Resident Evil 4 (2005)

What a tremendously good game.

So I played this for the first time when it came out on PS2. I remember being so excited because this was like the game everyone was saying was the greatest game of all time but it was only available on the GameCube initially.

I played it and it scared the shit out of me. The thrill of being chased around by the chainsaw guy in that first village. The controls and the combat were amazing. How you're forced to either move or aim and shoot adds such a beautiful tactical layer to the combat.

But I eventually got to the point where the game was either too scary or too hard and I never went further. I think I literally only made it to the part where you meet Salazar. So maybe 3-2? Less than halfway through the game.

I came back to it a couple times but was usually put off by the now-clunky controls.

But 15 years later I came back after playing Resident Evil 7, wanting to get back into the series, and this time it stuck. It really is a masterpiece. Sure the story and acting is classic Resident Evil trash. But the combat. The structure of the levels. The variety of the weapons. How they handle differently and have different tradeoffs. I love that you can invest heavily into the bolt action rifle, it'll hit harder than anything in the game, but it's slower, harder to use. Or you can go with the semi-auto and shoot faster but do less damage.

The enemy design is super cool. Some are slow, some are fast. Most are terrifying. The fact that you can buy rocket launchers to basically skip bosses is such a cool piece of game design. Basically adjustable difficulty.

And there are so many wonderful scenes. My favorite might be the scene where you get trapped in the house with the spanish guy and the president's daughter. The house gets surrounded by villagers and you have to spend time moving furniture to block the windows and kicking down ladders as they try to scale the house. The way they scale the amount of resources you get so you're always watching your ammo supply closely. The inventory management.

Every piece of the game is wonderful. I really couldn't get enough this time and finished the whole game. And after I finished I immediately started a new game plus because I wanted to feel how strong all my upgrades were. I even went so far as to get the infinite ammo tommy gun to just fuck shit up. So fun. Easy 10/10 game.