Here's some new gameplay footage from a few days ago:

I'm still keen to try it even though I don't love all the decisions they've made. Another key one seems to be--based on this footage--that Leon's melee attacks won't stagger or knock down whole groups anymore, which again is be a big departure and a real shame from my perspective. But some of the other changes look interesting, so we'll just see...

It seems like the biggest change, based on the trailers, is that Luis doesn't die but survives with Leon until the end in a buddy cop type of setup. I could be wrong, but that would be a interesting change from what happens in the original game. Or maybe a choice made in the game decides if he lives or dies. And I like that Ashley no longer looks like a young Britney Spears.

Overall, it seems like a really good remake. The most ambitious of the RE remakes so far, which makes sense considering how much of a praised classic the original game is now. Capcom really needs to bring it with this one. I would like them to do one of Code Veronica, but rumors is Capcom hates that game for some reason.

Glad to see they’re working on the rain for the sole purpose of perfecting their Dino Crisis remakes, which are surely coming any day now!

@allthedinos: Hnnnnnngh. I hope so

C'mon, we all know it's time for an Omnimusha soulslike.

Ok in all seriousness, I played the “Chainsaw Demo” tonight, and I loved it. I really didn’t see the necessity to remake this game, as its HD upscaled version seemed adequate for people to get their fix, but the early goings are impressive. The lead-up to the village is more meaningful, the Ganados are truly grotesque, and the addition of stealth kills actually felt like a positive for once. Chainsaw Man was just as terrifying as before, with the bonus of having some truly fucked-up eyes. I was also worried about knife durability, but the shot-kick combo is still intact and effective.

Overall, this is looking like a day one (or thereabouts) purchase from me. Looking forward to playing the rest of it!

@allthedinos: Oh, cool, thanks, I actually hadn't heard there was a demo. I'll have to download that and give it a shot!

I played the demo and ended up in a shack in the side of the town with 6 dudes stacked up on the only door, and got killed. The chainsaw man didn’t even show up. It was fun, but it was a case of steal thing put me in a corner. I alt+F4 outed because I was done and getting done would take a few more minutes than I had patience for a demo. I’d give it more patience if it was the full game. The controls felt a little awkward. A tad slow. I think I’d have no real issue with that with the full game, but knowing it was a demo, I didn’t have that patience. No point to this, I think it’s well made, just was more frustration that I wanted to deal with in the moment.

Because of some of the escapability (especially the very Last of Us shiv defense when grabbed) the encounter didn't feel as intense as I remember it. Chainsaw Man also felt a little easier to lose than before and the chase didn't seem nearly as infinite. That could all be in my head though, having played this encounter maybe as many as a dozen times and being keenly aware there's a hidden timer in the first place. I was completely disappointed that I forgot about the shotgun until just before the bell tolled so I never got to mess with it, though Leon's "oh, nice!" when I picked it up was hilarious.

Edit: Just to add that just because I didn't find this encounter as much of a reimagining of how terrifying it used to be as I expected, and in some ways found it simpler (one other fun note: seems like you can just drop a grenade and not worry about clearing out of its blast zone? I never used that stuff in the original so maybe it was always that silly) that doesn't mean I had an easy time. Like I said, I found the shotgun right after the first bell tolls, and I was running towards it for a very specific reason: I'd used my G+R "special blend" and included first aid kit, ran out of pistol bullets and kept getting distracted by that damn companion mount icon forgetting that didn't mean I could climb on my own. I was sure I was dead; in fact, does this game have a "near death" type feature where you get one last chance? I feel like I remember the screen going grey on my last hit but letting me limp away.

One thing I found really interesting is that they might be doing some subtle, clever stuff with Leon's mobility. One of the most fun things I did in the demo was make a wrong turn a few times and "whoops-a-daisy" my ass in reverse, seeming to just miss a lunging axe swing. I'm also 99% positive that I successfully not only shot an axe out of the sky but ducked under one to save ammo a couple times.

Lastly, is it just me or does this game look weirdly...ugly? I'm the first to admit I kind of have a problem with the way these newer games look in general as RE2 never necessarily wowed me either, but something about the environments looks quite muddy to me. I was playing in Resolution mode with all the bells and whistles turned on - even the hair strands, my nominee for dumbest aesthetic option ever - and aside from the character models the whole place looked kind of gnarly in a not so cool way. Be curious to see if anyone else came away with a similar feeling...

I took an awesome photo of my first kill, unfortunately I've never been able to get my PS App on my phone to pull Captures from my console (despite downloading this demo to said console from said phone's PS App while at work reading the news that it had just released) and I don't feel like sending it to my Twitter account so maybe I'll just take a picture of my picture with my phone some other time for y'all.

