Fine for mobile play - but not quite the triple-A experience.
As the year closed out, Capcom delivered RE4’s first mobile port.
So is the game hung up on performance and configuration issues likeResident Evil Village?
Or is RE4 a capable conversion of the console code?
The visuals were mostly preserved on Sony’s eighth-gen machines, but there were some notable cutbacks.
Most notably, texture resolution took a big hit, and texture streaming could be pretty slow.
Textures look pretty similar for the most part between the two versions.
These aren’t huge differences, but the world just looks a bit blurrier and less well-defined in general.
This is most noticeable on smaller incidental objects and there are also some very obvious reductions in foliage density.
Treelines look pretty similar, but patches of grass and bushes are less thick on the iPhone than PS4.
A lot of the lighting is pretty similar across the two games.
On the PS4 it looks acceptably fine-grained, but on iPhone it looks very coarse and unconvincing.
Post-processing also takes a hit.
Depth of field isn’t as obvious, and can exhibit some pretty nasty artifacts around character edges.
In terms of general visual configs, the iPhone code measures up just fine relative to PS4.
This is far better than what you’d expect from a Switch port of this game, for instance.
Image quality is probably the biggest sore spot though.
By last-gen standards, image quality is perfectly reasonable on that platform.
The iPhone just doesn’t hold up well by comparison.
The game tends to have a lot of ‘salt-and-pepper’ disocclusion artifacts all over the screen at times.
I think it’s all about the resolution.
Interior areas fare best, where minimal alpha effects result in fewer artefacts.
Upsampling solutions just don’t tend to work well when they have to work with so few pixels.
Firstly, frame-pacing is incorrect, similar to many 30fps iOS games.
It’s annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
Additionally, loading times are another win for Apple’s smartphone.
The controls are a bit of a mixed bag.
Rumble works fine and all the buttons function normally.
It’s not unplayable, but it never really feels responsive.
Simply overlaying a modern gamepad layout across the majority of the screen is not a particularly effective solution.
Summing up, there is progress here.
Resident Evil 4 on iPhone is definitely an improvement over Village.
It just lacks the performance and visual consistency that a lot of players expect.
