that was the one place where I properly knobbled myself with ammo. Right. Like that fight ate so much of my ammo up that I was then like on the back foot for like, you know, about an hour after that, like clawing my way back and like really reliant, you know, I had to be a lot more careful. I’d almost wish they’d been, they’d use those side challenges to add like a few more beats like that, where it’s kind of like, oh, you want this, do you? Well, this is actually going to take it out of you a little bit and a good way of kind of like policing people who are like sitting on all that magna-mama or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you because I think there’s only really two challenges like that in the game. Like basically sub optional sub bosses, essentially, this one in the village as well. Yeah, I actually missed that one. Yeah, it’s not that good. Like it’s not even it doesn’t even look particularly visually distinctive from the other dogsy fight. It’s just it’s just takes more damage really. Right. Yeah. So it’s not Yeah, but I too would have liked that because the optional challenges in this they they do I think like you could argue that they are filler in the sense that they don’t meaningfully add anything to the arc of the game. But they are. I don’t mind having a few wrinkles here or there. They’re a little bit different from the original Retty 4. So I was quite happy with them. I quite enjoyed them. I’m less so like the there’s like a side quest where you have to kill rats. That’s a little bit more just like find the things and kill them basically. Not quite quite straightforward. So yeah, yeah, that was that was good. Like new enemies, Matthew. So in the farm section, again, this is a very spoilery session just to make that very clear. There’s like an enemy type in this. It’s like a cow head guy who sort of moves at you. And carries a fucking giant hammer. The reveal of that during like the village section, I thought was amazing. I was like, I just thought it was it seemed so scary in the moment you get. Eventually you get you can kill these things super quickly. But your first battle with it, it feels like, oh my God, I had no idea this is in the game. And it really, it really fucked me up for about 30 seconds. Were you a fan of the little enemy types they added to this? Yeah, yeah, that that worked really well, particularly because you sort of like if you do have familiarity with the game, just for something else to come through the door was was pretty shocking. Maybe I’m misremembering this. I think they’ve I think they changed the the the kind of free roaming parasite quite a bit in this. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I definitely found them way more of a challenge because the thing with the Los Pagas is you have obviously like they’re inside people. Sometimes you shoot the head off and like a tentacle comes out. Then there’s like a nastier version of a tentacle. And then there’s almost like a like a full bodied parasite which runs around, can latch onto enemies and make them more powerful. When you kill the body, that thing jumps off and goes to another body. And they were definitely in the original game. But I felt like whenever one of those things turned up, I was often quite fucked. But they were the things I was saving my flash grenades for. Because if you flash grenade, you can just kill them instantly, like the Lost Plagas hate bright light. And yeah, there were a few sticky situations where it just kept coming. And like you shoot, when those things possess a body, if you shoot them off, you can see like loads of them writhing in underneath. If you shoot their head off, like there’s loads of horrible kind of tendrils coming out and they’ll keep on coming. And like if they get up close to you, they’ve got a really horrible instant kill. In fact, in general, like something pretty sure I said in the first section, the instant kill and the close up kill animations in this game are like fucking gross. It’s like pretty hardcore. Did you see the eyeball one, the thumbs in the eyes one? No. Oh, it’s horrible. Like if you’ve got a very little bit of health and they grab you and you basically don’t have any health to push them off, some of the villagers will push their thumbs in Leon’s eye sockets while he screams. It’s just so fucking rank. So, yeah, that’s good. Yeah, and I like that too. They do, they certainly capture like, you know, when a dude with a chainsaw just takes his head off and stuff. It’s like that gnarly vibe is absolutely still present. Yeah, it’s interesting. One thing I did actually really like about the remake as well is that the first variant of The Last Plague, I swear it’s like the tentacles are swinging at you. They just go, they just go down much easier. There were such bullet sponges in the original that I just, I always found them like, oh, when one of them popped off here, it’s a bit like a problem you deal with quite quickly. And that was a balancing thing where I was like, oh, well done. That’s