I loved it!

I played the demo and everything about it seems okay, except one serious issue, the shooting in the game. It's not as tight as it was in the original game and feels more like how the shooting was in Resident Evil 6. That is not a good sign. Forget about the rain effects, they need to tighten the controls and make the shooting with weapons more solid. Also, the melee attacks don't seem as powerful as they were in the original game. It seems like Capcom has also been influence the Souls nonsense and trying to make the game harder than it needs to be.

@av_gamer: Agreed. I mostly love RE4 for the amazingly tuned combat, and this demo just... doesn't feel that great to play. It looks right but feels all wrong.

I played the demo this morning. Quite proud to say I didn't get killed! It was fun, can't wait for the full thing.

Too dark, claustrophobic, fov slider doesn't go far enough like i'm looking through a tube, i thought it was broken at first, most of the demo is a corridor, Canadian Leon, they try to make it spookier then in a cutscene teenage Leon kicks a dude so hard he gets launched, the movement feels awful, people complained about Geralt in The Witcher 3 but this is worse, aiming feels weird on controller i had a hard time, Leon takes up too much of the screen when aiming, can you see the chainsaw man in this image?, RE2 remake combat with RE4's enemy count doesn't work, RE4 had the best shotguns of all time, this does not, gun to knife transition is slow, enemies have more combo attacks keeping you at a distance, all this makes the village fight (one of the best scenes in the original) feel tedious and annoying, stutter during area transitions but that's not a huge deal.

I am always lenient with games, i believe it's a miracle any game gets made with how complicated they are to make, but they are remaking RE4, one of the few games to receive perfect review scores and set a standard for the franchise to follow for the next 18 years, they're taking a risk by doing this and i can't go easy on them, i owe the original that much.

The title on this is "Resident Evil 4", they took remake out, it's not a spin off or a reimagining it's a replacement, i've heard plenty of people already say "i want to play RE4 but i might as well wait until the remake comes out", so i feel completely just in holding it against the original, one of the best games of all time, this is one of the few times i'll be harsh on a game the next is probably the Max Payne remake.

Popping in to say there's a hidden weapon and a hidden difficulty mode in the demo.

I won't spoil the weapon here, since it's only a couple clicks to an instructional video. It's not very hard to get, and it'll be in your briefcase at the start of every subsequent run.

Now the difficulty mode is unlocked completely at random. It has a small chance to appear when you start a new game, so you'll have to keep trying over and over. When it works, you'll get a warning screen asking if you want to opt into the "Mad Chainsaw Mode". This difficulty has no checkpoints, beefier enemies, and the chainsaw is literally on fire.

Anyhow, I'm enjoying the demo so far, even though I get grabbed by Ganados every five seconds. I think the full game will be more well rounded, and the hidden weapon does add variety.

Once people figure out all the ways to (ab)use the knife parry system, and after some weapon upgrading, I think this game will feel just as good as running through the original title.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about, this demo is fantastic and an improvement on every way from the original as far as I can tell - from playing this demo and all the info on the main game that's been out pre-release. The original village section in RE4 is a pretty stress-free breeze to me (at least has been since every replay I've had of RE4, obviously as a kid it was crazy) and playing this demo a few times I'm already stressed and spooked about the chainsaw man getting me. Plus, ammo already feels more premium than in the original as well. I never really felt I had trouble conserving ammo in the original version, I always had enough to take on every combat encounter.
Sure, maybe some of the campy dialogue might be replaced but I'm sure it still has its goofy moments just like the RE2 remake (which overtook RE4 as my favorite RE game.) That being said, I see this as a sequel to that, not really trying to be 1:1 with the original game – part of the sequence of remakes of the classic four main Resident Evil games.

I couldn't disagree more. The original was a once-in-a-generation type of game whose gameplay was almost unfathomably well-tuned. Given its troubled development history, and that even Shinji Mikami hasn't been able to replicate it since, I chalk a lot of that up to a very happy accident. It's so good that I've played it roughly once a year in the eighteen years since its release, and it just never gets old. After playing through this demo a fair few times, there is nothing about it that makes me believe the same will be true of this one.

