Life Without Toast - Sibling Rivalry

"Warning: This game contains strong language and scenes of extreme violence and gore"

And that ain't even the half of it. I played the original Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube, and it was very, very good, but this new, Wii-centric version surpasses it in almost every way there is.

Having played most of the way through the GC version, the majority of the shocks and scares were no longer shocking or scary, but as the entire game has been rebuilt from the ground up, in 480p 16:9 widescreen and with a generous amount of Wiimote waggling for good measure, pretty much everything in the game feels "new".

From the opening scenes in the village, through the rescue of the Presidents' daughter (kidnapped by a Spanish cult called the Los Illuminados), through all the various puzzles, the Wii-Remote controls are really without fault. Indeed, if I had not played the game on a system that requires you to use buttons and joysticks (how old-school!), I would have sworn that the game had been designed for the Wii from the beginning. The point-to-aim system is pretty much flawless, enabling a raft of head-shots to be accomplished with ease, with crazy villagers heads exploding everywhere as a result.

If you're coming to this as a fan of the older Resident Evil Games, you're in for a shock. In the older games, the pacing was slow, the camera fixed, and the tension unbearable. The tension is still present, but the pacing is generally set at a rapid-fire full sprint, machine gun in hand, and the camera is an over-the-shoulder affair that brings you right into the action, almost like a first-person shooter, only not.

The story, is of course, being a videogame story, completely bunk, but it's definitely better than either of the Resi movies that have been released. The scope of the locations is vast, from the sprawling village at the beginning to the labyrinthine castle in the middle, to the sci-fi-like confines of the island laboratories towards the end, and this helps the story a lot. I won't spoil it for you any more than that, as there's quite a few surprises to be had.

The graphics, while excellent, are definitely "last-gen", albeit the very best of last-gen. The enhanced definition and widescreen aspect definitely help. The sound is awesome. The music is perfectly weighted and matched to the mood of every scene and level in the game, and the incidental sound effects are totally spot-on, be they a candle blowing in the wind or a grotesgue monster being frozen by liquid nitrogen and exploding in a shower of fragments. Brilliant.

Speaking of monsters... Oh. My. God. Whoever designed the beasties clearly needs professional help. They are FUCKED UP. Again, I'm not going to go into too much detail, but lets just say the main character, Leon Kennedy, had his head ripped from his neck on more than one occasion by a nefarious hench-thing covered in spikes, claws and drool. If you don't jump from your seat and/or grimace in disgust at least once, then you are clearly already dead. Brilliant stuff. And the 18+ rating of the game is definitely deserved, and should definitely be adhered to.

All in all, totally brilliant. I'll give it 9.5 slices of toast out of 10.

Official website / Wikipedia page