what, that’s what I would have done if I was remaking this game. I would have made it so you had one variant that was really easy to like just get rid of, but it’s like an inconvenience to the player. And then another variant that actually takes up a lot more ammo or you can just use a flash grenade to kill it. Like that’s, that felt wise to me. I was just using the, my beautiful red nine to just pop off the ammo, pop off the other, the first variant quite easily. So I like that a lot. Like again, they’re in the original game, but they, they seemed particularly horrible in this is that, that fucking red dude who can like make everyone like turn into the horrible Las Plagas parasite. He certainly didn’t have an effect on you in like your parasite. Yeah. Maybe that’s, that’s, that adds to it. Cause when he’s chanting, you’re all like, oh, I can’t do anything. Cause it’s like the parasite in you waking up as well. And like those I found to be like, you know, quite big difficulty spikes until I got rid of that guy. I just didn’t really understand at first like, oh, I need to prioritize him. So that was, that was like a really effective change. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I thought all of these changes were, were good ones. There’s a tiny bit more variety here or there and then like, yeah, but then otherwise I think they’re just, it’s faithfulness to the, to the original ready enemy types is exactly what this needed, really, and no messing around. How do you feel about the new merchant voice? Really liked it. At first I wondered, is he a bit too much because he is like, he has the old sort of, very much captures the vibe of the original, but he talks a lot more. So yeah, that’s something to get used to, but it’s well judged. He says some really funny things. And then by the, I had the same dynamic of like, oh, thank fuck, here he is kind of thing. Is that how you felt about it too? He says, gun rhymes with fun for a reason, stranger. Yeah, that’s it. And then he says a lot of the classic lines, but they don’t come up as obviously. And like, whenever you walk up to him after he’s not doing, after he’s been idle for a while, he goes, oh, breaks over, I suppose, he says that loads. Really good. That again, feels like someone who just adored the original game made that choice, right? Like it’s, you know, people know The Merchant was a big fave. I do wonder, like, what is the vibe of that character in Japanese? Like what, you know, if you, because the cockney element of it is so specifically like a Western English speaking thing. Right. I would be curious to kind of know what the… Maybe there’s like, you know, how sometimes in like the Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest games, they have like, they really lean into like Japanese regional dialects. Maybe it’s like a real kind of like, I don’t know, country bumpkin region or something. So maybe it’s like a very specific part of Japan where everyone could be like, oh, it’s one of those guys. Yeah. What is, what is a Japanese cockney? Drop us an email and backpagegamesatgmail.com. So that’s really good. And I also, I suppose like the other thing is that there’s Capcom, I think, like didn’t want to discuss this in like the reviews, but obviously this is a spoiler section. So I think we’re fine. Like the, the gun gallery stuff in this, the shooting range is really, really nicely done. Yeah. It has a fun theme to it. If you’re joined by another character, they’ll, they’ll sit and watch. I never felt more single man than when I like absolutely merked like the shooting gallery and then Ashley was like, great job, Leo. And I was like, yeah, I’m so, I’m so single right now. But really nicely done. That again feels like someone identifying a real personality strength of the original and pulling it out a bit more. Yeah. Were you fond of those, Matthew? Yeah. I thought they were great. And I liked that the currency from that went into like the, the kind of capsule toy machine, which you can kind of customize your case with these little like dangling toys, which give you stat boost. So there’s like a little, a little layer of customization on top, like perks, but you are also kind of like, I don’t know if you’ve got every medal in the game, would you be able to unlock every toy in one run through? I didn’t get the feeling that you could, based on sort of how many there were. And like the ones I got were like annoying me for like machine gun. I’m not even fucking using the machine gun. Give me one for like drops more shotgun ammo or whatever. That’s what I wanted. Is it like, do you get the pistol ammo one by default? Maybe? Um, certainly like it felt like that was the default one to me, but that’s right. I think that’s the Leon one and like he, that’s like the first one I got. And so. Right. I got the chicken one, which was like you get more health from eating chicken eggs. Oh, nice. Um, no, I got the, yeah, the one I got was the handgun one. So it made it even more sense for me to keep the red nine