I want to quote another RE4 superfan from almost two years ago on this board, @lapsariangiraff, who described better than I could what made RE4 so special in relation to RE8:

Similarly, I replay it a lot. And that combat loop [Stagger-->Kick-->Knife] is a huge part of it. Sometimes people say it controls poorly, but I think it controls perfectly for what you're being asked to do. You're not being asked to be a crack shot (though it helps) -- you're being asked to control a space. A space that is constantly trying to get away from you, with guys spawning behind or inching to your periphery. And when you best them, when you maneuver in such a way they're all lined up in front of you ready for *one* shotgun blast or *one* grenade or *one* well-placed kick -- you've already won. And that feels great. And I never feel like I'm in control of the space in Village-- I'm just hitting as many headshots as I can as the enemies come toward me, and then running over to another side of the room when they come close to me to do it again.

The core problem with this remake is that, like RE8, you're not able to control your space like you were in the original. It's just not that game anymore.

The two biggest components, broadly speaking, that are causing this are these:

(1) Leon--and his weapons--are less capable than before, while enemies are more capable.

(2) Enemy reactions aren't consistent.

That's hardly all my complaints, but let's look at these for a second.

An easy place to start is the shotgun, which @cikame mentioned. In the original game, shotgun blasts hit a wide area and were an automatic knockdown against most non-boss enemies, including chainsaw maniacs (even the female versions, which were supposed to be more deadly). The shotgun in this game hits a much more narrow area, and the chainsaw maniac mostly just shrugs it off. So while in the old game every shotgun shell represented a powerful ability to control your space, knocking down everything in a wide cone in front of you, here it's just... another way to pump some damage into enemies, but still leaves you very vulnerable.

The pistol mostly feels about as capable as it was before, at least with the shooting part, but the melee attack follow-ups aren't. You have to be closer to initiate; it doesn't hit as wide an area; sometimes it randomly selects an animation that doesn't clear other enemies at all and instead leaves you standing in the middle of them (speaking to consistency). Meanwhile Leon is more sluggish in running forward to initiate the attack.

And speaking more to consistency, sometimes a shotgun shell to the face will put the chainsaw maniac in a state to melee... but sometimes won't. There seems to be no way to tell whether it will or not. Likewise, sometimes knocked-down ganados can be instantly killed with your knife (right trigger), and sometimes not, unclear when you can and can't. And probably worst of all, a pistol shot to a ganado's head won't always put them in a melee-able state, either. Again, not consistent.

The original game was utterly consistent in enemy responses to your gunplay: a shot to the head of a ganado would always leave them reeling. Here you can shoot them in the head and run forward to melee, only to realize the game arbitrarily decided the enemy isn't staggered. That type of inconsistency is the kiss of death for me, because the rules of the game aren't clear. You can respond that a certain amount of random variation in reactions is more realistic, but I don't f-ing care. If I wanted complete realism in my video games, my character would need to take a piss every few hours. I want to know that when I do an action, it's going to lead to the same result.

Add to all this that enemies are in general faster, more aggressive, more difficult to hit. I'm someone who likes hard games, but RE4 wasn't great because it was hard. It was great because it was just hard enough... and because it was fundamentally a tightly controlled action game first, and second, and maybe even third; being a horror game was a distant consideration by comparison.

The original RE4 was about standing and fighting. Your strong area-control options and the badassness of Leon and his weapons meant that ideally, you actually wanted to corner yourself, creating a narrow space in front of you in order to keep knocking down whole groups of enemies with a single bullet. E.g., there was a house in the first game in the middle of the village that led to a dead-end room. That was the best place to go because you could wait for enemies to collect in the outer room, and then shotgun blast about ten of them at once as soon as they opened the door, or shoot one in the head and roundhouse kick them all.

This remake? It's a lot more about running away. That same house not only doesn't dead-end anymore, but you don't even want to dead-end yourself with the chainsaw maniac anymore, because you no longer have the tools to deal with him well. I tried doing it by returning to the village entrance... putting your back to the gate is the best you can do for this strategy. But since there's no way to consistently knock down the chainsaw maniac besides grenades, you're just trapping yourself needlessly if you do this. Leon is no longer a badass. Run away, Leon!

That would be fine for a horror game--see Mr. X, who is definitely terrifying--but RE4 was never a horror game in the way previous entries were. Previous games didn't reward you for killing enemies, they were purely obstacles to overcome, and running away without spending ammunition was sometimes the best solution. But RE4 was an action game masquerading as a horror game--enemies even give loot drops, meaning you actively want to kill them--only this dev team apparently didn't get that memo, because they've made Leon less powerful and enemies more powerful seemingly in order to increase the sense of terror and panic, the horror aspect. And that part just isn't what made RE4 special.

Oh, and, ya know, then there's the whole thing about your knife being breakable that I wrote a whole damned blog about. I called it my "one big complaint" at the time because I obviously hadn't gotten my hands on the game yet, it was just a complaint based on early footage. Now there's even more important stuff to complain about.

