Resident Evil 4 VR review: a good VR porting of a classic

Some days ago, I have finally finished playing Resident Evil 4 VR on my Oculus Quest 2, and I thought you may be interested in a review of mine. I know, the game is two months old now, but when it came out I was swamped with work to do, so I kept it as my Christmas gift, and I played it during the winter holidays. So I will write the review just now that you have already probably read the other ones, or maybe you have already played the game, but hey, it’s always cool reading an article about Resident Evil, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it anyway.

Just a caveat before you start: this post will contain mild spoilers on the gameplay… not on the story, but on some things that may happen during the game (e.g. weapons that you may find, bosses, etc…). You have been warned.

Resident Evil 4 VR

Resident Evil 4 VR is the porting to Quest of the famous Resident Evil 4 game from Capcom. The porting has been performed by Armature in cooperation with Oculus Studios and it is an exclusive Oculus Quest 2 title.

I’m a huge fan of the Resident Evil saga, and I’ve played some of its titles. I even remember when, in the period I was a university student, I decided I wanted to play Resident Evil 1, which was very old at that time, and I had to download a downgrader for my CPU to make it run at the correct speed on my modern PC… but then I discovered that the best way to make it run was actually opening in background Firefox with Gmail, because that made the game go at a perfect speed… and after so many years, I still wonder why. By the way, I love Resident Evil, I loved the survival horror game genre, and I loved playing it at home with the lights turned off, having a heart attack every time there was a jumpscare with some zombies.

Actually, Resident Evil 4 is one of those titles I had not played on PC, so in this review, I’m not able to make a comparison between the flatscreen and the VR version. That is not a good thing for you but was actually a good thing for me, because so I have been able to enjoy the story of the game without knowing it beforehand. I know anyway that Resident Evil 4 is the first title that made RE go outside the survival horror genre because for the first time there were no zombies, but angry dwellers. It is so a bit less scary than the others, and that’s why it was probably the best RE candidate for a VR game that could be good for a mainstream audience. And it has been a winning choice: Meta has revealed that it has been the fast-selling title ever for Quest.

Story

You impersonate Leon Scott Kennedy, a previous policeman that you may remember from Resident Evil 2. Given your talent, you have been asked to perform the delicate task of rescuing Ashley, the daughter of the president of the United States, who has been kidnapped in a village in Spain. You arrive there and suddenly the situation reveals to be a bit more complicated than it was expected…

Gameplay

Resident Evil is a saga of action games, and this episode makes no exception: the game is about exploring environments, shooting the bad guys that you find there, going to the next place, rinse and repeat. While you kill people and monsters, the story unfolds, either by objects that you find in-game (e.g. written letters you find around) or by cutscenes where some events happen (e.g. you meet and speak with people, someone gets killed, etc…), or by radio communications.

The game also offers some little variations on the theme:

• Some parts of the environment can be analyzed. You go in front of them, press the A button on your controller, and you read Leon’s thoughts about it. For instance, if you are in front of a wall with stains of blood, he may say something like “There is a lot of blood. What’s happened to people here?”. These little sentences help in giving you the lore of the game, even if rarely they provide you useful info;
• There are some little enigmas here and there. They are needed usually to unlock a door or some other mechanism, and are never very difficult. Usually in a few minutes you solve them. A variation on the theme is when you have to look around in the environment trying to understand what to do, because you feel stuck, usually in search of a mechanism, or an interaction that is a bit hidden. It happened to me two times to feel stuck for like 10 minutes, until I understood that I could move something or activate something to trigger the action to make the game go on;
• There are boss fights. Quite a few times in the game, you have to fight a boss, and he of course take more time and more powerful weapons to take down;
• There are some vehicles to drive, especially boats;
• You have to care about Ashley (spoiler!). During your rescue mission, you have to find Ashley, and she will be together with you in some parts of the game. You have to protect her at any cost, and also be sure not to kill her with friendly fire. This creates some interesting challenges in the game, and there have been two times were caring about her has been very difficult and stressful… but challenges are what a game fun, isn’t it? There is also a moment in the game where you control directly her, and this is very anxiety inducing… I won’t spoil you the details, but let me just say that she of course isn’t as powerful as Leon, so most of the time you will be running away from enemies and screaming while they chase you. Being Ashley in VR, so really impersonating her from the inside, is a scaring experience!

