Resident Evil 4 has been a well of inspiration for countless third-person titles, from Gears of War to Dead Space. Yet out of many of those titles, few, including its own remake, have harnessed one of its best aspects: one of the finest aiming reticules in gaming history. RIP red dot sight – relegated to an add-on exclusively used with handguns that most players probably won’t even use now. It still works great, incidentally – far better than the awful, gratuitous, flat crosshair you’re expected to use by default.
It’s not that a normal crosshair is bad, mind you. Crosshairs exist for a reason – you aren’t actually holding the gun or aiming down its sights, so of course you need some help lining up a target. Crosshairs can even help with motion sickness, giving your eyes something grounding to focus on. The thing is though, how you implement that crosshair is way more important than that little semi-transparent sprite would lead you to believe.
Does it wobble? How accurate is it to where the player is aiming? Do you want them to spray and pray or be precise? Is it a good fit for a controller? A mouse? A motion controller? We’ve even got VR headset based aiming in the likes of Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 4 VR. All of this is important to consider, especially in a game like Resident Evil 4, which is all about precisely aiming to land tactful shots.
Sure, it’s an actiony survival-horror game by nature of letting you take precision aim, but Resident Evil 4 originally made you stand in place to take each shot. Enemies can also shrug off a good few rounds like they’re nothing. So it’s up to you to make every round count. To help with this struggle, every weapon has a laser targeting red dot sight, rather than a static crosshair. There’s the exception of scope-based aiming, but otherwise, the emphasis is solely on lining up the dot to make contact.
You’re seeing a clear line of where your shot is going to go, stretching a good few meters out. You can even use this to better line-up your gun to pull off timed shots as you predict where an enemy is advancing, or as a guiding central line to focus the cone of your spread if wielding a shotgun. It makes you think rather than instinctively fire and forget. You’re essentially aiming with a virtual projectile, which is quite different from your average crosshair that just gives a vague approximation of where your shots will land.
So you can understand the disappointment I felt when Resident Evil 4 Remake doesn’t even include laser sight aiming as an option for all your weapons. Instead, there are some rather peculiar crosshairs used – the magnum’s in particular is so strange I’m baffled at what the intent was.
They often didn’t quite correspond with where I was aiming, so instead, I had to effectively learn to aim like I would with the laser, but just with the model. I got quite good at it with the TMP SMG, condensing my spread with controlled bursts, but I don’t think that’s how Capcom intended me to play Resident Evil 4 Remake.
Yet the evidence in my playthrough spoke for itself. I was landing substantially more shots with my pistol the second I could use the laser instead of an aiming reticule, and I loathed every time I had to put it away for other guns. It’s to the point I started investing more resources into my pistol than the rest of the game’s arsenal.
Precision shots are just as valuable as high damage, opening most enemies up for melee takedowns as well. With plentiful pistol ammo through crafting, this limited implementation of the laser sight fundamentally shifted how I prioritized weapons in the game. I’m still not sure how to feel about that, and I hope that in the future Capcom considers patching in a classic aiming mode for fans of the original. Some old ideas are worth revisiting, especially if they help you stay on target.