I'd pre-ordered this thing because, well, I'm such an RE4 superfan that I just had to know exactly what they did to it. But after playing this demo, there's definitely a big part of me that wants to cancel. It hasn't made me more excited, it's made me more sad that the dev team doesn't seem to have understood what made the original so great in the first place. People who have never played the original will play this and might like it pretty well, but will probably wonder what all the fuss was about back in 2005, assuming that this thing is a straight upgrade. It's not. It has a lot of the same gameplay elements, but feels completely different, and not in a good way.

I think I'll still play it at release, but... ugh. Now it feels like I'm only doing it to confirm my disappointment.

A few other things:

I think you're getting grabbed by ganados every five seconds--just like I am--because, as I said, the game is just harder in a way that isn't particularly fun. I see no reason to believe the full release will be "more well rounded." What exactly would they change in order to do that when the game is releasing in two weeks?

Also, upgrades in the original game were always matched by the enemies correspondingly having more HP, so I don't expect upgrading will actually help much with this feeling of Leon being overwhelmed a lot of the time. Like, yeah, the hidden TMP in this demo feels powerful, but that's because it's a fully upgraded version (you can see that by examining it in your case). For the retail release it's not going to be nearly that strong.

I agree that this game certainly doesn't feel like the RE4 I love, but I think some of this is overstated.

Yeah, most of the demo is indeed a corridor... but so was the original RE4 up to the first village encounter. I think the real complaint here is that the opening section feels much more barren and focused on spectacle than the original. In the original game you were looking for loot right away, with the crows right the beginning, with the box you could knife to the left of the first house. In this game you can't even draw your weapon or open your inventory for a bit; your first ganado is an uncontrollable cutscene rather than a fight; the first ganado you actually fight never drops loot and is better just avoided completely--likewise with two more ganados you can see by going backwards, they never drop anything either; aside from a single herb and a key, none of the interactables are things that matter at all, gameplay-wise. You have to dive through the window on the second floor before it starts being a video game.

The movement is worse, yeah, but c'mon, it's not as epically bad as Witcher 3's original movement. Geralt had the turning radius of a mack truck.

But your core comment that RE2 remake combat with RE4's enemy count doesn't work... yeah, pretty much.

I should probably say that I don't hate every change they've made. I think I like the system of gunpowder so that you can make the ammo you want, rather than being stuck with a certain type all the time. I like that they've differentiated the TMP more by making the aim positively atrocious. I like that loot dropped by enemies doesn't seem to disappear after a bit like it did in the original.

But these feel like small victories in a game that to me has largely missed the point.

I suspect there will be a strong correlation between people who loved the original RE4 to death and people who just aren't that into this one. I'd love to be wrong, I'd love to eat my words and love the full release of this thing as much as the original. But I feel very confident that I won't. In words of one Dan Ryckert, if I like this game as much the original, I will eat a hat. And unlike Dan, I mean a real hat.

@atheistpreacher: I was waiting for someone to question my corridor comment because i didn't go into it :P, a lot of the areas before the village are so much tighter than in the original, which as you say was also a "corridor" but it gave the illusion of a wider forest past the borders, in the remake i started by looking to the sides for details or things to examine but it's all just extremely dark thick walls with nothing to look at, so you walk forward and are given some things to examine like dead animals and... that's it for the start of the game, maybe the claustrophobic design is intentional but the short paths devoid of any interesting detail except darkness really feel like loading zones.

That's what i meant by corridors, it's only important to me because the opening area of the original is so cool.

FWIW, there's an... uh... interesting thing going on with the Deluxe version of this game for PS5.

It became available for pre-load last night, so I tried to do so... and it wouldn't let me, it threw an error. When I unchecked all 13 of the add-ons that come with the Deluxe edition, it allowed to me to download the base game. But attempting to download the add-ons individually afterward through "Manage Game Content" only led to the same error each time. They all read as "Not installed" and attempting to download gives you the message "Something went wrong" with error code CE-107880-4. And if this Reddit thread is any indication, this is a pervasive issue.

I contacted both Sony and Capcom support, and both say to wait until launch day and it should work. I would feel better about that being the case if not for this: I can download the PS4 version of the game with all the same add-ons without incident, and they all read as "Installed" when I check "Manage Game Content." If we're supposed to wait for release day, then why can I download the add-ons now for the PS4 version and not the PS5 version?

So I guess we'll see what happens. But if I still can't get this extra content to download at launch time, I'm going to be annoyed.