going because it was like, I had my stock, had my little ammo key and then like, yeah, just, um, and then upgraded the damage I got the, um, the other thing is that by completing side quests in this, you get a secondary currency, which is the spinel, right? That’s what you get as the currency and you use it to unlock different, slightly different rewards to what you spend with your main, um, pesetas in the, uh, that’s a nice, uh, of the time touch kept from the original game, isn’t it? Um, because this is, this is still set in 2004, the game makes that clear. It would be weird if it was euros. There would be something weird about the idea that, like, the euros had come to this village. Like, that someone had come in and, like, removed all their old currency and given them the new currency. The idea that, like, Salazar and, uh, uh, Sadler were, like, people who had euros in their pocket would just, just, it’s just not, it just doesn’t work. Yeah, somehow, per se, it does just really work. So just, like, just like the idea of, like, um, you know, sort of Sadler being very pro-EU and it’s like, we’ve got to, we’ve got to do this, you know, like, this collective currency is better for all of us, you know, despite, despite everything else, I believe. Unless they, unless they are just, like, holdouts, you know, like, they’ve got some mad kind of, like, you know, they’ve, they’ve got some, like, big kind of, like, Brexit energy going on. Yeah. I mean, like, there’s a lot of, like, rules and regulations that they aren’t adhering to in the world of Resident Evil 4. It’s got, I could, you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were the types to do that. Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to mention, Matthew, is Luis. So actually, like, joins you as a, as a, you know, a player, like a non-playable character for a section of the game, which I think is quite a good touch. He’s quite a fun little companion, but it doesn’t feel like he’s seen that much of the game to me, and probably about the same as he is in the original, but very fleeting appearances I felt like. What did you think? The second run of him, though, like he’s basically there for like the mining set piece. Yeah. And that is just such a rollicking half an hour. Oh yeah, it’s great. Because the two of you just eat through anything they throw at you. The enemy types are like these fun bugs. There’s the minecart stuff. There’s like a great boss encounter that I really liked with them. That was like definitely the area in like the latter half of the game, which felt like most changed. And almost during that, I was like, oh, I would have liked to have seen a bit more of this kind of stuff, you know, I would have liked to have seen them like throw in a few more curve balls like this. And if it was like both the village and the castle have something which really deviated massively and the island maybe doesn’t have that, they could have padded the island out. They could have maybe added a stretch to it or done something more to it or like really, you know, the stuff with the regenerators is still like very, very effective, but they could have like, you know, put another big horror beat in there or something. I think the only I think like the regenerator section is the only like real sort of 10 out of 10 moment of that whole section. Like I think like even though like your mastery of the combat means that some of those like later battles are really fun, I think like in terms of like the sheer ideas factory element of Rezi, like it does feel like the weaker section to me, but the regenerator section itself is like and the reveal and the sound effects, all of that stuff is still great. And then of course, a very specific twist of how you kill them. Really, really great. So I’m totally with you on the minecart section. That’s like fucking great. Like what a great- It’s like Temple of Doom now. It’s like really, really fun. What a glow up. And like, yeah, having the two of them with like this dialogue of like the cart’s about to tip over. It’s just preposterous game logic stuff where, yeah, it actually like, it’s so silly. It makes you wonder why they don’t have like the Salazar sort of statue chasing after you. It’s like, it’s the same vibe really. Yeah, that’s it. Like totally, the stuff could have fit in. It just didn’t. You wondered if like, could they not see a way of doing it outside of a cut scene, but I swear they could have found a way to do it. