Late last night, the folks over at Capcom unleashed their pre-release Resident Evil 4 Remake demo, and we did what all wise folk would - downloaded it straight away and played it in the wee hours of the morning.
Thankfully (for our sleep schedule anyway), this demo slice of Resi 4 is short, with our playtime clocking in at just 15 minutes for our first run. To be honest we'd have probably played it for hours though, as this chunk of Resident Evil 4 feels great to play and has left us wanting much, much more.
As the demo's name suggests, you get access to a couple of early sections of RE4 here, right up to the point where chainsaw boi starts chasing you around the opening village area liked a crazed lunatic. The reworked gunplay is on show pretty much straight away, which feels like an evolved version of what Capcom cooked up with Resident Evil 2 remake.
Combat feels weighty and satisfying, with even the introductory pistol feeling nice and punchy right from the off. You won't be doing much puzzle solving or anything like that here - this demo quickly demonstrates RE4's more action oriented nature.
We'll add the caveat here that this writer has never properly played the original Resident Evil 4 - the game's intro village area is about as far as I personally ever got with the old version. Even so, if this remake keeps going in the same direction as the demo, it'll stand on its own as a fantastic third-person survival horror title, even without any sort of fondness for the original game.
A quick note on performance, at least for this opening section - the game looks and runs amazingly well on Xbox Series X based on our (VRR enabled) experience. We opted for 'prioritise frame rate' with ray tracing switched on, and didn't notice any obvious dips from 60FPS. We've heard varying reports on other systems, but Resi 4 remake seems well optimised for Series X so far.
And well, that's about it really! As we say, this is a very short demo but it's well worth a download if you're at all interested in the new version of Resident Evil 4. Newcomers and fans of the original alike, we should be in for a real treat when the full game launches on March 24th.