The Bolt Thrower is a completely new weapon in the Resident Evil 4 (RE4) remake. It basically replaces the Mine Thrower from the original Resident Evil 4, and has some of the same functionality as the Mine Thrower. The Bolt Thrower is basically a cross between the Mine Thrower and a crossbow. The Merchant will offer the Bolt Thrower for sale at a pretty early stage in the game. You can buy it for 10,000 ptas from his shop at the Abandoned Factory grounds during Chapter 2. But the SR M1903 rifle is also newly available at that time, for a slightly steeper 12,000 ptas. At this point, it’s unlikely you can afford both, so you’ll be wondering whether the Bolt Thrower is worth it.
Is The Resident Evil 4 (RE4) Bolt Thrower Worth it?
The answer to this question will obviously depend on your play style and your own personal preferences. But if we’re being as objective as we possibly can, we would say that it is not worth buying the Bolt Thrower at the first available opportunity. The SR M1903 rifle is a better weapon for that particular stage of the game. In fact, we wouldn’t recommend buying the Bolt Thrower until Chapter 4 at the earliest, as this is when the Merchant starts selling the recipe for attachable mines. And attachable mines certainly improve the Bolt Thrower. But even then, it might not be worth it. The Bolt Thrower only has two strengths, and they’re both only useful under certain circumstances.
What is good about the Resident Evil (RE4) Bolt Thrower?
The Bolt Thrower has low power, terrible ammo capacity, slow reload speed and rate of fire, and poor range and precision. But its bolts are retrievable, both from fallen enemies and from the environment, as long as they land somewhere that you can reach. This isn’t such a great trade-off on Assisted or Standard difficulty, especially not early in the game. But later in the game, or if playing on Hardcore or Professional, it can be extremely useful to be able to retrieve your ammo. This is because on higher difficulty levels, and in later chapters, Resident Evil 4 remake gets less and less generous with ammo. And the Bolt Thrower kind of offers you infinite ammo.
The other strength of the Bolt Thrower is the fact that you can attach proximity mines to its bolts, although bear in mind that this destroys the bolt. The area-of-effect of these mines isn’t great, but if you get a lot of enemies bunched tightly together, attaching a mine to the face of the one in the middle can result in a devastating multi-kill. Again, there aren’t many opportunities for this earlier in the game, but later on it gets more and more useful.
So, while we don’t recommend getting the Bolt Thrower as soon as you can, it is worth keeping an eye on your ammo supply as you play through the game. Once ammo starts to get tight, then the Bolt Thrower is a very good solution to that problem.
