In January of 2005 the world was introduced to the work of art that is Resident Evil 4. RE4 is considered one one of the best in the Resident Evil franchise, despite being the first to move away from its traditional horror emphasis and moving to more action oriented gameplay. It recently was remade of the Xbox One and PS4 with this being the third console generation the game is living on and it still looks and feels great. It got the HD treatment to 1080p and 60fps.

The game has a solid plot, but needs a certain suspension of disbelief. You follow Leon S. Kennedy, ex Racoon City cop turned secret service officer and part time dream boat. His first assignment is to save the president’s daughter, Ashley Graham, who has been kidnaped by a cult somewhere in eastern Europe. For the most part you, as Leon, are alone with little to no support from anyone, going through waves of villagers infected with the zombie making parasite, the Las Plagas. Of course getting to the president’s daughter is half the battle. Once you find her, you have to escape the with Ashley and that is no easy task.

Once you find Ashley, she then has to follow you around as you try to escape and anyone who has played escort missions in games knows it can be annoying. For the most part this isn’t the case, but she has her moments. For example, you can get surrounded very easily if you aren’t careful. When this happens, it becomes likely Ashley will get in the way of your gun and you will accidentally shoot her and she will die, making you reset. If that doesn’t happen then odds are she’ll be grabbed. When Ashley gets grabbed, whoever grabbed her will attempt to carry her into the next room, and if this happens then it’s a game over. Passed that, she isn’t all that bad.

The gameplay was a bit clunky and difficult to get down, but this design choice was intentional. When you play for the first time you’ll have some trouble walking around but you find your first infected villager almost immediately. If the controls were closer to the norm then this encounter wouldn’t have been anything special, but because of these strange controls, it becomes a terrifying and stressful situation that usually involves you wasting most of your bullets hitting the wall behind him. Once you get passed that initial hill the game becomes almost second nature, but not any less stressful.

All the previous Resident Evil games were horror with some action. RE4 on the other hand was an action game with horror elements. Some of the monsters were nightmare inducing such as the Regenerators, but all of them made every encounter a stressful one. The threat of someone sneaking up behind you is constant with only about five places in the game that are effective corners to hold up.

This quickly became one of my favorite games ever. I beat my first play through of the main story in about 20 hours and started my second the moment the credits stopped rolling. If you enjoy video games and you haven’t played this one, do yourself a favor and pick this one up. It’s 20 dollars right now and i think it’s $20 well spent.