In this highly evolved continuation of the Resident Evil series, you play the part of Leon S. Kennedy, formerly of the RPD. Now working for the US secret service, Kennedy has traveled to a remote European village to search for the President’s kidnapped daughter. He finds the locals rather inhospitable.

I hate to say it, but zombies are getting a bit old. Oh sure, they’re still creepy, but horribly overused. In the world of video games the walking dead have served as grunts for decades now, in everything from old 8-bit side scrollers to the technically brilliant fps ’Doom 3’ . In the realm of shambolic celluloid, zombies have experienced somewhat of a renaissance recently. This trend isn’t hard to analyze; most filmmakers realize that they have to do something new with everyone’s favorite breed of putrescent revenant. Capcom too, has come to their senses. They have finally realized the fatal flaw inherent in their RE games, the overwhelming redundancy. Play one old-school RE game, you’ve played them all. Unfortunately, in scraping the old game formula, the zombies, and the scares both wound up on the junk pile.

Resident Evil 4 puts an end to the traditional RE game design laziness with a complete revisal of the old control scheme. I would like to applaud them for this, but frankly this little bit of thoughtfulness was long, LONG overdue. It’s hard to heap much praise on Capcom’s designers when they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into fixing something that had been broken for years. However, even I can’t deny that the game is a joy to play. There is genuine nuance in the game’s controls, Environments are interactive, and you’ll have a blast searching through crates and shooting away at little nooks and crannies in order to uncover valuables to trade with local merchants. Speaking of those merchants, the ability to buy new weapons and upgrade your existing cache is more than welcome. My only complaint is that I found the aiming controls to be a bit lazy. However, more expensive weapons supposedly have faster and more intuitive controls, but cheap bastard that I am, I never got to find out for myself.

As typical for the series, the graphics are superb, at first glance that is. Environments are rendered beautifully, and are heavy with detail. Rustic villages, dusky mines, hazy wetlands, cavernous castles, and crumbling tombs are all brought to life with equal perfection. Between the new fluid play controls and the jumped up graphics, the world of Resident Evil 4 is an absolute joy just to run around in. (And keep in mind, you now have total control over your point of view!) But crunching data at this level comes at a bit of a cost. While character models are hyper-realistic and very well animated, each class of opponent (villagers, los illuminados monks, las plagas militia) only have about a dozen character face-models apiece. After you’ve shot the same podgy, balding, bearded peasant for the 50^th time, you‘ll notice that the game‘s realism factor takes a serious nose-dive. (And exactly how many people lived in this little village anyway? I shot my way through at least 1,000 by the end of the game!) The music sets the mood well, but it isn’t catchy or even very memorable. The sound design is pretty much perfect. The voice acting is much improved since the old days, give or take the occasional cheesy bit of dialogue. The shrill cries of possessed country folk and the morbid chanting of lesion-ridden monks is delightfully ooky. Too bad the rest of the game isn’t so chilling.

I’m sorry to say it, but at no time during the course of the game was I the least little bit afraid. Apprehensive or frustrated perhaps, but never scared. The game hits hard early on, while running through the village you will stumble across cartfuls of rotting corpses, women impaled with pitchforks, a maggoty collection of severed heads, but the gruesome goings on are strictly of the blood and gore variety. The atmosphere picks up when you reach the booby-trap ridden castle which houses the Los Illuminados cult. An order of inquisition-style monks, the Los Illuminados members are clad in black and crimson robes accented with skeletal and goat faced masks. The weapons they wield are straight out of the middle-ages, morning stars, spiked shields, flaming crossbows, and grim reaper style scythes. A cross between a Polanski film and one of Torquemada’s wet dreams, the castle segment is where the game comes closest to being terrifying. (Aside from, perhaps, some of the boss battles, as the huge creatures you face off against are genuinely intimidating.)

In order to explore the reasons why, IMHO the game failed to be frightening, I must now turn to discussion of the plot. For those of you who still haven’t played the game through, I offer a Spoiler Warning. To cut to the chase, click here.

