I played Resident Evil when I was a child on the starting on the PS1 with Resident Evil 3. I fell in love with this series and played all the games.
I remember playing this game back on GameCube and not liking it so much. I mean, it wasn’t a bad game. But it did not feel like Resident Evil to me.
Recently, I played 7 and 8 which where really good. They feel different than Resident Evil, but they were scary and I enjoyed these games a lot. Still not as good as the classics or the RE2 and RE3 remake.
So what is it about Resident Evil 4? Well, it feels like an action game and less a survivor horror game. It was a linear experience of just moving forward. It lost the metroidvania part of RE for the most part.
I know this game is loved by many and I can understand why it is loved. It is a genuinely good game. It just should not be a Resident Evil game.
I kinda disagree. It could have been way worse. Remember: Devil May Cry was originally being built as the 4th Resident Evil installment. It got so off the rails, it became its own thing with a new name.
What we actually got with 4 was different, yeah. But not that different. The story and lore already were over the top and written like a cheesy action movie; 4 made the game play match the tone the story was setting. It wasn’t perfect. It’s a lot faster paced, which takes away a bit of the horror; but the newer ones recently follow almost the same format as 4, though in 1st person and with a slower pacing that brings back the same feeling of “I gotta hurry the fuck up and run” that the original tank controls conveyed.
It has all the same elements that the first 3 had, just with a lot more combat with the action being put first instead of the horror.