Report
Developers: Capcom
Price: ~$12 USA
Rating: M
Release: June 19, 2007
Sales: 191,000
Recap
In a universe of infinite possibility, hero Leon S. Kennedy once again fights a zombie onslaught in a sequestered town. This time, the town is in the Spanish countryside, and, this time, the zombies are farmers and church-goers under the influence of psychic mutagenic parasites called "Las Plagas," which is Spanish for "The Plagas."
Normally, shooting priests is wrong.
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition takes all the elements that worked so well in the previous console releases, mashes them together, adds new controls that deepen the gameplay, and, oh, in case you weren't aware, the central game is still one of the greatest ever made. Whereas previous Resident Evil games succeeded despite their ungainly controls and static camera, Resident Evil 4 fixes both problems by sticking the camera behind the hero's shoulder. Beautiful graphics and a clever new inventory system (players must stack items like Tetris blocks into an attache case) bolster the dark adventure, which features the most impressive boss fights I've seen in a video game. If you're not crushing house-sized trolls with boulders, you're boating after lake monsters, knife-fighting mutant mercenaries, and fleeing a caged monster helpfully named "it."
The Wii release improves on gameplay by allowing the Wiimote to serve as a reticule, allowing the player to aim at specific body parts without altering character movement. Additionally, the context-sensitive actions ("Press A really quickly to not die!") feel more natural when mapped to the Wiimote. Swinging the controller to swing the knife saves on valuable brain-time, since you're replicating motion instead of interpreting through a button. You'll need that ease of control while wading through this game's enormous size and thousands of enemies. Indeed, there's a generosity on display in this game, as new areas always bring new monsters, new visions, new ways to play, and new ways to be freaked the hell out.
RATING: A
The threat of American imperialism is symbolized by Leon jump-kicking Spanish zombie farmers.
Resemblance
35%: Zombie - Latin-based zombie threats in a rustic setting full of imposing Christian architecture gives Resident Evil 4 a curious Fulci quality. The slow-quick variability of the game's "Ganados" further matches with Zombie, which features zombies that move very slowly unless the plot requires them to speed up, which they do. Often. Points to Resident Evil 4 for consistency.
25%: Night of the Living Dead - I include this mostly for the sequence where you're suddenly trapped in a house with a thousands ghouls outside, and you're forced to barricade all the doors and windows, lay ready with a shotgun. The "Rio Bravo" school of zombie films features hundreds of movies, sure, but we might as well honor the first.
20%: Night of the Creeps - Most zombies in the horror genre come from radiation or voodoo or viral infections, but Resident Evil 4 features parasitic/mutagenic organisms called "Las Plagas." Fred Dekker's 1986 horror-comedy Night of the Creeps comes closest, with its alien leeches that take residence in the human body and reduce people to putrefying zombies.
10% Lord of the Rings - Mostly because the "El Gigante" creature is so clearly aped from the Cave Troll of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth. Supposedly, all the monsters in-game are mutations of real-world creatures, but if this hunchbacked monstrosity grew out of a normal person, then I am Carl Weathers.
10% Resident Evil - In a perverse bit of reciprocity, Resident Evil 4 steals the laser hallway from Paul W. S. Anderson's first film adaptation. You'd think that the films would be easy successes, given how well the games build suspense, but I've yet to see a Resident Evil film that lives up to the experience of playing a game.
You didn't think you'd win without a mine-cart level, did you?
Dead Space: Extraction - B
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