Resident Evil 4

I never got a chance to play Resident Evil 4 on my Game Cube before I sold it, so when I was walking through a Half-Priced Books Store I was presently surprised to see Resident Evil 4 had made it to the PC. After hearing all the praise this game had got, and my current craving to crap bricks, I bought the game.

You start off playing as Leon who is sent into a creepy forest, to find the President’s daughter (Ashley) who had been kidnapped. soon finds that Ashley has been abducted by a bunch of Spanish Zombies and in no time you’re out shooting their heads off to try and find her. However this isn’t too hard as all the Zombies are relatively easy to kill (with the exception of some bosses). They slowly walk towards you (emphasis on slowly) just so they can throw an axe at you and miss and for you to blow their heads off without much effort from your trusty shotgun. None of the enemies are scary in the slightest and at the very most it feels like your at a target range while playing Resident Evil 4. In between action sequences there are some puzzles that again, aren’t that challenging but they are a nice break from just shooting Zombies all day long. Resident Evil is a fairly cheap game though, it often relies on Quick Time Events (QTE) to kill you (which with the exception of bosses your rarely if EVER die from Zombie attacks) and scare you. They are so bloody annoying and cheap its unbelievable.  On the PC version the buttons that pop up are numbers instead of keyboard symbols or letters and to make matters worse when you look in the manual to see the corresponding key for a number and then press it during a QTE you often die while the game laughs at you because the numbers that pop up on screen aren’t the equivalent to their symbol or lettered key. Then when you do the event over again (usually after a long battle sequence which you have to do…again…for the third time) the QTE is different each time making the randomness of getting it correct even greater which makes the gameplay overly frustrating.

The controls by the way are complete shit in the PC version of the game as you can’t change the controls, the mouse isn’t supported and aiming is harder than it is on the console versions. You aim with right shift and shoot with enter and run with right ctrl. (and yes which shift/ctrl you press does make a difference.) Moving feels clunky and as I said earlier aiming is horrendous. You can play the game with a game pad, which improves the controls and QTE’s but for some reason my sound cut out when using my game pad which brings the experience down even more. I looked for  fix to this glitch but found nothing.

As for the whole horror part of the game well, the game isn’t scary in the slightest. Simply put, NOTHING, in the game will even remotely scare you. Doom 3 was scarier than this game and that is saying quite a bit.

The graphics on the other hand are quite nice especially with the higher resolution and textures. Cut scenes on the other hand are very blurry and are an eyesore compared to the rest of the game. The RPG elements of buying weapons and what not is also well played out, but this brings me to another problem, you can’t buy ammo so latter in the game you get stuck in situations where you have to little ammo to have any real stopping power against sub bosses and bosses and just Zombies in general making you rely on your crappy knife. Which just adds the cheapness of the game as it feels like the lack of ammo to the point where you have to rely on your knife (no I’m not a bad shot) is somewhat ridiculous.  The sound is excellent down to every last bit of sound with a great atmosphere and soundtrack. Voice acting is also worth mentioning as it’s done, for the most part, well.

Resident Evil 4 wasn’t all its cracked up to be in my opinion as its crappy controls, lack of game options, weak AI, and cheap gameplay mechanics make this game a no go. Then add to the fact that the only way to exit out of the game is ctrl +alt+delete, ALT+F4 or to die feels very backwards and stupid for a 2007 PC game.