Over 20 Years Later, Does “The Best Resident Evil” Still Hold Up?

Released January 11, 2005, Resident Evil 4 was a massive hit for Capcom. Debuting on the GameCube before making the leap to other consoles, the game reinvented the horror series with a greater emphasis on action than the exploration and survival elements that were key to earlier entries. Even as the series has shifted back more towards pure horror, the unique aspects of Resident Evil 4 are still influential on the series and gaming as a whole.

That’s what makes it so interesting to revisit Resident Evil 4. As one of the undisputed classics of the sixth generation of consoles, Resident Evil 4 typically gets by on reputation alone. However, even revisiting the gameplay and the story, and even without the additional elements introduced in the 2023 remake, Resident Evil 4 is still fun to play, a blast to experience, and a prime example of how tonal experimentation can create something genuinely special.

Resident Evil 4’s Impact Is Impossible To Ignore

Resident Evil 4 was a hard departure from what came before it, at a crucial junction for the Resident Evil franchise. Although the early releases have been major hits, the series was increasingly suffering from samey gameplay, convoluted narrative, and disjointed spin-offs. Even good new games in the series, like Resident Evil 0, suffered from frustrating controls and forgettable threats. That is part of what made Resident Evil 4 such a revelation when it launched. The game shifted setting completely, creating new landscapes and types of villains to break up the typical monster load-out.

The heavier emphasis on action, brought to life with the third-person perspective, lent itself well to big action set pieces and monster confrontations. The tone was tweaked, embracing a more campy vibe to reflect the emphasis on weird villains and bombastic combat. The result was exactly what the Resident Evil series needed. It was a jolt of energy into the series, resulting in some of the best reviews the series had ever gotten. It was also a veritable hit with gamers that went on to influence generations of action games, popularizing the over-the-shoulder perspective for plenty of titles that followed. It’s hard to imagine something like The Last of Us without looking back at Resident Evil 4 and the groundwork it laid.

Resident Evil 4 Has Some Of The Best Horror-Action Gameplay Ever

In the years since it was released, Resident Evil 4 has been ported to numerous platforms. It even got a ground-up remake in 2023. However, it’s worth revisiting the game from a modern perspective and noting the ways it holds up or doesn’t. Luckily, for the most part, Resident Evil 4 remains as exciting as it was when it debuted over twenty years ago. While Resident Evil: Dead Aim had actually done something similar with third-person perspective and more liberated aiming than other entries in the series, Resident Evil 4 took the mechanic and refined it to perfection. There’s a fluidity to Leon’s movements and combat skills that makes encounters feel like genuine confrontations. There’s a natural strength and resiliency to Leon that becomes the core feeling of playing the character.

When playing Resident Evil 4, it really feels like you can take on an entire village of corrupted killers. It also means that when a situation arises where Leon does have to flee, the tension feels all the more intense. While the game is more of an action title than a horror game, it’s able to use the horrific imagery and sudden bursts of intensity to elevate the tension. That’s the key way Resident Evil 4 keeps up the horror while shifting more thoroughly in terms of raw tone. Even looking at games that took inspiration from the gameplay — chief among them The Last of Us — Resident Evil 4’s ability to balance sudden terror with satisfying action gameplay was a big reason the title was so effective.

Why Resident Evil 4 Still Holds Up

Perhaps the thing that stands out the best from Resident Evil 4 is the storytelling. Resident Evil has always had a uniquely challenging tone. This can be boiled down to the way the franchise has always had one foot in the horror-action subgenre, while the other half of it feels more indebted to the legacy of survival horror. Games like Resident Evil 3: Nemesis were perfect examples of this, with fearsome enemies like the titular bioweapon adding a sense of non-stop dread — that nevertheless doesn’t take away from players getting to use an absurd number of weapons on the undead as Jill Valentine. While the series would eventually find a better way of handling both tones simultaneously, the franchise needed to refresh itself away from the gameplay style that had defined the early entries in the series.

In a similar way to how Resident Evil 7: Biohazard would eventually reimagine the series as pure survival horror, Resident Evil 4 went the other direction and delivered something that was never necessarily unsettling but consistently remained engaging and suddenly scary. The somewhat self-aware tone means the game gets away with having some truly ridiculous elements, such as the deeply memorable weapons merchant or Osmund Saddler, but the characters never make snide comments about the situation. The whole experience is treated with the sincerity of a B-movie, which turns out to be a perfect fit for the style of action and the tone of the horror. Resident Evil 4 has great game design that has stood the test of time (although some elements, like quick-time events, feel especially dated). However, it’s the presentation that makes it so enduring. It’s the perfect video game action flick — and just like so many of those movies, it makes Resident Evil 4 a blast to revisit even two decades after it debuted.