The Resident Evil 4 Remake Is Still the One to Beat
Remaking the game most often named the best of its generation was an obviously bad idea. Three years on it's still the benchmark everything else gets measured against.
Remaking Resident Evil 4 was a genuinely risky proposition, and it’s easy to forget how risky it looked at the time. The 2005 original is regularly named one of the most influential games ever made. It invented the over-the-shoulder camera that a generation of third person shooters then used. It wasn’t a game that needed fixing.
Capcom shipped it in March 2023, it reviewed at 93 on Metacritic, sold three million copies in its opening week, and three years later it remains the reference point for how this should be done.
What it understood that other remakes miss
The insight was working out which parts of the original were beloved and which were merely tolerated, and being unsentimental about the difference.
Tank controls and the inability to move while aiming weren’t what made the 2005 game great. They were constraints of the era that the design worked around brilliantly. The remake removed them, added a proper parry on the knife, and rebuilt encounters around a Leon who can move and shoot. The tension survived because the crowd behaviour and the ammunition scarcity were tuned to compensate.
Meanwhile the things people actually remember are all intact. The village siege. The merchant. The cabin fight with Luis. The pacing of the castle. These were preserved in shape even where the details changed.
The parts it improved outright
Ashley is the clearest example. In the original she was an escort mission with a health bar and a habit of walking into gunfire. The remake removed her health bar entirely, gave her useful commands, and made her a genuine part of encounters rather than an obstacle within them. Almost nobody complains about Ashley now, which wasn’t a sentence anyone could write in 2005.
The knife durability system is more contentious and mostly works. It turns the knife from an infinite resource into something you ration, which gives the parry weight.
The writing was rebalanced too. The original’s tone was often unintentionally funny. The remake keeps the deliberate absurdity and trims the parts that only read as camp because of dated voice direction.
What it lost
Some of the original’s stranger edges are gone. The remake is more consistent and slightly less odd, and a small number of set pieces were cut or condensed. The section in the original that everyone has an opinion about, depending on which one they mean, won’t be there in the form you remember.
Purists have a fair point that the remake is a more professional game and a less peculiar one. That’s a real trade and it’s worth acknowledging rather than dismissing.
The extra content
The Mercenaries mode arrived free after launch and is the best version of it Capcom has made. Separate Ways, following Ada through a parallel route, was substantial enough to justify its price and is genuinely worth playing rather than a lap of honour. The VR support added later is one of the few high-profile VR conversions that people actually finished.
Why it still matters as a benchmark
Because it demonstrated that a remake can improve on an acknowledged classic without diluting it, and it set the standard the rest of the industry is now measured against. Every remake since has been discussed in terms of whether it made the Resident Evil 4 choice or the safer one.
If you’ve never played either version, play this one. If you played the original and are worried it will spoil the memory, it won’t. It’s the same game, made by people who understood exactly why you liked it.