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Resident Evil 4 of course, like all the other action games, has also health and weapons management. If you have played other Resident Evil titles, it may be familiar to you. You have an inventory, where you can put weapons, ammo, and health-restoring elements (herbs, and first-aid sprays). The inventory is limited, so you must be careful about how to handle it. While you play the game, you find ammo and health supplies scattered around, sometimes in a visible way, other times hidden inside barrels, boxes, or other things you have to break. Exploration is needed if you want to never find yourself out of ammo. As for the weapons, you never find them in the game, but you have to buy new ones at the Merchant (more on this in a while). In the various environments of the game, you can also find gold, jewels, or treasures, that you accumulate as money (Spanish Pesetas, the currency that was in Spain before the Euro) so that you can then buy things at the Merchant. All these goodies (gold, herbs, ammo) may also be spawned by the enemies you kill.

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Every once in a while in the game, you find the Merchant, who is a weird guy that is able to buy and sell things to you:

• He can buy your weapons, and all the objects you have in your inventory, and give you money. If you sell to him the jewels, you can have good money. Some of the jewels can be combined so that to have even a greater value;
• He can sell to you new weapons, or other useful items (e.g. a detailed map of the level, or a bigger suitcase so you have a bigger inventory). In exchange for all of these things you have to pay him money;
• He can sell to you upgrades for your current weapons (e.g. more firepower and shorter reload times) in exchange of money.

The merchant is very useful to get new weapons without which winning the game would be impossible unless you are one of those pros that can play such a game using only the knife. In some selected locations, he is also able to make you play a minigame in a shooting range where you win some little collectibles. They are totally useless, but it’s cool to have them in your inventory!

You can constantly check out your health state and the ammo by looking at your left wrist, where there is a watch telling you the most relevant info. It’s good because it is a natural interface that is also efficient.

At every time during the game, you can press the Menu button on your left controller to open your inventory and choose which is your main pistol, rifle, grenade, and health element from the ones in your inventory. These are the only ones that can be used during the action, all the others stay in the inventory. When you open this inventory menu, the game is paused, and you are teleported into a black room where you can handle it. In this Menu environment, you can also consult the map of the game, check the written files you have found, and do other management things.

You can’t save here, and you can’t even save whenever you want, though, because saving is demanded to the typewriters that you find scattered throughout the game. When you find a typewriter, it means that you can save your game: you press the A button, and then you can literally type the name of the save file on it using your fingers in a natural way. I love the idea of typing the name on the typewriter, it is so immersive and cool. Typewriters are a good mechanism from Capcom to raise the tension of the game: since you can’t save whenever you want, it means that if you die, you have to re-do a good part of the game, so you want to avoid that at all costs. The difference with the first 3 chapters of Resident Evil here is that there are no ribbons, so you can save infinite times. The game also introduces checkpoints: if you die, you recover from the last checkpoint (e.g. the last cutscene), and not necessarily from the previous time you saved.

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Enemies are quite variated: at the beginning of the game, they are always the same, but the more you go on, the more you find new ones. There are some special ones that appear only in specific parts of the game. They will try to kill you in every possible way, either shooting you or trying to maul you. If an enemy catches you or is about to catch you, you may have to perform a fast action with your controllers. The system shows you that you have either to shake the two controllers very fast or to move them in a clear direction shown on screen: if you do it correctly, you save yourself from the enemy’s attack, if you do it badly, either you die, or you are injured pretty badly. This is also good to create tension because you know you have to react very fast as soon as you see this kind of indicator.

The last mention goes to what is actually the first thing you do in the game, which is onboarding. As soon as you launch the game, an in-game tutorial teaches you how to grab your weapons and how to shoot. The same happens as soon as you find something you never used before: this is great to teach the user how to play the game without making him/her play a separate long and boring tutorial. In the menu section, it is also possible to read the documentation about the game, where pictures and sentences tell you everything you need to know about the gameplay.

The game is pretty long: it is composed of 25 total chapters, and I needed 25 hours 2 minutes, and 22 seconds to finish it. It’s pretty a long time for a VR game!

Difficulty

In the beginning, the game is in general a bit monotonous, and also quite easy: you have to shoot at villagers with the same weapons, and you kill them by having lots of ammo that you find everywhere. I have honestly found the first part a bit boring: as soon as I found a method to kill the enemies, I was able to do that easily. I was also not that much scared. After my first 3-4 hours into the game, I was slightly disappointed: I kept playing because it was anyway fun, and I wanted to finish it, but I didn’t feel challenged at all. One of the things I loved the most about the survival horror saga was that even in normal mode, I had to be very careful with ammo, because it was always very scarce. This created an added sense of panic, because when you have just a few bullets in the inventory and you see some zombies around you, you are afraid you don’t manage to kill them. I remember clearly that in Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3, I left some enemies hanging around in the environments to not waste the bullets to kill them. In this 4th episode, in the beginning, I had so much ammo that I could sell it (and I actually sold lots of it to the Merchant), and I found the game to be a bit “too easy”.