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a shame. Did you like the Krauser stuff? So not really. And like the thing is that I absolutely love the original Krauser fight because I think the fact that they did, they did the bold thing of like, the first time they have a knife fight in the original game, it’s like probably the best cutie in the game. It’s really, really fun and ridiculous and like there are slow motion shots and they are treating their knives like swords. It’s like watching a lightsaber battle or something. It’s just ridiculous and just really, really great fun. There’s a bit more of a like, sort of like right wing men rights activist like feeling to this version of Krauser. Like he’s sort of like, he doesn’t quite have the same like Metal Gear boss element that he had in the original to me. He really felt like a Metal Gear solid boss that turned up in Resi. I think like he’s quite an unusual presence in Resi 4. Even here, instead of the QTEs, they actually like put the QTEs into the game. So you are having these kind of like up close knife fights. And that’s good in a way because you can use the parry system to parry the knife and things like that. But I don’t know if it necessarily has the same level of like drama or excitement to it. Yeah. I found him a slightly fiddly boss. What did you think? I liked it as like a like a knife mechanic showpiece and like changing up the rhythm of it. I thought that I did like it, you know, I liked it enough, but I would have had nothing against them having done something with quick time events and the flashiest stuff. Like I too like remember that the sort of silliness of it and the excess of it. And that’s definitely something which you lose when you don’t have quick time events in there. I did like the second fight with him though, with like his little obstacle course again and fighting with him, I mean, that’s still a beat I quite like. It’s like, it sort of comes out of nowhere in that third act. And like the area, you’re suddenly in like, I’ve always found it odd that you’re in these like ruins, this like temple, in an island which is otherwise an oil refinery. In the moment, you aren’t like, how the fuck am I here? Like they transition you into it however they do it and that’s fine. But when you think about it afterwards, you are like, what was the deal of this island? It seemed very like that, that Sadler’s whole like operation is confusing to me and I never really understand like what his deal is or like how these three kind of acts kind of, well the first two acts obviously make sense, like how they fit together. But what he achieves by having the village when his main base of operations is on this island doesn’t quite add up. I think like it feels like he joins the story earlier in the original to me and that is that maybe because there’s like cutscenes of him and Ada that aren’t in this game, maybe? Oh, yeah, there’s definitely like, I think you have like radio conversations with the enemies, with the boss, with like definitely with Salazar in the castle in the original. Like there’s a bit more like to and fro, it almost like builds up this like big prize fight coming, which is slightly lost in this. You just hear him on like the speakers sometimes. Yeah, I wasn’t blown away by the Salazar redesign either. Like he loses, because they’ve turned him from basically like a weird child, just a small man. He obviously looks like Margaret Thatcher. Yeah. It was like, that actually didn’t bother me so much. It was more that like the boss fight, I thought it was so bad that boss fight, just rubbish. Like he was, it was so like, it was like it was so annoying how you had the different levels of it and he just burped that stuff at you that just like constantly slowed you down and then it felt like knifing him in those instances was the only way to move it forward. I just, I really just didn’t think it was a net gain from the original and so, but yeah, I think like he does feel like more of a presence when he’s calling you. It is preposterous that he was calling you on his, on Leon’s video phone, but then that’s kind of quite fun. It’s like just giving you a call to say, fuck you basically. Like I quite like that about, about the original. Like it doesn’t have the whole, your right hand comes off stuff and all that, you know, that’s not in there either. Yeah. But that the defacto, Krauser fight is the defacto best boss fight in the game, I think, just because generally speaking, they’re not like a hugely strong crop. But yeah, I think it was like, I think it was fine. But Krauser for some reason just registered more of an impact for me in the original. It might have been like the voice actor as well. There was maybe a slight, there was slightly more of a feeling of history between them. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because like, because you’ve played Resi 2 Remake and then you’ve played this, it almost feels like you can’t imagine Leon and this guy having like some experience together in the meantime because you’ve played them in such quick succession. I don’t know. That’s a really minor point. But anyway, yeah. No, if you played the extra campaign in Dark Side Chronicles. Isn’t it the prologue, the, that in the Dark Side Chronicles, I can’t remember, but yeah. Yeah, they definitely fill in that gap anyway. