The Basics

Yeaaah the basics of RE4...I really hope you weren't expecting a real RE game when you picked this up. 'Cause it's not. At all. It's a damned third person action game, it's not even a survival horror at all. When I heard this I was extremely disappointed and almost lost my motivation to even play the game. Fortunately I did because while Four is hardly an RE game...it's one hell of an awesome game.

Resident Evil? Since when were the boonies of Spain considered Residential?

The first thing you need to be aware of is this is NOT a real Resident Evil game. It's packaged as a Resident Evil game, the main characters are Resident Evil characters, with the star being Leon from RE2, you fight hellish creatures like a Resident Evil game...but it's not a Resident Evil game. What makes this obvious is the obscene amount of enemies. You kill more enemies in the first ten minutes of RE4 then you do in the first three RE games combined. You also have more weapons, ammo and healing items then every other RE game combined. Umbrella's gone, the survival aspect is gone and even the gameplay is completely new. This SHOULD have been packaged as a side story like Code: Veronica. CV should have been Four and this should have been something like "Resident Evil: The Illuminados Conspiracy" as it's barely a Resident Evil game at all.

Four? Why would anyone start counting at Four?

Four is one of the worst and best games to start the series with. On the one hand you don't have to play the rest of the series to enjoy this game, although a few character relationships will be unknown to you, on the other hand if you intend to play all the other games in the series this is a bad game to start with because the extreme gameplay differences. It's seriously a night and day difference between the two styles of gameplay. While the rest of the main RE games involve sneaking around, almost no ammo, enclosed spaces and a small group of powerful enemies strewn about the location, Four has an entirely different gaming format. The game is violence incarnate, copious amounts of weapons and ammo, huge areas and lots of weak baddies to pound on. So it's all a situation of "Ok, now, Four is a great game that is only slightly related to the rest of the series and has it's own unique style of gameplay. But if I want to play the whole series I'm going to have to learn a new control scheme and try to avoid the urge to shoot everything that moves like in Four." It really is all a matter of taste.

Normal? Well the Ganados don't try to chew off your face...so I guess thats normal

There are only two modes in Four: Normal and Professional and there's very little difference between them. Normal is the standard difficulty mode and while there are a few hard parts throughout the game it's mostly a walk in the park. Professional has slightly less ammo strewn about the game and more enemies that take more hits to kill. The lack of ammo is made up for because the enemies still drop lots of items and thus you get more ammo from the higher amount of enemies. Thats about it.

I've got lots of good things for sale, Stranger

Perhaps the creepiest thing about Four is the Merchant. He's obviously infected with the Las Plagas parasite but he seems to have free will. So it has to be a royal Plagas...which makes no sense. He also keeps his face and body hidden and his skin is slightly red leading me to believe he's either involved in Wesker's conspiracy in some way or the designers just designed him how he is for no apparrent reason. Whats REALLY creepy about the Merchant is the fact that he seemingly has the ability to keep large amounts of weapons and items in his coat. Another thing that makes me wonder about the game is the Illuminados' eerily familiar technology later in the game. Either someone from Umbrella is funding them or the Merchant is double dealing and supplying the Illuminados cult with copious amounts of weapons and technology. Yeah, thats about all there is to it...this has nothing to do with the basics of the game as I've covered it already I just decided to include a rant about the Merchant...creepy english bastard.