Content from Last 48hrs

I just finished RE4R on Sunday, and now I'm trying to get through Separate Ways before Requiem launches, but it's gonna be close.

Resident Evil 4 Remake I bounced off this game on Gamecube back when it first came out, but this time the remake clicked with me way better. I'm partial to the Raccoon City incident, so the fact that this is largely unrelated to that is a bit of a ding, but it's fun game and I enjoyed my time with it. Grade: B+

Ditto.

Probably won't finish my current run of 4 and 4R before it comes out lol.

Resident Evil Village + Winters Expansion With Requiem coming out at the end of the month, I figured now was the perfect time to finally play the Village DLC and get the last few achievements I was still missing. I also used the opportunity to replay the base game so I could mess around with that 3rd-person mode they patched in a while back. I was gonna do a fresh run but once I loaded my clear save and saw all the fully upgraded guns with infinite ammo I had at my disposal, I decided I wanted to play with those instead. So it ended up being more of a victory lap kinda run. I did bump the difficulty up to hardcore to keep things interesting. I almost did Village of Shadows but then I remembered that the Heisenberg fight almost gave me an aneurysm the last time I played... Anyway, you can really tell that the game was made with first-person in mind. The devs expected you to be looking at the environment with the camera way up close. In third-person, some areas feel kinda clautrophobic in an awkward way and the added distance makes it kinda hard to make out all the small details in the environment. I'm glad they added the option for people that care about this kinda stuff but to me this felt like an inferior way to play the game. I'm hoping Requiem won't have this issue because it's being made with both POVs in mind from the very start. Overall, I still feel the same way about the game. It's really good but it feels super disjointed. Castle DImitrescu is still by far my favorite area of the entire game with its classic RE Mansion experience. The factory area with its more actiony RE4 style is a close second but I can't help but feel like they dont belong in the same game. I would have been fine with a full game's length of Castle Dimitrescu gameplay or a full game's length of Factory gameplay but having both together (along with two other areas each with its own different style of horror/gameplay) kinda feels like they were trying to please everyone and that just never works out. The best parts leave you wanting more and the worst parts feel like they're wasting your time. Although, to be fair, House Beneviento is the only area that feels completely out of place in the game and is so fucking tedious on subsequent playthroughs. Oh and the whole fake out about Chris being evil is still such a baffling plot contrivance. It's like they couldn't come up with a plausible justification for the fake out so when everything is revealed Chris just goes "yeah, that was a bad idea lol". I still can't get over how bad this actually is lmao. There isn't much to say about Mercenaries mode. It's fun if you enjoy the combat and the Winters Expansion added some new characters that made getting S rank on all the stages easier, so I'm glad I waited this long to do it. As for Shadows of Rose, it's... fine. It mostly re-uses environments from the main game in basically the exact same way (e.g. Castle Dimitrescu is still the classic RE "Mansion" area). There's a few neat twists in there but overall it's kind of underwhelming as the "conclusion to the Winters Saga". And the way they connect it to the final cutscene of the main game is kind of confusing, too. It really makes me wonder if the original plan was for Rose to be the protag of a future game and then when that idea was scrapped they had to throw something together to wrap things up for her. Also, I kinda wish I had done my first run on hardcore because I had to run through it a second time and that was kinda tedious. But anyway, I'm finally done: Now bring on Requiem!