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, you’re right. Because I remember playing the original Resident Evil 4, there was this real sense of like, you’ve been through so much. And then this like whole other fucking dude turns up who you’ve got backstory with and you’re like, who is this guy? What’s going on now? Like that’s like such an unusual bit of boss pacing that I loved in it because you’re like, oh, I, there’s, there’s definitely more of this game to come because I’ve now got business with this guy to sort out. Maybe like there’s some residual fondness for that, which is why I’m still quite into Krauser in this. And I, you know, it’s like, I think they did as well as you can do with the knife fight stuff. I think it’s just, yeah, yeah, it’s, it is, it is to the strong part of the game, just to be very clear. I feel like I’m griping too much about this game. I really know. No, no, it’s, this always happens when you do these episodes, you end up like taking a massive shit on Ragnarok, and we both quite like it. Actually, I didn’t really like Ragnarok that much. That’s in retrospect, in retrospect, I reflect on that as a not so fond experience. So, yeah, I dunno, just lots and lots of time spent and the camera not quite giving me enough perspective of what was going on with the action. Anyway, this is not that podcast. And this is not like, you know, not to dunk on Ragnarok, but like, this is just so lean compared to other games. You know, its character beats are short, it is always action, there is always something happening, there is no like filler in it, there’s no like, you know, lame tricks to try and like fill gaps or disguise things in. Like, it’s kind of quite black and white in terms of the characters, you know, they’re not trying to make everyone, not everyone has like a sympathetic backstory, they’re just a load of fucking monster men that you’re gonna kill with increasingly impressive shotguns, like, and that’s fine. Yeah, and it’s no like, it’s just, yeah, and that’s, this is the time where pacing mattered more than anything else, and now we’re at a time where it’s like value matters more than anything else, so single player games have to be, or you know, at least they’re perceived to be, to perceive that they have to be like as long as possible. And this just isn’t that game, this is the art of pacing, the art of like set piece design and yeah, you’re going down corridors a lot of the time, but they’re fucking great corridors and you’re having a fantastic time. Just so much momentum to it. I loved it. Like I say, nine. But it’d be like, if I was doing it for PC Gamer, it’d be like a 93 for me or something. I just thought it was incredibly strong. And as Matthew said, this doesn’t replace Rezi. It’s a very unusual remake situation where they can live symbiotically, where you can enjoy them both still at the same time. But it is to this game’s credit that as soon as I finished it, I wanted to replay it. And I didn’t feel that way about Resident Evil 2 Remake, possibly because you are going through some of the same beats with the other character as the campaigns flip. But yeah, as it goes, Matthew, this is just really fucking strong and I just I could definitely see myself blasting through it again. The New Game Plus thing is really enticing because those guns really are cool. And there was some stuff I just didn’t really explore that much. And you don’t have to be conservative about ammo. It’s really good. It’s really fucking good to just have this to a shiny new version of one of the best games ever made to play. Right. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No. Yeah. Wild time. Yeah. I’m a couple of hours into a New Game Plus replay and it’s just really, really fun to kind of recontextualize those fights with, you know, this horribly overpowered arsenal just exploding heads left, right and center. Yeah. Real good. Great stuff. Well, then I think we’re done, Matthew. That’s Resident Evil 4 Remake. It’s the, you know, you should go buy it and play it, especially if you, you know, if you love the original. Fantastic. If you never played it, I don’t know, actually. I’m not sure how you would feel about it. It might feel a bit, it might be a bit strange without the context of the time. I’ve not read a review from that perspective. So if you haven’t played it, please do let us know. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I just, it’s the, it’s the first game I’ve played this year where I’m like, you absolutely fucking must play this. That’s, that’s how I feel about it. So yeah, I think we’re done, Matthew. So next week is a simple What We’ve Been Playing episode. Looking forward to that. It’s been a while since we’ve done one of those. We’ll answer a bunch of listener questions, too. What We’ve Been Playing is Resident Evil 4, unfortunately. Yeah, I can talk about the anime cutscenes in Fire Emblem Fates, I suppose. No, not Fates, sorry, Fire Emblem, what was the one that came out that I just forgot about as soon as this came along? Engage, there you go. Good. Yes, Colgate hair, I remember now. Okay, good. So yes, otherwise we will be back soon. If you liked our podcast, please give us a thumbs up. 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