Resident Evil 4 (2005)

The game that rewrote a whole genre

Drop it back into 2005 and the weight of it lands. Survival horror had started to calcify, and this game, very nearly single-handed, tore the genre down and rebuilt it. It kept the horror shell — the damp countryside, the cult, the malformed monsters — and swapped the core for something snappy, controllable and skill-rewarding. That "horror skin, action engine" recipe proved so potent it was copied for years. A 96 on GameCube, a 9.8 from IGN, a permanent fixture on every outlet's greatest-games-ever shortlist: it is routinely named one of the most influential games of the 2000s.

Its reach travels straight down that shoulder. Gears of War took the over-the-shoulder camera for cover shooting, Dead Space for sci-fi horror, The Last of Us for narrative stealth — their camera skeletons all trace back to Leon. The lovely irony is that director Shinji Mikami has admitted he was only solving the problem of how to aim in third person, with no idea he was rewriting the industry's grammar.

That accidental-revolution story is half of why people keep retelling it; the other half is that the game is simply, durably brilliant. It swept Game of the Year from outlet after outlet plus six awards at IGN's Best of 2005, and 5.7 million sales were an enormous success for the era. Influence and quality rarely arrive in the same package this cleanly — usually a game is either a landmark or a joy to play, and this one managed to be both at once.

Who should buy, who should walk, which version to get

So should you, today? The yes column is clear. If you want to take the history class of third-person action, to touch the source every over-the-shoulder game flows from; if you relish high-pressure, precise combat where every bullet has to be counted; if dated textures don't bother you — this is close to required reading, and on Steam it costs almost nothing. You are buying a place in a museum for the price of a sandwich.

The walk-away column is just as clear. If you need modern fidelity and voice work out of the box, can't stomach 2005's fixed-camera transitions and clunky menus, or will be put off by the occasional half-speed animation at 60fps, then your game is honestly elsewhere. On versions: for the source on PC, take appid 254700, the Ultimate HD Edition, ideally paired with the community RE4 HD Project for the best image quality; if what you actually want is the fully modernised audiovisual treatment, go look at the 2023 remake instead. They tell the same story but they are two different games, and their scores and positioning should never be blurred together.

My verdict: as a museum-grade game, the source version's core play still holds up two full decades on — still sharp, still good, still genuinely pulse-quickening in a way most modern games never manage. The visuals genuinely drag and the controls wear their age, and I won't paper over either. But if you want to actually understand where today's action shooters grew from, the answer is written, plain as day, on Leon's raised right shoulder. It is not flawless, and it is irreplaceable — which is, more or less, what a true classic looks like.