Having said all that, there are some aspects to the Resident Evil 4 experience that don’t feel as in-step with VR. That’s going to matter to a lot of people. Resident Evil 4 is certainly atmospheric, but never so downright frightening that players will be tempted to rip the headset off. It had moments of surprise, sure, but the game was far more concerned with inducing anxiety than it was fear.Īgain, I suspect that’s going to play to VR’s strengths, especially for those that struggled to cope with the sheer terror of 2017’s PSVR-supported Resident Evil 7. It substituted pitch black corridors and unnerving zombie cries for often well-lit environments and relatively human-looking enemies.
The other big departure Resident Evil 4 marked for the series was that, well, it wasn’t very scary. That, I suspect, could really bring the combat to life. What I’ll be interested to see is if Capcom and Armature give players the option to remove the trusty laser sight and encourage precise aiming. We already know Resident Evil 4 works well with motion controls – the Wii version is one of the best ways to play the game. Again, that feels like something that’s very important to VR, forcing users to actually aim their weapons and not just keep their arm at waist height and roll their wrist around. You could lose an entire clip into the stomach of an enemy, but you were much better off taking riskier headshots to save on bullets. Part of what gives the game that flow is the importance of accuracy and ammo preservation. In fact, it already does Half-Life: Alyx has action sequences that feel directly inspired by Resident Evil 4, and they make for some of the game’s best moments. Some of this will need to change, of course, but the mounting pressure of this combat system seems like it could work incredibly well in VR. It was a game about having your back against the wall, fighting to the last bullet and, if need-be, the last swing of your knife. The timing of painstaking animations to reload a weapon were burned into your brain, and absolutely every shot had to count. You couldn’t walk while aim, cranks and switches took time to operate and the enemy usually used this to its advantage. That said, it was still a long way off the speed of most other shooters, with a considered pace to Leon’s movements and a lot of minutia in its combat design.
Resident Evil 4 represented the first time the mainline series diverged from that path, with more active, intense combat sequences with more enemies than the series had ever tried before and modernized - if still cumbersome - over the shoulder controls. The earlier entries in the Resident Evil series are very deliberate in their slow, tense pacing.