All things Resident Evil

Looks like we're getting a Resi 4 Remake demo today. I'm kinda torn on whether I want to wait until the game comes out this month. First world problems eh?

Oh and they're changing the rain in the Day 1 patch due to a lot of feedback.

Oh

Surprising nobody, the Chainsaw demo for RE4, basically the opening village fight, has been announced as available from today.

Better yet, there's no time limit and you can play as many times as you want (I figure it will be a short demo).

Got the Steam one. Finished just now. It's very short indeed, only up to the bingo line (thank god they kept it). But I'm pretty sure I must have missed a couple things. I also didn't try to kill the chainsaw dude. Will give it another go tomorrow.

It's very much an awesome graphical lift, but as a general rule, you can see that the RE2 and RE3 remake already used the original RE4 as a starting point, so it's a remake that doesn't change as many things. Other than being able to move and shoot at the same time, it feels very familiar. But that's no bad thing.

Graphics are very nice, and my 6600 XT can hold 60fps no sweat even on ultrawide 1080p and high settings, aside from some rare slowdowns when streaming data. That said, native resolution gives some annoying noise on high-frequency material, a common problem with RE Engine games. In the end, I actually decided to use FSR2 to remove those issues. On Balanced mode. Yeah, it looked better than Quality mode to me. More stable somehow?

I can do this section easily on the original, but this was extremely hard I thought. I didn’t actually like it overmuch, but I’m so married to the original game I’d have preferred the exact same game with these graphics.

The stuff they did to gradually introduce the monsterism is out the window, as is the choice to jump out the window or not. It will be interesting to learn if Dr Salvador is even killable in this, I only gave the fight two attempts but it kicked my ass. Enemies are way tougher, faster and in overwhelming numbers, and it’s easy to get cornered.

Strangely, I didn't die even once. I also had to only use one mixed herb. I haven't played the game in a while, but I still remembered this section.

Maybe you need to get used to Leon's new mobility. Compared to the original game, he's so much faster, so if you ever feel like you are in trouble, just move around until you are in a better position. I actually thought it reminded me of the original game a lot: sure, you get swarmed more quickly and by more enemies, but all the usual techniques (hit once and rush for a melee to disperse a crowd, kick down ladders, get to high ground and then jump down to gain time) seemed to work just fine.

By the way, yeah, despite running the same engine, this seemed a lot heavier than the previous remakes. I don't think my old RX 480, which could handle RE2 in 1080p60, could have done the same here. No surprise that the PS4 is sluggish. Also no surprise that there's no Xbox One version.

Gave the demo another couple runs (it's basically 10-15 minutes each). Doesn't seem like there are any secrets. I also managed to kill Salvador, though he was beefier than in the original game for sure, took a grenade to the face and seven full shotgun blasts before going down. In my best run I made 7150 gold.

On my second run, I got a random prompt to try chainsaw mode, which was basically nightmare difficulty. The first encounter has two enemies, and just the first one took forever to kill. The second guy killed me in short order. Whew.

Strangely, the demo points out that this mode will not be available in the final game. I guess it's a streamer bait for the demo?

The first enemy is stronger than most. Almost everyone else is about as durable as in the original, so usually a headshot and a melee is enough to put them down for good. I guess it makes sense, because this game seems to swarm you with many more enemies than RE2. Wouldn't be fun if they were so hard to kill.

I played quite a few runs. It's good, and I keep trying to get as much gold as possible. My record is currently 9450.

Mad chainsaw mode is still way too hard though.

Fucking hell, you're a wrongun.

Ecoss Ay was right to besmirch your photo!

Look, we both know I'm going to get it anyway.

Wasn't Operation Raccoon City much more successful than anyone expected? I guess we are lucky they decided to go for RE7 instead of following up on that (I guess RE6 helped).