“Fun” rhymes with “podcast” for a reason, stranger.
Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about the Resident Evil 4 Remake that was released this year. Why are we talking about this game on Pocket? Well, we wanted to squeeze it in closer to its release date and the focus of the episode is mainly going to be on the way the remake differs from the original, rather than our typical beat by beat discussion of the game itself. This resulted, of course, in an hour long Pocket episode because they changed a whole lot, actually. The bones of Resident Evil 4 are still here, obviously, and the Village portion of the game is still similar to the original in many ways, but there is a ton of new and altered content throughout and that’s without talking about the fundamental changes to the gameplay. Leon controls in a much more fluid way which feels more modern, but necessitates a change in the overall combat system. Enemies are much more aggressive and have new angles of attack to match Leon’s ability to parry with the knife, perform stealth kills and even move while shooting (what a novel idea). This makes the game even more action-focused than the original, which was a massive departure from the series at the time of its release. Basically, even for fans of the original game, this remake represents fantastic new content, rather than a replacement, and that’s probably the best thing they could have done for a remake of an icon like this. We’re going to be talking about combat and difficulty and how the updates change what the game feels like to play, the slight change in tone to bring it out of the B movie camp that defined the original, and we call out the great offense that is adding crafting to Resident Evil 4.
Thank you for joining us again this week! We probably could have gone on about this game for another hour and done a full episode, but we were afraid it would be a little redundant both with the discourse that has already happened and the fact that we had already covered the game in the past. Not to mention we have a slate of games planned for the extremely well-thought-out Spooktember in July theme month we have going on and didn’t feel like it would fit at a different time in the schedule. How did you feel about the changes to the game? Was the remake the first time you’ve played RE4, and if so do you have any desire to go back and see where it came from? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord server! Next time, we’re going to be moving along into the next subtheme of the month and talking about Ghostrunner, so we hope you’ll join us then.