As iconic as it is, Resident Evil 4 could have solved some of the issues with their gameplay simply by examining it's framework.The first issue I have with the game is that it's kind of slow. The enemies are slow, your look sensitivity and movement are pretty slow, etc. The gameplay is essentially dictated by the control problems.
I am keeping in mind that this is an older game and shouldn't be compared to games of today, but still you had 3rd person shooters as early as Playstation 1 (Siphon Filter, for example) where the aiming was pretty fast, the movement was fluid and it made for pretty fast gameplay.
In Resident Evil 4, the enemies aren't exactly zombies, but they're not exactly rational humans either. They can talk and communicate, and at points they are pretty fast (like the speed of me hopping on one foot), but otherwise they lumber around and walk slowly at you, as if they were a zombie. I know that it had to have been this way because your movement is pretty slow, the look sensitivity is slow and the aiming is downright clumsy, even for the standards in place when the game was made. There's also no way to adjust your look sensitivity, as there is in games today. Some guns look around faster than others while you're aiming, which.. I guess kind of makes up for it. But it still doesn't make much sense.
One of my biggest pet peeves in video games is when they change the basic control scheme depending on what you're trying to do. For example, in Resident Evil 4 when you're not aiming, the right stick is meant to look around (although it has this annoying sticky feeling where you can't look further than maybe 45 degrees in any direction before it snaps back into place). Regarding looking around in 3rd person and relating that to movement, everything that Silent Hill 2 did well with it's vision and camera functionality, Resident Evil 4 didn't.. and Silent Hill 2 was released several years earlier.
Anyway, in Resident Evil 4, when you aim your gun at something, your looking is no longer your right stick, but now your left. I know what they had in mind when they developed it this way - they essentially wanted you to be able to play the game with only your left stick or the D-Pad. I caught myself realizing that as the game progressed and I adjusted to my severe lack of a field of vision and aiming with the left stick. I got over it, and eventually learned that you could spin around 180 degrees really quickly with run + walk backwards.
Still, though, it was 2005. A notable and fluid shooter known as Halo: CE had come out a couple months earlier, introducing the modern-day standard for control schemes in a shooter on a console. Resident Evil 4 had every opportunity to do something similar, but instead their customs were stuck a generation behind.
As a result, this is going to make Resident Evil 4 age very poorly, even though it is a fabulous game, even today.
One other thing that should be mentioned is that the story is a little bit cheesy, feeling a little like an arcade game's story - basically you need a reason to go this crazy place and the reason is something you hear, then don't care about. In this case, it's the President's Daughter who has been kidnapped.. which is totally over the top and for Leon only being a first-day policeman the last time we saw him, he's sure moved up in the world since then. It's a little distracting, I think.
Anyway, I'm actually not quite done with the game yet, but these are my complaints and observations so far. It's a shame that they built a bunch of things into the game trying to overcome their hurdles (quick turn around, slow enemies), rather than approaching it from a whole new perspective and mimicking games that already had good controls and camera work. It'll age poorly, but at least people like me are still willing to give it a shot and overlook the annoyances as I play (even though, ironically, I'm talking about them right now).
No comments:
Post a Comment