I don’t know what’s harder to believe: That the Resident Evil 4 remake is out in less than a month or that January just marked 18 years since the release of the original groundbreaking action-horror game. And based on the 17 minutes of preview footage we’ve seen, it looks like Resident Evil 4 is shaping up the way of Capcom’s other remakes. Which is to say, brilliantly.
As suspected, there are a lot of confirmed changes and updates (many of them improvements) that have been made to the original 2005 game. Hardcore Resident Evil 4 fans will notice one segment that stood out in particular because it felt like a culmination of a lot of these small changes resulting in a more flexible, less punishing experience.
Nowadays Resident Evil 4 is known for its revolutionary dynamic difficulty settings, but even on normal it’s far from an easy game. Going back to the controls of the original certainly adds another layer of difficulty for many new players that’s absent in the remake.
There are other additions in the preview footage that seem to ease the difficulty for both new and experienced players. These are demonstrated in footage of Leon facing off against one of the most ferocious enemies in the Castle segment of the game — the Garrador.
Roughly translated to the “Clawer,” the Garrador is the vicious cultist experiment that has been chained away in the castle basement. The parasite-infested host has been transformed into a monster of endless rage, equipped with metal claws on its hands. This enemy always signaled a difficult fight in the original Resident Evil 4, especially in the sequence where you have to fight two at one time.
Many would call the Garrador, in particular, one of the most difficult non-boss encounters in the game. It seems the development team at Capcom is aware of its reputation based on the new ways to take this enemy down.
Image via Capcom
From the preview footage, we gleaned information about a handful of new mechanics that are now at Leon’s disposal. The big one is stealth. Leon can now crouch and sneak up on enemies without them noticing him. If you sneak up on the Garrador from behind, you’re able to stab the Plagas on its back, exposing its parasitic weak point to your big guns without having to waste ammo.
There are also new mechanics that make it easier to go up against the Garrador head-on. The first is an evade move that lets you press the right stick to perform a quick duck. Secondly, and we saw this in other combat sections as well, Leon now has the ability to parry incoming attacks with his knife.
Right before Leon is about to get hit by the Garrador’s claw swipe, the knife icon on the bottom-right corner HUD lights up and (this demo was on PlayStation) an L1 prompt showed up. It was just for a split second, suggesting the timing window on this parry is pretty tight.
These newfound options at your disposal will hopefully make a few of the more punishing sections of Resident Evil 4 fairer in the remake. And it’s more than likely the Garrador isn’t the only enemy who has new weaknesses for the player to discover.
To learn more about the Resident Evil 4 Remake, go to GameSkinny’s RE4 hub page for more news, previews, guides, and more pre-release coverage.
Featured image via Capcom.
