Resident Evil 4

An old-timer with real bite.

- Rich Stanton

When a game has a good reputation you can be confident it’ll also come with a downside. And reputations don’t come much bigger than that of Resident Evil 4, which is universally acknowledged to be a watershed for action games. Director and series creator Shinji Mikami had returned to the helm of Capcom’s biggest series in order to revitalize it. In the process he created a wave of changes within the third-person genre and the wider videogames industry.

But that was back in 2005 and this is an 11-year-old HD re-release on Xbox One. Video gaming is a technology-led business, and the inevitable fate of pioneering titles, however special their place in history may be, is to fall by the wayside. Resi 4 is certainly not immune to the effects of age, particularly its environment textures, which were designed to look fantastic when ‘blurred’ in SD but are over-exposed in the harsh light of HD. And then there are the always-divisive controls.

The game was something of a last hurrah for so-called ‘tank’ controls, whereby a character rotates on the spot, always runs forwards when you press up, and can only shoot when they’re standing still. But the developers built the whole experience with this in mind. So while a 2016 player might find it annoying not to be able to change direction sharply or check corners easily, the old-fashioned movement style is overwhelmingly mitigated by the fact the enemies and their world were designed around such limitations.