A range of technical issues take the shine off an otherwise excellent game.
It’s an excellent-looking game too with fine-grained indirect lighting and attractive artwork.
The RE Engine itself is powerful enough, but the deployment of its high-end features has raised some questions.
Across opaque surfaces, the game has a slightly smeary representation of fine detail across both visual modes.
I think something is amiss with the checkerboarding on PS5 that is creating issues here.
Any scene with foliage is a bit of a noisy mess and SSAO shimmers quite a bit as well.
The console expectedly is a bit soft but it otherwise looks fine considering the hardware.
Outside of image quality, there are a handful of odd differences that separate these modes.
Resident Evil 4 on current-gen consoles uses a mix of cubemaps and screen-space reflections to represent reflections by default.
The SSR is drawn all the way to the bottom of the screen - occlusion issues be damned!
- and there’s often a big difference in colour between the SSR and the underlying cubemap.
It’s a baffling issue.
Bodies of water usually look more realistic, though I did note some off-putting issues occasionally at a distance.
I couldn’t spot its use anywhere but on water.
Again, Resident Evil 4 is just chock-full of strange and undocumented visual issues.
However, that’s not to say that the default mode is perfect.
It’s mostly 60fps, but the drops are noticeable.
It’s a pretty unimpressive turnout, and there’s no frame-rate cap to engage to keep things consistent.
PS5 is much the same, but the overall frame-rate is higher than the Series X equivalent.
The village fight only suffers a few significant drops in the frame-rate mode for instance.
The resolution mode bottoms out in the high 40s and the all-dressed option hits the low 40s.
It’s not great, but it is a noticeably better performer.
Series S runs worse than either of the two premium machines.
The game just doesn’t have a very console-like configuration in its current state.
So can the base PS4 really deliver this level of visual complexity in a cross-gen game?
It’s a bit complicated.
On the one hand, the basic visual feature set seems fairly close.
Just running around the gameworld, everything looks about as it should.
However, on closer inspection, there are some inevitable cutbacks.
Firstly, texture resolution has been cut down across the board, with much lower-res artwork on PS4.
Most surfaces look quite a bit less detailed on the last-gen machine.
Texture streaming also suffers on PS4.
Lighting also gets an understandabledowngrade.
Indirectly lit scenes sometimes look very different with less detailed GI, which is especially noticeable outdoors.
There doesn’t seem to be any screen-space reflections on PS4 either and sub-surface scattering is absent as well.
The opening village fight is a good example, with a heavy use of half-rate animation.
This was a common concession in priorResident Evil gameson consoles, but it seems especially obvious here.
Image quality is surprisingly respectable as a result, with a reasonable resolve on fine details.
PS4 Pro is comparable to PS4 with similar visual cutbacks.
Resolution mode also gets somewhat denser foliage, though this is only really noticeable in side-by-sides.
PS4 has an unlocked frame-rate, just like the other console versions.
The general run of play operates between 35fps and 50fps, so it tends to feel unstable.
The Pro’s resolution mode is the worst performer yet.
That’s the bad news.
