Leon has a number of tools at his disposal to take on Los Illuminados in Resident Evil 4, including guns, knives, and special herbs, but there's one thing he can't do: dodge. At least, not until this mod courtesy of alphaZomega.
The "Dodge Roll and Sprint" mod lets Leon dive out of the way of attacks for zero damage, provided you time the dodge right. "The move can be triggered in any direction at any time that the player is walking, jogging or idling," wrote alphaZomega in the mod description. "Currently the roll has a default 30 iframes (at 60fps) at the start, and for the remainder of the animation you are vulnerable."
Clearly inspired by FromSoft's action RPGs, dodge rolling in the mod works mostly the same as Dark Souls or Elden Ring, but with a few key differences. First, there's a "perfect dodge" mechanic that will provide you with a free counterattack and/or activate bullet time. And second, you have the option to tune your dodge roll to be exactly how you'd like.
If you don't like the added bonus of slow motion or a melee counter after performing a perfect dodge, you can turn that off in the mod settings. You can also tune the number of "invincibility frames" to be easy (30 frames), hard (23 frames), or off (zero frames), which would just give Leon a neat animation without any of the Dark Souls-inspired benefits.
There's also custom mapping for the button to activate dodge rolls, input types, and tuning for the double tap (crouch by default) that gets you to dodge. There are also some options to tune the animation itself, such as how far the camera zooms out when activating a dodge.
As it says in the name, there's also a sprint option that gets Leon to kick it into high gear when he needs to. Just hold down the run button to begin sprinting. Both sprinting and dodging are supported for Leon, Luis, Krauser, and Hunk for Mercenaries mode, and Ashley for the main story campaign.
There are two options for installation, although both require you to download the REFramework mod and put the "dinput8.dll" file into your game folder. After that, you can either extract the mod file into its "reframework" folder and then place the folder into your game directory, or you can download the Fluffy Mod Manager and unpack the mod files into Fluffy Mod Manager's "Mods\RE4R\" folder. Then it's just a matter of activating the mod from Fluffy before starting your game.
Mods aren't just great for adding features to Resident Evil 4--they can also unlock hidden content! This one mod that added an outfit change option to RE4 also allowed Leon and Ashley to comment on their new duds.