Resident Evil 4's awesome reloads: 16 GIFs from RE4 HD

Leon S. Kennedy doesn't just blow the heads off of zombies and Ganados like a boss. He reloads his guns like a boss, too—and he was doing it before flashy reloads were cool. Shooters released since Resident Evil 4 have added progressively more detailed animations to their gun reloads, but Capcom set a high bar for reloads in 2005. There's something incredibly tactile about the way Leon slams a new round into the bolt-action rifle. And when he whip-cracks open the Broken Butterfly, violently jams new rounds into it, and slams it shut...well, at that point he's just showing off.

After playing through the new HD port of Resident Evil 4 , I decided to capture Leon's dramatic reload animations in high quality GIF form. Almost every gun in the game is represented below, and the animations are embedded in bandwidth-efficient HTML5 form. Give one a click if you want to share a link or download the original GIF version.

Note: We believe a recent Chrome update is sometimes causing crashes when loading our HTML5 embeds. These pages work fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but your tab may crash and need to be refreshed if you're using Chrome. To keep the page from crashing, tell it to stop loading after a few seconds. All of the embeds should still load in and play just fine.

Pistols

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).