Reviews// Resident Evil 4 (GameCube)

Having played earlier demos we knew roughly what to expect when we paddled back over the Atlantic with our very own copy. The general premise is 'shoot people', the setting's 'eerie' and the camera's 'over the shoulder'. But this is one of those games that simply cannot put its greatness across when you're only playing it for 15 minutes, standing up in a brightly lit room. This is one of those truly engrossing titles that demands to be played only under the dim flicker of daytime curtain-leakage, with big screens, big speakers and no respect for the manual's suggestion you stop playing for ten minutes every hour in order to reduce the likelihood of a seizure. Seizures-schmeizures. You're unlikely to even have a one minute break per ten hours once you get stuck into this.

The key thing that underpins RE4's classiness is the incredibly tight way in which the design has all come together. The controls, the camera, the graphics, the presentation, the pace... each component suits and perfectly complements the next and it all makes the entertaining concept play very well indeed. The change of camera and perspective is perhaps the single most important development. It's pretty much a cross between a first-person view and a third-person perspective, uniquely managing to capture the advantages of both. When you're targeting your enemies, it feels as swift and precise as an FPS, and when you're fearfully creeping through unknown territory, the third-person-ness helps enhance those cinematic qualities. It means that your view is often slightly restricted, and that serves to make you scared and jumpy. Which is a good thing. When you're health's low and you can hear enemies bumbling about nearby, you'll find yourself constantly freaking out at every peripheral twitch; pressing the B button to swivel around, frantically checking left and right and generally falling into a delightful state of panic.

Then once you've found your foes, or they've found you, the action turns to hardcore gunplay. It's another moment where RE4 takes a video game norm and improves on it. The enemies themselves take each bullet impact exactly as they should. Shots to the legs will bring them to the floor, shots to the head cause a wonderful splatter of matter and close-range shotgun fire can decimate a torso, leaving a bewildered pair of legs stood in front of you, twitching foolishly. Although the enemies in RE4 aren’t zombies per se, there are certain parallels to be drawn. The staple crop of cannon-fodder is composed of mountain-dwelling European types; and presumably due to strange local fermentations and obscurely veined-cheeses, they can get a bit funny in the head like. We won’t spoil the plot for you, but there’s still plenty of Resident Evil’s ghoulish traditions to keep things supernatural.