As part of Sony’s State of Play showcase in February 2023, we received a new trailer (opens in new tab) for the Resident Evil 4 remake, which gives us our first look at the revamped shooter’s castle and island parts. The trailer also revealed that a demo will be released and that the game’s legendary Mercenaries mode will also return.
Firstly, despite some speculation to the contrary, the RE4 Remake will still feature the original game’s slightly maligned island chapter. After the thrills of the village and castle parts of the game, the island has always been something of a B+ for me, with the level bolstered by some home run hits like the Krauser boss fight and encounters with the seriously unnerving Regenerators. .
The trailer also shows a revamped version of her first encounter with aspiring resident Arnold Krauser. Before starting his Soul Calibur with that boss fight later on, Leon engages Krauser in a cool cutscene with some hard quick time events. Seriously, take a sip of your Dr Pepper at an inopportune moment in the original game and bam, a Delta operator fell from the rafters and skewered you with a Bowie knife. Now, the first fight with Krauser will be more traditional, with full control, and I can’t wait to see how that translates.
It also looks like we’ll be spending more time with the new, more sleazy and decidedly in-yassified takes on Luis Sera, a paw-of-a-monkey moment for fans of the original Spaniard for sure. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he seems like a potential co-op character – there he’s getting up to Donkey Kong minecart shenanigans with Leon, and oh, now he’s here teaming up with our hero for the dual-Giant boss battle (Ornstein and Smough? Well, how about Smough and Smough). Most curious of all, these two set pieces occur after Luis’ death in the original game – get your betting pool ready to take advantage of this “Madrid cop”‘s chances of getting out of Spain alive (?).
Confirmation of the return of the Mercenaries is also extremely “hype”, as the children say. Resident Evil’s arcadey wave-based survival mode is one of the best ever, and the maps of its original iteration are etched into my brain after five stars on all of them with each character to unlock the Handcannon super weapon. I think there’s a lot of promise here in the map expansion and character selection – Mercenaries has come a long way in eighteen years. Capcom hasn’t provided a date for the RE4R preview demo, but it shouldn’t be far off – the full game is set to release on March 24th.
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