Resident Evil 4 Remake | Critical Consensus

gamesindustry.biz:

When Resident Evil 4 launched on Nintendo GameCube, it was a revelation.

The title jettisoned the gameplay that the franchise had become known for – no more fixed camera angles, and goodbye 'tank' controls – and in its place was a new third-person action horror experience. It not only re-defined the Resident Evil franchise, but most of the third-person action games that followed.

Fourteen years later and Capcom decided to start remaking some of its classic Resident Evil games. Yet with Resident Evil 2 and 3, the developer didn't just improve the visuals and tweak the controls, it took the story and characters and changed the gameplay into something decidedly more modern. They basically gave those two games the 'Resident Evil 4 treatment', and it worked.

This week, Capcom launches its Resident Evil 4 Remake. But how do you give Resident Evil 4 the 'Resident Evil 4 treatment'?

"The Remake does an incredible job of capturing all the details that matter, while bringing everything else up to a modern standard

The answer is you don't. You make far subtler changes that may not be as surprising as those from the other remakes, but still results in yet another terrifying Resident Evil adventure.

"[It's] a game that incorporates evolutions of the original's template, rather than attempting to recapture lighting in a bottle," writes Andy Robinson in his five-star review on VGC. "2023's Resi 4 sticks incredibly close to the format laid out by the original – more so than any of Capcom's previous REmakes, which themselves felt far more dated by today's standards (partly set by Resident Evil 4 itself)."

Eurogamer's Aoife Wilson says that although it may not look like a lot has changed, the Remake has actually done a thorough job