With the events of Raccoon City behind him Leon S. Kennedy embarks on a new mission. Now 6 years since the horrors of Raccoon having been trained as a special agent Leon is sent to find the president’s missing daughter, who was last seen in an isolated village in Europe. Here is our full Resident Evil 4 Remake Chainsaw Demo Preview.
Starting off you will get dropped into the beginning of the game and be able to play through to the end of Chapter 1. From loading into the demo it feels and looks like a resident evil game worthy of the previous two games which were remade, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3. Coming from someone who has not experienced the full horror of Resident Evil 4 this latest remake felt something special. The atmosphere and movement of the game keeps you on the edge of your seat, wondering what monster will leap out at you next and the low ammo makes you wonder if you will last the next or current encounter. Although the demo only encompasses Chapter 1 you can feel the love and time that the team at Capcom has put into every moment you are playing and the fact that you are pitted against insurmountable odds and expected to survive is a daunting task.
Although the demo is only around 20 minutes of playtime you can still have a few hours of fun trying different approaches to the chapter, however, this is mainly in the later part. As illustrated below, the map is pretty compact and a lot happens in this small time.
Throughout the entirety of the demo, every little part feels expertly crafted and meticulously designed for smooth performance on the PlayStation 5. Animations and Leon’s complexity in each movement make him an interesting character to be playing as. In addition to this, the smooth transitioning between cutscene and gameplay is almost a perfect balance, unfortunately, because the demo is so compact this can’t be perfectly examined. The main gripe that this author can find with the demo is Leon’s hair, if it was overlookable it’s something that can be but the fact that his hair seems too shiny or too “plastic” is rather irritating. The issue is Leon is always in the shot, and with certain angles, you can get the camera into the hair can be distracting to gameplay. There is only one saving grace with this, which is there are 2, shader modes for the hair which can be modified outside of the game and are called “Hair Strands” basically it will change between different looks for the hair, using different texturing approaches.
One feature that felt nice in comparison to the original release was the HUD. The reason is because of the subtlety of it, and no distracting element. All you will see is the little circular interface in the bottom right corner, this will track your health, ammo, and current weapon. Now, it is only displayed if you are aiming which makes the immersion feel better, let’s face it how many games out there have a HUD that is constantly on-screen while trying to be immersive? The only other HUD aspects are things like a button, prompting you to interact in some way, so picking up something or breaking/attacking. With these little bits, the immersiveness of the world isn’t hindered but it doesn’t help. The final thing that you see, which is part of almost all game HUDs, is the Crosshair. Where it’s always nice to actually know where your aiming and where your limited ammo is going to hit, it might have been nice to have the option to disable it along with other elements. There is the option to reduce the opacity or change color settings however there doesn’t appear to be a setting where you can completely remove elements.
There is always more than 1 way to play the game, and Resident Evil 4 Remake is no different. Whether you’re an impatient murderer who charges in guns ready or the sneaky ghost utilizing the Sam Fisher approach, from the demo you can attack the main situations how you feel best will give you an advantage. Due to the demo being short and only a single chapter this can only be hypothesized but going on the crafting presented in the demo this author wants more of the same. The first chance you get to try this is after daybreak and you get into the town square where unfortunately Leon loses another member of the police officers sent in before him. Either pick to charge in and take revenge for your fallen allies or follow the left path and crouch to limit enemies spotting you. Regardless of how you attack, in most of the demos situations, open combat seems to erupt and you are forced into a shootout to survive. This particular situation however introduces a near-endless number of standard enemies and if that’s not bad enough, as the demo is appropriately named, a chainsaw guy comes in who is a pretty big bullet sponge compared to the standard guys.
As a closing note, my personal feelings and expectations for the game are that I would like the rest of the game to feel the same as the demo, and the continued terror that is felt through each encounter is kept. Personally, during Resident Evil 2 and 3 I felt that essence of terror and the fact that there was meant to be a horror aspect slack off. However, with this game, I would really like to be kept on the edge of my seat all the way through and not lose that vibe given when starting up the game. The reason for this drop-off in Resident Evil 2 and 3 might have had something to do with getting used to Mr. X hunting you in Resident Evil 2 and Nemesis in Resident Evil 3 so much. As for Resident Evil 4, there isn’t something like that in the demo so the initial vibe is very positive. This is one aspect that I would ask the Capcom team to keep and not lose, I would want to feel the terror and horror of every little aspect of the game, as you would expect from one of the greatest horror series available.
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