Apple announced in mid-September this year that popular Resident Evil titles; Resident Evil 4 remake and Resident Evil Village will be playable natively on its latest iPhone 15 Pro model when it revealed the series during the product showcase. The tech giant promised users that its new devices will let players enjoy console and PC games anywhere with no compromise. However, those promises turned out to be hollow, as early impressions of Resident Evil 4 on iPhone are not even remotely good.
Resident Evil 4 Fails To Impress on iPhone 15 Pro
Apple pushed to boost its sales with the announcement of bringing console quality to the palm of players’ hands. It stated that its iPhone15 Pro model smartphones have some of the best hardware and support ray-tracing with its powerful A17 Pro chip. The game was released on December 20 for the iPhone 15 Pro for $59.99.
However, it seems that Apple needs more than just ray tracing and upscaling tech to impress gamers with AAA games on its smartphones. Although it is impressive that Apple has managed to play the game on the iPhone, there is still a lot that it needs to do to call the smartphone “the best gaming console.” While the game starts fine, it slowly begins to derail from what could be called a good gaming experience.
As per IGN‘s Jacqueline Thomas, the game sees constant frame drops even on the lowest of settings when playing on 15 Pro and it’s so bad that the game struggles to run on 30 frames per second. Now that’s not powerful tech as far as I know and surely not a great way to start if you want to bring AAA games on your smartphones. Thomas further said:
Now that pretty much everyone who wants to play a game like Resident Evil 4 has a way to play that kind of game on the go – whether through the Nintendo Switch or one of the best handheld gaming PCs – paying full price for a version that doesn’t run as well on your phone is a bit harder to swallow.
The frame drops are even worse aiming the weapons or loading into any area. While such heavy games are bound to have performance issues and be slow on mobile devices, the game comes to a stop during intense moments. Another major issue with the game is that you need a physical controller or controller adapter to play. Now that’s just sad as you can’t play the game using the touch screen and need to get a controller on top of paying for it.
The game sometimes even crashes while playing and the graphics are good but it makes the iPhone too hot. The graphics also get worse after a while if the phone is hot and gets pixelated. It is still commendable that the game runs on a mobile device, there is a lot for Apple to do as the game feels like an Android emulation app. The game needs to have native touchscreen controls and needs to be more polished so it doesn’t feel rushed.
These same issues were also seen on iPhone 15 Pro with the recently released RE Village as the game’s performance starts going down after a while and no matter how much you change the visual settings, you’re still treated with the same garbage of a game. A physical controller is required for this title as well which is just the opposite of what you’d expect for a game ported for mobile devices.
The phone’s battery holds up for a while but that’s not a good excuse to let off the hook if you can’t play the game properly. That said, Apple needs to work a bit more on its devices to properly support the game and then maybe we could get something better with the A17 Pro chip.
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