Resident Evil 4 Remake is a faithful recreation of the classic game, but it’s also added or adjusted some environments and systems to refresh things. Speedrunners have been digging into those changes while reconfirming strategies from the original game, and they’ve already found some tactics and time-savers that can come in handy even when you aren’t racing against the clock.
Minor spoilers for some Resident Evil 4 Remake levels ahead.
Speedrun guru WaifuRuns (opens in new tab) recently released a fabulous round-up of the discoveries made since the remake’s release. As you’d expect, some of the most popular skips are proper glitches that push Leon out of the game world or through doors. A sniper rifle equipped with a scope is key to a lot of these glitches, as aiming the scope at the ground apparently pushes Leon’s character model back just enough to clip through some geometry and avoid many large sequences or fights. Some of these skips are actually too effective because they can let you access boss fights or scripted areas in the wrong chapter, soft-locking the game.
That said, a lot of the strategies used by speedrunners are just clever but fairly normal weapon interactions, and on top of saving precious minutes in timed runs, they can save you a lot of headache in a normal playthrough. This started with small discoveries like skipping the village fight by shooting the church bell, or using gold eggs to nearly one-shot a particular boss, and there’s plenty more where that came from.
As WaifuRuns reports, you can breeze through the opening windmill encounter just by shooting a lock off a door through a window in the rear shed. In a similar vein, several counterweights in the castle section – particularly the catapult and Gigante bits – can be broken early, either by shooting them through windows or chucking grenades through gaps in iron doors. In another cool instance of prior knowledge shortening some sequences, a ton of Ashley’s puzzle section in the castle can be skipped just by entering the code at the start – no need to acquire it in-game.
In the interior of the castle, when you’re collecting pieces of the chimera statue, there’s an encounter where a masked cultist pulls a lever that drops you into a big fight on the lower level of the room. The thing is, this cultist spawns before the cutscene triggers, which means you can just chuck a frag or stun grenade at their location beforehand to avoid dropping down. That’s another win for real-time cutscenes.
Likewise, encounters that revolve around destroying some environmental blockades – namely the big rock in the mines or the concrete wall by the wrecking ball – can be skipped using the RPGs sold by the merchant. This is an expensive skip, and if you do buy any RPGs you may want to save them for boss fights, but it’s still in the spirit of things. When you buy an RPG, you’re basically spending a bunch of Pesetas to skip a tough fight, or in this case, a sizable chunk of certain levels. Luckily, heavy grenades will also work for the wrecking ball section.
The late-gem section with the helicopter and anti-aircraft turrets has a similar workaround. It turns out you don’t actually need to clear out the surrounding area to reach the mounted machine gun in order to destroy the turret. Instead, you can just chuck two heavy grenades at the thing and waltz right through.
Many of these strategies simply require you to hang onto certain resources or use specific weapons in inventive ways, and tangible payoff for that kind of game knowledge is a big part of what makes Resident Evil 4 so beloved and replayable to begin with.
Mercenaries mode has returned to Resident Evil 4, but it’s missing a few characters.
