The originalResident Evil 4 would not let you walk and shoot at the same time. Raise the gun and Leon planted his feet like a man in wet cement; the laser sight came up, the world narrowed, and the Ganados kept coming. That restriction was not a technical limit — the GameCube could have moved him — it was the design. Shinji Mikami’s 2005 game was built on a single, brutal trade:you may aim or you may leave, and you must choose now. Every encounter in that game is a clock made of that choice.

Capcom’s remake, released in March 2023 across PS4, PS5, Xbox Series consoles and PC, lets you move while aiming.

That’s the review, really. Everything else follows from it. Directed by Yasuhiro Anpo and Kazunori Kadoi under producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, and built in RE Engine after the studio’s runs atResident Evil 2 and3, the 2023RE4 is a genuinely superb action game that has a running disagreement with the thing it’s remaking. It knows what the original’s tension was made of. It takes it apart anyway, and then spends forty hours building a different tension in its place. Whether that trade lands is the only interesting question here, and it’s a closer call than the near-universal praise suggested.

What the stop-and-shoot rule was actually for

Give the 2005 design its due before touching it. Planting your feet did three jobs at once.

It madepositioning a decision made in advance. You had to pick your ground before the shooting started, because once you committed, you were furniture. That’s why the village opening works: the whole encounter is you reading a farmyard and choosing where to stand thirty seconds before you need to have chosen.

It madethe crowd frightening without needing the crowd to be fast. Ganados shamble. They shamble at a speed that is trivially outrun and lethal to a man standing still, and the entire threat curve ofRE4 is calibrated on that gap.

And it madethe shot expensive. Ammunition was scarce, so aiming cost you time; time cost you space; space was the only defence. Three resources, one input, all traded against each other. It’s one of the tightest economies action games have ever run.

Take the plant-and-shoot away and you have to replace all three, and Capcom knew it. The remake’s answer is the knife, and the answer is smart.

The knife as the new economy

In the original the knife was a tool: break crates, chip an enemy, cut yourself free. In the remake it’s the load-bearing defensive system, and it’s the best thing in the game. You can parry with it — including, remarkably, a chainsaw — you can stab a downed Ganado to stop them getting back up, you can slit a throat from behind, and you can cut yourself out of a grab.

And it wears out. Knife durability is the pivot the whole design turns on. Every parry, every finisher, every escape spends the blade, and the merchant charges to repair it. So the game reinstates the original’s core bargain in a new currency:defence is not free, and the resource it costs is one you have to buy back. You’re no longer trading time for space. You’re trading blade for safety, and a blade broken at the wrong moment leaves you doing the thing you spent the last hour avoiding, which is fighting a crowd with a handgun and no way out of a grab.

Around that, the tuning is meticulous. Leon moves while aiming, so the enemies got faster and more numerous, and they flank properly now. Parades of Ganados throw hatchets and sickles at range. The crowd pressure is genuinely higher than 2005’s because the game knows you can back out of it. The village fight is still the village fight — read the ground, pick your building, watch the ladders — and it’s harder, because standing still is now achoice rather than a consequence, and the game punishes the ones who make it lazily.

The dynamic difficulty system returns underneath, adjusting spawns and drops to how you’re doing, which is whyRE4 has always been the most forgiving hard game on the shelf and why almost nobody notices.

Ashley, and the argument Capcom won outright

The one change nobody sensibly disputes: Ashley Graham has no health bar. She has a downed state you can revive her from, no ammunition to manage, and a two-verb command set — follow or wait. In 2005 she had health, could be killed, and was the reason a generation of players remember an escort mission with a full-body shudder.

The remake’s version works because it identifies what the escort wasfor. Ashley’s job is to be a constraint on your movement and your attention — a thing that makes you look over your shoulder and route around a room differently. Her job was never to be a fail state you couldn’t control. Removing the health bar keeps the constraint and deletes the arbitrariness, and it is a masterclass in understanding your own game well enough to know which parts were load-bearing. Compare it with whatFinal Fantasy VII Remake does when it reaches the same fork: that game changes the thing to make a point about memory. This one changes the thing because the thing was bad.

The QTEs go too, mostly, and good riddance — the cutscene button prompts that killed you for blinking were 2005’s worst habit, and the remake keeps only the parry, which is a real mechanic rather than a reflex tax.

Where it fights itself

The remake is longer, denser, more generous and, in a very specific way, less frightening.

The originalRE4 had arhythm of pressure and relief that came from the movement rule. Between fights you were safe, because walking away was always available and always sufficient; inside fights you were trapped, absolutely, by your own trigger finger. The remake smears that. You can always move, always reposition, always slice your way out if the blade holds. That produces an unbroken, competent, slightly even hum of tension where the original had spikes and troughs. It’s a betteraction game and a slightly flatter horror one.

Then there’s the sheer amount of stuff. Side treasures to combine, spinels to trade, a shooting gallery, requests pinned to walls, weapon cases with attaché-case grids. The merchant’s economy is deep and enjoyable and it is also, hour by hour, the thing that keeps pulling your eye out of the world and into a spreadsheet. The original was a corridor with a shop in it. This is a shop with a corridor attached.

And a few of the strange edges got sanded. The remake reworks Salazar’s laser corridor into a stealth sequence, drops the U-3 fight, and generally trades 2005’s cheerful arbitrariness for coherence. Coherence is worth having. So was the arbitrariness, occasionally. The best moments in the original were the ones where a Spanish village stopped making sense.

The verdict

Capcom made the finest version of this game and, in doing so, made a case that Mikami’s constraint was a compromise rather than a thesis. I think that’s about sixty per cent right. The remake is better designed, better paced across its middle third, better at crowds, and vastly better at Ashley. The original is still the more frightening object, because being unable to move while a chainsaw approaches is a specific and irreplaceable feeling, and no amount of parry-timing gets you back there.

Take both. They’re arguing, and the argument is the interesting part. Available on PS5, Xbox Series and PC, withSeparate Ways — Ada’s parallel campaign, added in September 2023 — worth the money for the grappling hook alone, and the free Mercenaries mode from April 2023 sitting there as the purest distillation of the new combat system.

If you want to see a remake that takes the opposite position and restores rather than argues, go toDead Space (2023). If you want to see modern developers building a survival horror that keeps the old constraints on purpose,Crow Country is the one.

Spoilers below

The Krauser knife fight is where the remake’s whole design philosophy stands up and takes a bow. In 2005 it was a QTE — a sequence of button prompts flashed over a cutscene, memorised rather than played, and one of the most-hated three minutes in the game precisely because it asked for reflex rather than skill. The remake rebuilds it as a real knife duel: parries, reads, a proper contest fought with the mechanic the game spent thirty hours teaching you.

That’s the case for the defence in a single encounter. The remake takes 2005’s laziest moment and turns it into a test of the systems it built, which is exactly what a remake ought to do and almost none of them manage.

The counter-case is Saddler. The final fight is fine, competent, well-staged and completely conventional, and the original’s version was also fine, and neither is the reason anyone remembersResident Evil 4. Both games peak in a farmyard in the first hour, with a bell ringing and a crowd walking away, and no amount of engine work changes that. The village is the game. Everything after it is a very long, very good encore.