The original post: /r/gaming by /u/kierco_2002 on 2024-04-29 16:49:03.

A little backstory first; maybe a bit more than a little. Growing up I wasn’t allowed to own any video game consoles (parents thought it would rot my brain) so the majority of my early gaming experiences came from visiting friends or playing what little I could on our family PC. Despite all this, I still read a lot of gaming magazines, EGM and 1UP especially, and watched shows like G4TV and Electric Playground to stay up to date on the latest games. I recall well when Resident Evil 4 came out there was a lot of hype and acclaim, and from the footage I saw, appeared to be lots of gory fun.

Fast Forward many years later when I was old enough to make my own decisions, I picked up the mediocre PC port on a clearance sale, went through it over a couple weekends, and generally had a good time. Shortly after Resident Evil 5 came out I picked that up, also for PC, and found about the same level of enjoyment playing that as 4, much to the contrary to the general consensus.

Then over the last few years, I’ve played much of the whole mainline catalogue, except 6. I couldn’t bring myself to finish that. I loved 7 and 8 and found them a nice shake up to the series, but my god did I LOVE Resident Evil 1 and 2. The RE2 Remake may be a top 3 game of all time for me. Everything was just so tight and tense, and you had to be so careful and calculating. Even your save slot ribbons were a scarce resource.

So now, playing the Resident Evil 4 Remake on ps5, while a great game, I cant help but feel how jarring of a departure it must have been coming from the original games to this. While there is some backtracking, the gameplay is much more linear on the whole, and often I found I missed the stress that came from encountering even a lone zombie in a tight corridor, as compared to gunning down a horde of ganados in the town square. I think because of the game’s success, the evolution in gameplay carried forward to future games in the series until sales slumped and they went back to the drawing board. 7 and 8 have moments that return to the games horror roots, but those feel less inspired by the original games and more akin to modern first person horror games. It just feels weird t me how so many praised resident evil 4 when it felt so different to me when comparing to the earlier games. So now for the question of the day:

TL;DR. If you played the original Resident Evil games in order (at launch or later in life) did you like the changes in RE4 or do you wish they kept the original games’ formula?