Luckily, the more you play this game, the more it becomes difficult. There have even been some moments in the game where I had a hard time defeating all the enemies in the room. And also at a certain point, I had to start managing my ammo more carefully. But the game never became difficult or very challenging: the proof of that is that I won against the final boss on the first try. I never died. Versus the final and biggest boss. This is very weird. In 25 hours of the game, I’ve died only 30 times.

I guess the “normal” difficulty has been tuned for the VR newbie, for the kid that received the Quest for Christmas and plays Resident Evil as one of his first games (just to have a trauma). If you are an action games veteran, I guess you will find it quite easy too.

Graphics

Apart from the easiness of the game, I was also a bit disappointed by the graphics of the game. I mean, it’s a game from 2005 and it must run on Quest, I know. And I think that Armature has done an AMAZING job in the porting procedure. As I will tell you in a while, it doesn’t feel at all a porting, it feels like a native VR game. They ported the graphical elements of the game in a good way, so you can feel inside this creepy Spanish village. And you feel there, and thanks to the beautiful design of the environments, you constantly find what is around you unsettling, creepy, and not comfortable. But it’s not enough.

The graphical elements look decent and the game runs at 72fps smoothly. But the 3D models have not a high poly count, and some of their textures look quite blurred to me. It’s weird to look in the eyes of the enemy in front of you and see a face a bit blurred as a result. You feel like playing a game from ten years ago, even if you are in 2022. It’s better than what was available in 2005, but still pretty dated. This part of the porting has been quite a failure to me.

This is even more noticeable in the cutscenes, which I guess are still the original ones, and that makes you scream

Audio

Audio never ages, and I’ve found it to be superb. The music always keeps you in tension, it’s immersive, but also informative, because for instance when you clear one environment from the enemies, the tense music ends, so you know that you can relax and collect all the goodies that are in the room. I really loved the sound design, I think that it is what saves the immersivity of the game even if the visuals are not perfect. The audio was truly able to foster anxiety in me, I loved it.

Input & Comfort

You control most of the game using a few actions:

• You grab items with your grip button of the controllers, as usual
• You operate an object in your hands with your index trigger button of the controller, as usual. For instance, you grab a gun with the grip, and then shoot with the trigger
• You press the A button of the right Touch controller to perform an action on external elements (e.g. letter, machineries, doors, etc…). Sometimes you can also activate phsyical buttons by just extending your index finger and touching them
• You press the Menu button or the X button of the Left touch to enter the Menu

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Regarding the weapons, you can choose if operating them in “immersive mode” or not. The immersive mode is having all the weapons attached to your body and grabbing them with your hands. For instance, the gun is close to your right hip, and the shotgun is behind your back. Otherwise, with the other mode, you can just choose to have the weapons always in your hand, and use the thumbstick to cycle through available weapons (gun, pistol, grenade, etc…). I picked the first mode because it was more immersive and I found it pretty cool. Also reloading of the weapons has been made so that to be a right compromise between realism and simplicity: you drop the old mag with a button on the main hand (e.g. the right hand), take the new one from your hips with the other hand, put it in place, and then start shooting again. There are some weapons, like the shotgun, that require a put-bullet-in-the-barrel action for each time you shoot, and this is pretty annoying to do, especially if you are in the middle of the action, with people that want to kill you.

As for locomotion, you can choose between teleportation and smooth locomotion. I chose smooth locomotion and I was fine with it, also thanks to the vignetting system that reduces FOV while you move. I only felt a bit of sickness in some scenes where Leon is on a moving platform.

In the beginning, Resident Evil 4 VR asks you to set a lot of preferences after it has explained to you all the differences between them (e.g. between smooth locomotion and teleport): there are many different comfort settings, so every one is able to configure the game according to his/her wish, and this is awesome on Armature’s side. But it’s also true, as Upload underlines, that playing such a game with smooth locomotion and teleportation is not the same at all, because with teleportation you can move very fast and escape easily when you have been surrounded. This makes the game a bit unfair.

All in all, I have to make compliments to Armature because on the interactions’ side, the game more or less feels like a VR game, and not just a porting.

