The horror on display might be pretty schlocky, but it’s genuinely effective at establishing tension. But he’s still scared, and you can still feel that fear when you feel what he can’t do. Leon is a lot more comfortable here, and you can feel that comfort in the new level of control he has over his movement and his gunplay.

The Resident Evil games have always been good at communicating character beats through control schemes, and RE4 does that expertly. When he’s established control over a situation, he can smoothly sprint ahead and start throwing kicks and punches, but usually he’s frozen in place, firing his gun with shaky hesitation. He’s learned a cool roundhouse kick, and he moves like he’s in his own skin, but caution automatically takes over when it’s time to open fire. He’s more graceful than he was back in Raccoon City, but as he quickly and aptly notes, he’s not dealing with the same zombies this time around. Then he runs into danger and totally freezes. When the remake demo was released, I heard no shortage of praise for the new, more traditional dual-stick controls, usually accompanied by the phrase “they fixed the controls” or something similar. In recent years, it’s been subject to some criticism ( IGN’s review of the remake says the original game’s star “struggles to get around as though he’s wearing an old pair of skinny jeans that haven’t fit him since his police academy days”). The presence of the controller is always felt. It constantly emphasizes the break between the player and the character. You should not have your character stop in place every time they ready their gun, because holding a gun does not incapacitate the legs.Īnd yet, Resident Evil 4, among the most celebrated action games ever made, breaks every one of these rules. You should put “shoot” on a trigger because it feels a bit like pulling the trigger on a gun. You should map “looking around” and “walking” to two different sticks because we look around and walk at the same time. There’s a prevailing modern philosophy in action game design that says that the controller should “disappear.” You should feel like you’re doing something when you press a button and the character on the screen responds.

Resident evil 4 pc controls