First Impressions of Resident Evil 4 on iOS
Resident Evil 4 comes to iOS today, and we've taken video of the entire free portion that is available to let you see it in action and get a sense of how this new version fares. The short version is, this game feels an awful lot like the port job of Resident Evil Village, albeit with a modern classic, as opposed to a game that feels like a dated also-ran.
Read on below if you want more detailed perspective on Resident Evil 4 on iOS. Otherwise, you can look through the video to see it in action along with some light captions reflecting on the play session.
Before I go any further, let me get something straight. This game, despite just being called Resident Evil 4 is not just a port job of the original 2005 release. This is a remade game that not only has updated visuals but also "enhanced" gameplay features, most notably being able to move and shoot at the same time. I won't get into all of the specifics that differentiate these two titles right now, but likely will come review time so stay tuned for that.
In between the release of Village and Resident Evil 4, it seems Capcom has done nothing to make either game feel more mobile ready. The touch controls are still just a virtual mapping of controller buttons with no meaningful accommodations to make playing via touch easier. If you want to see that in action, check out our impressions of Village. As soon as I saw the same virtual control layout, I wasted no time hooking up a controller to play, and I'm glad I did.
Not only is controller support also fully functional in Resident Evil 4, it also feels more necessary in general. Whether it's my memory playing tricks on me or Village just having a smoother combat model (maybe both?), I find the aiming and shooting in Resident Evil 4 to feel oddly clunky. Your reticle sort of jerks around without much smooth analog motion, which made the opening setpiece where you fight off a zombie horde feel a bit tougher than I found it in the original. As I play through, I'll experiment and see if there are settings that can fix this, but as of right now I think I've died just about as many times in Resident Evil 4 as I did in my entire playthrough of Village, and most of those times it felt like a lot of it had to do with feeling pretty hindered in my ability to control the game proficiently.
Outside the controls, Resident Evil 4 looks and plays just about how you'd expect. It feels a bit more stable than Village was on release, as I've had no technical issues and if there are frame rate dips I'm not noticing them all that much. It still makes my iPad Pro (3rd Gen) quite warm, but that is to be expected.
As for the free-to-start model for Resident Evil 4, it feels a little less generous than Village. The game thanks you for playing and asks you to buy in just after the first setpiece fight in the village, whereas the previous game had you play through several story beats ahead of the cutoff. This starter portion will ask you to download 13.41 GB of data, and even more if you buy into the full game for $29.99 (31.49 GB, to be precise). Also, just like Village, this downloading process once you've bought into the game is very hinky and takes a long time. I even had to reboot my device a couple of times to get the game to boot and resume downloading properly.
Other than that, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to say. It's a new version of Resident Evil 4, which by many accounts is a pretty great video game. I'll reserve more judgement until I'm able to do a full playthrough, but as of right now it feels about on par with my experience with Village, though the sore spots here are more around controls rather than bugs.