Last Residence Of Evil

And so the Island, the last section of Resident Evil 4. It’s perhaps not quite as big on set piece sequences as the earlier sections of the game, and instead decides to test your mettle by throwing in lots of army-type infected. Naturally these are quite tough due to the weapons they carry, the armour they may have, and their propensity to be lobbing dynamite about the place.

Not to mention the small matter of the big guy with the big machine gun. If you aren’t hitting him hard with either a Magnum or a Rifle then it’s game over.

Of course the Island is home to the game’s most fearsome and frankly worrisome enemies in the shape of the Regenerators. Woe betide anyone that didn’t equip the infrared scope. . .



Technically all you have to do is highlight them in your scope and then shoot the leech-like things off them before it gets to you. Sure, that’s made a tad trickier when you have to blow the legs off them to get at the one on its back, but it’s not too demanding. What really adds to the effect is the eerie sound effects that play when they are near, and the unnerving shuffling, snivelling noise they make. It’s a triumph of panic-inducing sound design and certainly makes lining up those shots feel all the more pressurised.

Possibly the hardest part of the game is against the cargo container monster (I think it’s called U3, or something like that). I never enjoyed fighting this thing on Wii, and the same went here.



The first section of the fight is a pain since you can’t kill the creature here, you just have to avoid its attacks whilst you frantically run around the maze of crates trying to find the buttons to either press or shoot that will open the doors and cause the crates to drop (nothing quite like a ticking clock at the top of the screen to really add to the stress!).

I took the approach of just keeping running, around it if necessary, rather than standing shooting it. I think you can end up needing to use a health pack by the end, but it’s worth it. Yet just when you think you’re clear you have to fight the thing properly, and it’s this battle – running in caves and around a stone whilst it gives chase, burrowing underground to attack from there – that I often struggled. I just couldn’t quite work out the best technique to taking it down effectively and often rattled through a lot of ammo.

The very end of the game, however, is actually pretty easy so long as you buy a rocket launcher from the Merchant just before it.



Just take a few choice shots at the weak points to make him reveal his eye, and then take out the rocket launcher and nail him with it. Fight done. All you have to do then is made your way over to the other side where Ada helpfully provides you with another rocket launcher to finish the game off (barring that irritating speed boat escape).

Once the game was finished, however, it then unlocked various other modes. Mercenaries (some may call this sacrilege, but I prefer the Mercenaries mode on Resident Evil 5) becomes available, but is not in any way essential to play for any trophies. Howver, Ada’s story ‘Separate Ways’ is required to get a bronze, which is pretty measly for a sizeable game in its own right that clocks in at over 4 hours to complete and is easily as challenging as the regular game.



Separate Ways does tend to lean on piling a lot more enemies in rather than doing anything too special, but considering it’s ostensibly an add-on game (and in the modern age this is the kind of thing that would have been released as DLC – and would be good value for money, too) you can’t complain. Only really one of the levels has new areas to explore (the fourth level), which is actually quite jarring, but mostly it’s just a well-executed additional content that really helps explain another dimension of the story and make what Ada was up to make sense.

A bronze trophy awarded then, for all that effort. . . The trophy-awards for this game have been disappointing, and it looks especially worse now I am at the end of it. I’ve got every single trophy the game has to offer except for the one for completing it on the hardest level. You get a solitary Gold trophy for that. So I’ve got all but one Gold trophy in the entire game and yet my return is a measly 68%.

One Gold trophy is worth 32% of the game’s trophy return! That’s pretty unbalanced, to me, but the worst thing is that to get this trophy you need to complete the game twice since the hardest mode is only unlocked after you have completed the game on one of the initially available modes. And going through the game twice would take easily 35+ hours.

So whilst I think I could manage to beat the game at the hardest level, doing so for the sake of that one trophy just doesn’t justify it. So I’m not bothering. It’s not really a big deal, I guess, but it still bugs me and mars what has otherwise been a fabulous title to have been re-released for PS3.