I just recently bought my Wii. I originally only had Wii Sports and Zelda. Those were pretty good games to play, but when I looked into Resident Evil 4’s upgrades and re-release onto the new console, I decided I wanted it. That’s basically the entire background of my purchase. I played maybe 20 minutes of another Resident Evil game a long time ago. I remember one cut scene and some really scary dogs. I needed something to play, and this looked really good.

It is that good. It is definitely deserving of all the awards it’s been handed or even nominated for. It’s so good that it made me want to play other games like it. I went out and rented Dead Rising just last night. I’ve been looking for information on both Resident Evil and Dead Rising’s sequels because I’m so in the mood for some more of this. It’s fucking amazing, and I barely know how to put it in words. Resident Evil 4 on the Wii is what other games should try to be.

It starts out with a fairly stereotypical setup in the President’s daughter’s kidnapping and government agent Leon Hunt’s mission to investigate her supposed sighting in a rural European village. I read that on the back of the box on the way home and sort of grimaced. Other cons? This game’s got tons of invisible walling, some hacked-out scenarios and occasionally horrible lines of dialogue. And the fourth wall of metagaming is shattered by the on-screen indicators at almost any moment telling you to ‘press A and B’ instead of saying something like ‘fire.’

But forget that stuff. This game is so good, it’s ridiculous. I like zombie movies like Dawn / Shaun of the Dead and I was definitely into Dead Rising a few months back, but Resident Evil 4 makes me want more. I only appreciated them before. I didn’t crave them.

The lame and almost irretrievable setup of the plot is completely dashed aside when you stumble across notes and clues indicating a much deeper purpose than the suspected ransom. The horrible dialogue is outweighed by the other 99% so realistic you forget that it’s been scripted. The same goes for the aforementioned scenarios that seem only like setups for gameplay. Aside from the fact that you’re fending off infected farmers and their wives with a riot gun, plus or minus the occasional mutated monsters in your path, the game is fairly lifelike.

This is helped by the very natural controls, the comfortable view from behind Leon’s shoulder, and his interactions with other characters (not necessarily the people he’s disemboweling). The prompts for actions appear on your monitor once in a while, when something significant is happening, and it usually involves Leon narrowly escaping a life-threatening situation, but the most intense moments don’t rely on these. That’s not to say that those moments aren’t, in and of themselves, scary as hell, or that the Wii remote’s application to these controls isn’t as good as the standard sections of the game. I just mean that every once in a while, you’ll turn around and step into a bear-trap and maybe scream a little on the inside. You’re lucky if it’s only a bear-trap.

And the point I’ve been trying to make is that, while the cinematic moments of near-survival are plenty bitching, it’s nice to be playing a game that regularly gets your heart rate to jump up without relying on them. For instance, one of the hardest enemies I have fought yet has not been a boss (or even a mini-boss); just one of the villagers carrying around a chainsaw. It was one of the only times I could and chose to run away, rather than fight him to the death. And one of the scariest moments wasn’t the revelation of a new monster or a final boss, but just a situation with the zombified villagers being inches away from sending Leon and Ashley plummeting to their grisly deaths, and I had about one second to blast them away before instant death.

Seriously, it’s that word again. Intense. That’s what Resident Evil 4 is. It’s nonstop action with fluid controls, seamless cut scenes and gameplay, some old-school save-points and boss battles, and all around a great package. Well worth every cent I paid for it. If you’re really wary, go ahead and rent it for a few nights. But for me, this game makes it a great time to own a Wii.