Resident Evil 4 - Separate Ways

I came out of Shadows of Rose, Capcom's previous big single-player story add-on, convinced the studio had confused "slower" with "scarier," so Ada Wong's campaign here landed as a genuine correction. Separate Ways sends you back through the village, the castle and the island you already cleared as Leon, but it hands you a grappling hook and a reason to keep your boots off the ground. It is a compact, high-tempo second pass rather than a folder of leftovers. The catch is worth stating plainly up front: this expects Leon's campaign behind you. Come in cold and most of the payoff (who Luis actually is, why the amber matters, what Wesker wants out of all this) will slide right past you. The hookshot is the whole design thesis. It is not a free-roam swing tool, it is a contextual yank toward marked anchor points, and it does two jobs at once. Out of combat it rewrites familiar geography, turning walls you used to hug into shortcuts and pulling you up onto rafters and rooftops that Leon never touched. In combat it collapses distance instantly, which means Ada plays as an aggressive skirmisher instead of a careful retreater. Zip in, knife parry a machete swing, stagger a Ganado with a shot to the knee, melee, hook out before the crowd closes. Her arsenal supports that read. The Bolt Thrower is the standout, a crossbow with recoverable ammo and mine bolts that let you pre-load an arena before you kick the door in, and it pairs beautifully with the ammo scarcity the series is built on. The TMP handles panic moments. Weapon upgrades and merchant requests carry over in the same shape, so the economy is familiar even if the loadout is not. What works best is pacing. Leon's campaign has a soft middle where the castle drags, and this thing simply refuses to sit still. Set pieces land back to back, arenas are smaller and denser, and the encounter design leans into verticality in a way that makes even reused rooms feel re-tuned rather than recycled. The boss fights are the highlight of the package. The Verdugo encounter is reframed into something far more claustrophobic than the version Leon can dodge past, and the hooded stalker that hunts Ada across chapters is a legitimately good addition, a pressure valve the base game never quite had. Roughly five hours for a first clear, a bit more if you chase every treasure combination, and it is tuned tight enough that a second run on a harder difficulty is actually appealing instead of a chore. Where it disappoints is unavoidable given what it is. You are walking through a game you already know, and no amount of grapple points hides that some corridors are the same corridors. A few segments feel like Leon's arenas with the furniture moved, and the island in particular runs out of new ideas before it runs out of runtime. The story does real work stitching Ada's motives to the main plot, but it is still resolving beats you already watched from the other side, so the tension is procedural rather than dramatic. And the knife economy remains stingy. Parrying is the most satisfying thing in Ada's kit and you are constantly rationing the ability to do it, which reads as tension the first time and as friction the fourth. If you bounced off RE4's inventory Tetris and durability management, nothing here changes your mind. Who is this for? Anyone who finished the remake, liked the combat more than the horror, and wanted a reason to run the system again with a different verb attached. It is also a good argument for the remake's engine, because it proves the encounter design holds up when you strip out the exploration padding and just do fights. Newcomers should not start here, not because it is hard but because it is a reply to a conversation they have not had. If you are still deciding whether to bother after rolling credits on Leon, bother. This is the most concentrated stretch of shooting in the whole package, and it ends before it wears out its welcome.

Alex · Scout Team

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