Resident Evil 4 First Impressions

You can download two movies of Resident Evil 4 in action - one from Capcom's Las Vegas press event earlier this year, and one from E3 2004 - right now from Eurofiles. For details on how to make use of our free file service, click here.

It's fair to say that we've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Resident Evil games over the past eight years. It's almost as if we like the idea of them rather more than the end result, and tend to fill in the gaps and perhaps forgive them for some of their more irritating flaws.

Even the Resident Evil remake and its prequel, Resident Evil Zero barely moved the gameplay on from the very first in the series, sticking doggedly to outdated control and camera systems, not to mention predictable sequences involving the hunt for an obscure object to unlock a procession of doors. Even the stories were barmy exercises in B-movie ham, complete with some of the most unintentionally amusing voice acting of all time.

So why the hell do we feel compelled to play through every single one of them? It's a question that's bugged us for years, but it probably comes down to that most difficult of gaming elements to quantify: atmosphere. It's there in spades, and although we can see through the trick, we're pulled in every time. As much as we wanted Shinji Mikami and company to fully overhaul the series, there was still a concern that it might not necessarily be change for the better. We needn't have worried - Resident Evil 4 is our most wanted GameCube title of the moment.

Evil... 'kinevil

The demo version presented on the E3 show floor this year is ostensibly the same as that presented earlier in the year to journalists at Capcom's Vegas shindig, but it was new to us and clearly one of the games of the show, so what the hell. To deliver some context, RE4 is set six years after Raccoon City was blitzed following the Umbrella Corp's viral outbreak. Leon Kennedy, the rookie cop from RE2, is now a fully trained Special Forces member, and is on a mission to Europe to rescue the president's daughter, who has been captured for reasons not entirely made clear.

Placed in a thoroughly unpleasant looking (Spanish?) village, full of decaying wooden shacks and unfriendly locals, your first task is to find one of the villagers and ask for clues. A nearby house, of sorts, offers the only location to enter, and inside is a shadowy figure standing by a roaring fire. Turning to face Leon, he shouts some aggressive expletive and lurches forward to attack. At this point you're straight into the action and get your first taste of the overhauled combat.

Panning back into an impressive over the shoulder view, a laser sight lets you know precisely where your shot will end up and a couple of shots later our assailant is grounded. The first thing to note is the appropriate and realistic response enemies have to being shot, both in terms of the way they reel back depending on where your hit them, but also their screams of agony. They also whistle for assistance if they know help is nearby and jabber away in their native tongue. It really is quite disconcerting, especially as they're not dressed up like generic zombies this time, but very real, very convincing murderers intent on making short work of intruders to their little festival of death.

Inversion perversion

Control wise, although you can choose to invert the aim or not, it's a system that doesn't feel entirely perfect, in that it's rather too easy to overcompensate and end up aiming at the floor or ceiling. Likewise in a group of enemies, the over-the-shoulder view means you often have no idea where your other assailants are coming from, leaving you with a bunch of ugly hicks tearing chunks out of your nice furry collared leather jacket (give us one, Capcom!). We're hoping we'll get used to pulling off head shots with ease though, because when you do get one right in the kisser, not only does it look fantastic, but it's incredibly effective - dispatching some of the weaker enemies almost immediately.

After your early encounter ends in shocking violence, you realise you're locked in for some obscure reason, leaving you with no choice but to check out a few pointless bookcases, a roaring fire and ascend the stairwell and peer out of the window. A context-sensitive 'action' prompt gives you the chance to escape by jumping out of the window, and although Leon lands with grace and no injuries, he's immediately set upon by a pissed off gang of three villagers, all determined to avenge their buddy's death. It's not easy to shrug these little beggars off in close proximity, but the game introduces new melee combat options, with context-sensitive kicks enabling Leon to floor enemies with a quick roundhouse to the chops. Nice.

After that little bout of bad tempered combat, the demo settles down for a brief few minutes, allowing you to have a decent look around the place, taking in some truly spectacularly detailed environments that you'd never have thought possible from a GameCube. The trees, well, they actually look like trees, for a start, complete with fallen leaves and a myriad of minute touches that previously would have been the domain of static pre-rendered games.

Silent Evil

Such an insane amount of vegetation detail is truly something special, and when you realise it's fully 3D and not just a flashy static environment, you know Capcom has truly created a cutting edge engine that lends itself to the game perfectly. In a way, it looks rather like what Konami has been aiming for with Silent Hill for years, but this truly takes it above and beyond that grainy style with so few compromises that it's hard to believe they've pulled it off.

In what is a distinctly rural, but ugly tree laden village, you're restricted in true Ressie Evil style to where it allows you to go, so there's a broken bridge, a few wooden huts here and there, and the game gives you the opportunity to shoot a few boxes open to raid them for pistol ammo and (surprise, surprise) herbs, as well as providing a save point opportunity, which disappointingly still relies on the unforgiving typewriter - we can only hope it still doesn't require the use of ribbons to dictate how many times you can save.

Also on your travels you - bizarrely - get to free a white dog, which has its leg caught in some evil metal jaw mechanism. Wandering down into a more populated section of the village proves to be an entirely hazardous experience, with multiple enemies ready to gang up on you and your weedy pistol. On approach the game gives you the chance to use your binoculars and check out what appears to be a cruel sacrifice ritual, with an unfortunate victim hung up gruesomely by a large hook in the square. Taking our chances, we snuck round the back of the commotion, only to be rumbled on our escape, with a chainsaw-wielding foe wasting no time in trying to saw our face off. It's just as terrifying as it looks in the screenshots and movies. The enemies in general are aggressive and intelligent, and you'd really rather not mess with them given the choice. Goodness only knows what variety of bosses lie in wait - so far we know about a giant and an underwater beast - but we frankly can't wait to find out.