Immersion and presence

As I’ve already told you before, the game has wonderful audio and wonderful design of the environments that are carefully studied to give you unsettling sensations. This is something that Capcom has always done in an awesome way in all its Resident Evil titles, and Resident Evil 4 is no exception. And being able to be INSIDE those environments, thanks to VR, is simply amazing. Also being surrounded by the enemies is scarier than just seeing them on a PC screen. The game keeps you in constant tension, and even if there are only a few true jumpscares, you are actually always scared of what could happen next. For this reason, I can say that the sense of presence is very high. I also suggest you not to play Resident Evil 4 VR during the evening: I did it many times, and the result has been nightmares, bad sleep quality, difficulty in falling asleep. The mind should relax before sleeping, and this game has the exact opposite effect. I also noticed that even during the day, I was far more reactive to whatever noise happened around me, because I was always in constant tension like during the game.

But I can’t say that the immersion this title offers is at the same level of its presence: graphics really feel outdated, and seeing blurry details in the enemies and the environment is not what makes you feel inside another place. I understand all the technical limitations that lead to this, since I’m a developer, and I don’t blame Armature for this… but in any case, my brain couldn’t feel inside another place if that place was clearly fake. I didn’t feel immersed in the village in Spain, but I did feel immersed in an old video game about a village in Spain. Resident Evil 4 VR made me feel like playing an old PC game from the INSIDE, like if I were teleported into the display of the PC, and this is surely cool, but not so cool as feeling like in another place as if it were reality. This is not Half-Life: Alyx, that is so wonderful that you feel like being in another dimension, not at all.

This shortcoming has also an advantage, though: since the game feels “fake”, it is also less scary: you clearly see that you are playing and those monsters aren’t real, so the game is also less traumatic to play, the horror effect is lighter.

The cutscenes of the game are shown in 2D on a big screen in front of you inside a black room, something like a cinema screen. I have to say that this idea doesn’t disturb me much: I know it’s not immersive, but it’s ok to follow the story, and it comes in a moment that is totally separated from the gameplay. So it’s like if I play the game, then I sit down in a cinema and relax, then I play again. What totally disturbs me is instead that there are some action sequences that are in-game and that are in 2D as well. Let’s suppose for instance that an enemy catches you by your neck. Immediately starts an animation where you see yourself on a 2D screen with the enemy catching you and you have to perform a fast action with your controllers to free yourself from its lock. If you do it correctly, you return inside VR and can keep fighting, otherwise, you die. This is totally disorientating… your brain must adapt fast at first to the fact that from 3D VR you go to the 2D scene and then, even worse, that from 2D you return back to VR. When this happens, you need a bit of time to orient yourself again… so to remember what was at your right, your left, where were the enemies, etc… This is an immersion-breaking terrible design. I understand that re-making all cutscenes would have been expensive and I’m ok they are in 2D, but these action sequences should have been in 3D VR.

Misc considerations

The game is set in Spain, and if you know a bit of Spanish, as I do, it’s interesting that you understand what the villagers are saying.

Resident Evil 4 VR has been slightly readapted so that to be a bit more female-friendly: a few lines of the dialogues of the original game have been removed because they were deemed too sexist, and the game also prevents you from touching Ashley in her sensitive parts by hiding your hands when you are close to her body. This is a smart decision because it prevents you from doing something inappropriate, but in a subtle way, without blaming you.

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Anyway, Meta and Armature have also made some errors in this sense: for instance, the on-body inventory in its first version was not suitable for women with big breasts. Then, when I’ve finished the game, I’ve been rewarded with “new clothes for Leon and Ashley”: he was dressed as a police officer and she as a slut. An interesting reward, for sure.

Price and availability

Resident Evil 4 VR is available on the Oculus Store (at this link) for €40. It is an exclusive title for Quest 2. I bought it during one of the various 30% discounts that Meta offers in its store.

Final impressions

In the end, I loved playing Resident Evil 4 VR for the same reason I loved all the other episodes of the Resident Evil saga: the story is interesting, the gameplay is fun, and the game is very good in keeping you always in a state of tension: it’s a good horror game, even if it never becomes too scary. It is also quite long to play to be a VR game, and it took me more than 10 days to finish it considering I couldn’t have too long playing sessions. It is also good for VR newbies because it has an incremental difficulty level.

It’s not perfect as a VR game, though, and has a few things, like the mediocre graphics and the in-game action sequences in 2D, that truly break the immersion. It’s also a bit too easy if you are a VR veteran. But it’s fun, and even if it doesn’t teleport you really into those cursed words, it at least gives you the impression of being inside an old Resident Evil game, and this is cool anyway.

I don’t regret having paid around 30€ for it, and I think the price was worth the fun I had playing it. I absolutely recommend you to play it if you haven’t done it already.

(Header image by Meta and Armature)