Warning. I am going to go a bit Hannah-Barbara on you all and use some re-hashed stuff from my older GameCube review and throw in some new insights for the new Nintendo Wii version of Resident Evil 4. So please forgive me.. :)
I am an avid horror fan. I love the old-school gore flicks from such greats as Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci (Zombi, City of the Living Dead aka Gates of Hell, The Beyond, House by the Cemetery), Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive) and George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and his upcoming Diary of the Dead... cannot wait for that!). Today’s horror sucks ass, plain and simple. It is all about the star power, or how much CGI junk Hollywood can squeeze on screen. Thanks to DVD’s of my old flicks I don’t have to watch this garbage that Hollywood poops out every year. Another thing that has always helped me to feed my love of gore has been Survival Horror games on consoles and PC’s. I love the Silent Hill series, and Resident Evil is one of the best. But the Resident Evil series started to become more of the same. It became boring and every game started to be the same. To top that off, we were treated to horrible movie spin-off’s of the game (you drop Romero and his original screenplay.. GGRRR!!!). The makers were going to change that with Resident Evil 4. The game hit the GameCube many years as well as the PS2 (with new features). Now that the Wii is here we have one of the Cube’s greatest games in Wii form. Complete with new control schemes to take full advantage of the Wii controller as well as the great new features that were in the Playstation 2 version...
Now let me give you all a bit of a back-story on Resident Evil 4. When I first read that there would be no more zombies, I was ready to call it quits on the series, but once I started learning more about what the developers had planned, I was really starting to support the change. At E3 I played what could possible be one of the greatest Survival-Horror games ever made. It was just a demo, but it was pure gold. Resident Evil 4 had finally been released to the masses on the GameCube. It was one of the best game for the Cube as well... I beat the game over and over again... and now that the Wii version hit, I took a stroll down memory lane and redid the long adventure once again... Was it worth it on the Wii though? Read on...
No More Zombies? Are you %#$* serious?
Let me get this out of the way first. Yes, there are no more zombies. You see some flashbacks of the undead in the beginning of the game when the story of the first few games is told. After that there are no zombies. It may seem weird to have a Resident Evil game with no zombies, but once you see whom you have to take on you will forget about the undead. The story is simple, your Leon (you remember him, from Resident Evil 2). Your job is to find the Presidents daughter on an island. But once you reach the place of destination you will soon find that the villagers are a little wacky. I guess wacky is not the right word, how about murderous freaks with weapons. They seem possessed by something. They walk around like zombies, doing their work. But once they spot you then it is game on.
These villagers are all very different. You have male and female villagers as well. They carry everything from knives, axes, torches, dynamite, etc. And they will throw them at you if they are close. These villagers will also take a shot from your gun and still move. I forgot to tell you, these villagers move in packs. At one point I was on a path, and I got the attention of this villager. I thought that I could put a bullet in his head and then move on. But you see, it was not that simple. He called more villagers. And soon I had about 6 villagers in front of me and about 6 villagers behind me. And they looked pissed.
There are also other things that roam the forest and villages. It is what could be a nod to Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (YES, the original, not the remake). This guy is huge, and he wears a potato sack over his head. He carried this big ass chainsaw. If he reaches you then you are dead. I won’t tell you what he does, but it is one of the coolest deaths I ever suffered as a video game character. There is also the lake monster that you have seen on almost every site. This thing is HUGE.
The game never runs short of new things. And each enemy seems to have taken a nod to a great horror film. The villagers have that “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” look and feel to them. The dogs you meet in the later levels have John Carpenter’s “The Thing” written all over them. There are even these monks that appear later in the game that reminds me of the zombie monks from “Burial Ground: Night of Terror”. That is a 1970’s Italian flick where a zombie kid (Peter Bark, who is played obviously by a 35 year old midget with bad hair... looks like a mini-Argento on crack...) bit his mother’s nipple off. Ah, you have to love Italian gore! Anyway, the game gives a great nod to classic horror.
