Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games ever made. It is awesome. It is also old. It's often been described as "timeless", but in recent years, it has started to show its age. I am well aware of the HD texture mod for the PC version, but that won't do much. RE4 was released in 2005. Textures is just one of the things that makes it old.
Playing Resident Evil 2 Remake earlier this year magnified this idea. For the longest time, up until we saw gameplay of the game at E3 last year, I was very firmly in the camp of "fixed camera angles or GTFO". I was convinced the game couldn't work if the player had the camera behind their back and if they could walk-and-aim. I thought the tension would be completely lost. I have possibly never been this wrong in my life about a video game. Resident Evil 2 Remake is fully modern in all of its aspects, and yet, it feels like classic RE. It is tense. I swear to you, in my first playthrough, Mr. X scared me to a level that I hadn't felt since I played the first Amnesia game. It was intense.
As I played RE2-R, I thought to myself: "Man, this game feels amazing to play. The movement, the aiming, the shooting, the reactions of the enemies when they get shot... If on top of that, Leon had the ability to suplex zombies, shit would be amazing." Of course, I don't want suplexes in RE2-R because that's not that type of game. But RE4-R...?
The people who made Resident Evil 2 Remake are immensely talented. Every aspect of this game is top-tier. I am convinced that this team has what it takes to take Resident Evil 4 and give it a remake that does it justice. They've already proved themselves. They've already showed me, a RE2 superfan, how wrong I was to think that a modern take on RE2 couldn't work. And they can show the world and everyone who thinks RE4 can't be remade that they can, in fact, do it correctly.
I want this game. I want RE4 remade from the ground up in the RE Engine. I want Leon to be able to walk and aim. I want every level in the game to be reimagined in the same way the police precinct of RE2 was, with the same level of attention and craft. I want the village of RE4, the game's best-remembered level, to wow us once more with how awesome it is as a set piece, just like it did back then, and just how RE2-R's police station wowed me earlier this year. I want Leon to suplex motherfuckers in the glory that is the RE Engine and its graphical wizardry.
I am ready for this game. Are you?