When I first saw the trailers for RE4, the sight of evil fire-spewing monks and possessed villagers gave me hope that the RE series would be broad-minded enough to branch out into occult themes (ala Silent Hill) rather than rehashing the same old mutant virus malarkey. The cause of the possessions is instead an alien parasite known as las plagas. While previous entries drew their influence from the films of George Romero, RE4 is something of a cross between John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, and ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. The game replaces its lumbering old zombies with parasite ridden humans. The hosts bodies retain their old memories and abilities, meaning that even the lowliest baddy you’ll be facing is smart, fast, and more than capable of driving an axe through your skull at 20 paces. While this does wonders for the game’s challenge factor, I just don’t find Spanish speaking aliens to be anywhere near as disturbing as moldering ambulatory carcasses. Occasionally, decapitating a foe will allow the squirmy Lovecraftian entity inside them to wriggle forth. This is rather icky, but not truly horrifying. I’ll admit that I’ve never really been effected by Croneneberg-esque Freudian-style horrors (I.e. themes of contamination, disfigurement, castration, etc.) half as much as I am by more archetypal terrors. Zombies draw on all the old taboos concerning death, cannibalism, and the loss of humanity. Squiggly space-bugs just don’t do it for me.

Another pet peeve of mine, is how the RE series has developed a penchant of late for presenting the most asinine antagonists possible. This sad trend started with ‘Code Veronica‘s Alfred Ashford, a simpering, cross dressing, knobby-kneed patrician. (Think of an effeminate John Kerry.) It continued in the form of ‘RE Zero’s opera singing slug wrangling villain, and ‘Dead Aim’s breast-sprouting Morpheus Duval. RE4’s resident buzz-kill is one Ramon Salazar, a two foot tall gray haired and wrinkled (though he’s only in his 20's) midget (sorry, little person) wearing a Napoleon outfit. He has a tendency to giggle like a ninny (and for that matter, do everything else like a ninny) in every scene he’s in. He also bears an unfortunate resemblance to Michael, the incestuous little troll in 'Burial Ground’. Open question to Capcom: Why even bother trying to build tension and atmosphere in your games, when you’re just going to trot out some silly little poot like Salazar and defuse it all? Humor, true humor would be welcome in the RE universe, as long as it was kept sharp and dark. (Ala Sam Raimi) This goofy anime crap just don’t cut it.

Two more minor points: Ada Wong’s character has not developed in the least since RE2. (Or rather, has devolved back towards its original state.) Despite declaring her love for Kennedy, and dying for his sake, she is still incarnated here as a selfish and arrogant sociopath who really doesn’t care whether or not she puts other people in harm’s way. The fact that she’s still working for Wesker (even if she's not loyal to him, she still rescues the plagas sample from oblivion) proves that she doesn’t give a damn about human life. I have an inkling that Capcom did this deliberately, reasoning that if Ada had actually shown some character growth or any permanent change in personality, hard-core fan boys wouldn’t consider her cool anymore. Sad thing is, they’re probably right. Question is, if no one in this series grows or changes, why should I care if any of these characters live or die? There is also one glaringly obvious plot hole. The alien plot revolves around releasing the president’s daughter Ashley back to him, but infected with the alien creatures. She will then infect her father, his cabinet members, etc. giving the cult control over the American government. Why then are the alien parasites willing to kill Ashley, either in booby traps or face to face? Hell, why not just release her to Leon after it becomes apparent that the creatures are hatching? Saddler, the leader, claims that he wants to extort a little donation from the president. Two questions:

• WTF do alien parasites care about money?
• Wouldn’t it be easier to get the money after Ashley had been released and infected her father?

I don’t want to make it sound like RE4 is a bad game. As a game, it’s marvelous, just the narrative aspects stink. Hectic, immerse, and truly challenging, you progress in the game inch by bloody inch. It just doesn’t let up, throwing fresh new horrors at you when you’ve barely had a chance to recover from the last. Sure it’s beautiful, and a lot of fun to play around with, but just like that girl you dated in college, that doesn’t save it from being shallow as hell. Since it fails to engage the player on an emotional level, I just can’t get too exited about RE4.