All the while you must preserve enough ammunition to cut a path through to the tenuous safety of Ramon Salazar's looming castle. You must fire carefully placed shots to herd the Ganados and avoid being flanked. Kennedy must draw on his police officer training, not by way of a rapid response to cheap shot scares, but through crowd control. The Ganados are defined by unpredictable, sporadic bursts of speed and lunging sidestep dodges. Where the previous games in the series had carefully placed monsters (whose shattering entrance through a pane of glass or the rear of a one-way mirror were lifted straight from low-rate horror cinema), Resident Evil 4 induces panic through a mob. The over-the-shoulder viewpoint was adopted by games as diverse as Gears of War and Batman: Arkham Asylum, while its precision aim system that snaps the camera inwards to focus on targets is now an industry standard. Indeed, Resident Evil 4 was, in its entirety, a new kind of Evil, a game designed from the peat up with such wisdom and creative insight that its example went on to define the subsequent decade of third person action video games. Players had grown weary with a series whose exquisitely pre-rendered backdrops now seemed antiquated, and whose fussy controls schemes seemed increasingly cheap. Kennedy's surprise at this new kind of evil was, at the time of the game's release in 2005, mirrored in us. Once you rescue the President's daughter Ashley you must protect her from the Ganados, using her as bait to draw the foes, while picking them off to keep her safe. These are not zombies they're something far worse. They are a recognisable yet unfamiliar people, furious with intruders (they pin the police driver who escorts Kennedy to a post in the town square in the game's opening moments, where he hangs idly, burning) and calmed only by the rounded toll of a church bell. They're soiled with mud and the unmistakeable blemishes of land toil even their chickens are grubby and irritable. Los Ganados are, as the game's marketing slogan put it, a 'new kind of evil', peasant folk dressed in sackcloth and armed with rakes, hoes and sticks of dynamite. They speak in a quick European tongue rather than slurred moans and they maintain their humble houses rather than allowing them to fall to post-apocalyptic ruin.
They have bright, alert eyes instead of hollowed pupils, and in some cases wield chainsaws, not mere incisors. Indeed, Resident Evil 4's Los Ganados walk tall and never shuffle. Kennedy is as surprised as anyone: after cleaning up the zombie infested Racoon City in the second game in Capcom's survival horror series, any encounter with a person whose rotten flesh isn't slurping from the bones must be something of a novelty. Kennedy as he stands over the twitching corpse of the man he's knifed to death in a forest shack during Resident Evil 4's opening scene.
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