Resident Evil Village on iPad Is Surprisingly Decent

When Capcom announced that Resident Evil Village was on its way to not just Apple’s MacBooks, but also iPads and iPhones, I was shocked. I was more surprised when I saw that not only Village but also other AAA titles like Resident Evil 4, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Death Stranding were also being ported to the mobile platform. Is AAA gaming finally viable on these smaller devices? The first glimpse at an answer to the question can be found in how RE Villagelooks and runs on these devices. I played the game on an M1-equipped 11-inch iPad Pro with a PS5 DualSense controller, and while it’s nowhere close to the comfort and quality that console or PC gaming brings, I think I see the future that Apple is promising.

First, a quick refresher - Resident Evil Village takes place three years after the events of RE7, following Ethan Winters as he searches for his daughter across a haunting village in Romania. Comparisons to Resident Evil 4 aside, the game expands upon the first-person style established in RE7and offers a bigger world and scarier monsters to explore and fight.

Booting up the game, the first thing that surprised me was the expansive graphics menu. Village on the iPad is essentially a port of its PC version. It should be noted that Village was a cross-gen release and didn’t utilise the hardware in the new PS5/Xbox Series consoles to their fullest potential. What we got from its current-gen upgrade was an option to play it at 60fps with higher detail and a general increase in fidelity..

The cost of turning on the limited ray tracing options on the console was too high for me. On PC, Village offered more options such as AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution and CACAO for its ambient occlusion. These days, when a multi-platform AAA game releases on a console, we see a new, somewhat standard performance mode toggle. On the iPad, you get much more than that.

On the iPad, users can tweak the following settings:

Yep, full customisation options for resolution, frame rate targets, individual knobs for different visual features, and even an upscaling option. Apple has developed its image reconstruction feature to rival NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR, called MetalFX Upscaling. In principle, the tech works similarly to its competitors - it takes a lower-resolution image and uses specialised hardware on the SoC to upscale and reconstruct details. Given that I was playing the game on an 11-inch screen, it’s hard to see what areas MetalFX affects, with the obvious caveat being vegetation.

RE Village features plenty of trees, and for a pixel-peeper, they present the perfect opportunity to do some diagnostics. Turn on MetalFX upscaling at any target resolution, and you’ll immediately notice a loss of detail on the edges of sharp objects like tree branches and fences. Beyond this, the overall image inherits a particular softness that reminded me of DLSS’s early days.

Apple has touted the hardware-accelerated ray tracing capabilities of its devices when it announced the game’s arrival, but on the M1-equipped iPad, there are no options to enable it.

My iPad Pro has 8GB of unified memory, and the settings menu behaves exactly like my NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti-powered gaming PC. On the “recommended” preset, the game chugs 3.7 GB of VRAM with a resolution target of 1600x1118, a staggering 75% lower than the maximum of 2388x1668. So, does the difference in resolution result in increased performance?

Resident Evil Village iPad Pro Performance - Far From Pro

I wasn’t surprised when I saw how sub-par Village’s performance is on the iPad. It’s not bad for a mobile device, it’s just worse than the standard developers have set for gamers on consoles and PCs. The frame rate on the “recommended” preset, which uses a mix of high and medium settings, hovered around 30fps. You could potentially lock the target to 30fps from the menu but it won’t help with the constant dips below it. 30fps is a fine target as long as it’s stable, which isn’t on the iPad if you don’t want to compromise on the visuals. The drop is even more noticeable given that I’m launching the game from a silky smooth 120 Hz menu. Scalability options make sense for the Mac release, but Apple should have gone for bespoke tuning of features for the iPhone and iPad to offer a more console-like experience.

Of course, performance isn’t the be-all and end-all for gamers as we’ve seen with the resounding success of the Nintendo Switch. What matters more is the gameplay experience - a mixed bag on the iPad. Right from the get-go, I knew that this port wasn’t going to be a true mobile-focused experience thanks to the frankly ugly UI. Half of the screen is covered with button prompts emulating the layout of a standard game controller, and you can’t even navigate the menus directly using the touch controls and gestures. You’re locked into using the on-screen controls everywhere, and that’s the reason I connected my DualSense controller. Once connected, the experience was much smoother, though I had to work with Xbox icons on the screen - a minor inconvenience. I faced no connectivity issues, although the input lag could be better. The game allows players to customize the position and size of the on-screen touch controls, but with the limited display area, it’s not as helpful as it should be.

Besides, even if the performance was stable you wouldn’t be playing it for long, given how much of a battery hog the experience is. When I started the game the iPad’s battery was near 60% capacity, and by the time I was exploring the opening areas of the village it was down to the mid-30s. That’s nearly a 50% discharge over less than an hour of gameplay. The iPad also got abnormally hot during the experience, although having mounted it on a keyboard folio case may have helped with heat dissipation. That takes away the portability factor that this release promised, as I don’t see myself whipping out the iPad in a Starbucks to play AAA games on. I haven’t played the game on the iPhone 15 Pro, but early impressions from reviewers elsewhere suggest a similar situation. Suffice it to say, the iPhone is not going to be replacing mobile gaming platforms like the Nintendo Switch or the Steam Deck anytime soon.

Resident Evil Village uses Apple’s Game Centre to track the progress of its 56 achievements, but the lack of other social features, such as screenshot sharing on a community feed like Steam, is mildly disappointing.

Taking headshots was quite hard with the uneven frame pacing and I concluded that Apple should stick to games focused more on exploration than action. Fortunately, we’re getting just that with Death Stranding set to arrive on the platform later this year. But before that, we’ll once again be fighting crazy villagers in ResidentEvil 4 when that comes to the iPhone and iPad next month. I hope that performance in that game’s port improves over what I just played. Frame rate isn’t the only unstable aspect of the port, as immersion-breaking audio and subtitle-syncing issues also plague the release. If my complaints seem harsh, it helps to remember that Apple will soon charge a premium for these games on its platform, and for that price, I expect a better experience.

Of course, most of these issues are expected to be fixed with improved hardware in the years to come, and we already have more powerful devices sporting the M2 and M3 chips in the market. Still, I can only write about my experiences today, which start with the hardware most people are expected to already have access to.

I came away with a faint idea of what Apple’s vision for mobile gaming could be, and it doesn’t lie in the AAA space. While purely speculative on my part, I believe the existence of AAA games on Apple’s devices should inspire indie developers to port their games to the platform. If Resident Evil can run on an iPhone, what’s stopping games like Hades, Disco Elysium, Sea of Stars, or Dredge from doing the same? Given that massive open-world games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage are headed for the platform, could we see something huge like GTA V debut on the iPhone, if only to remain in the conversation before its sequel arrives?

Verdict

Resident Evil Village’s iPad port is more proof-of-concept than an actual port, but it plays much better than one would expect from a console game. It shows the potential that Apple devices have to be considered as a legitimate contender in the AAA gaming world.

Resident Evil Village can be bought for $39.99 USD, with a free trial on the iPhone and iPad. The Winters’ Expansion is available for $19.99, while the All Access Voucher can be bought for $4.99. Resident Evil Village is also available on PC, PS4, PS5, and the Xbox Series X/S consoles.

This review first appeared on Men’s Journal on June 6, 2024. and was produced in partnership with GLHF. The story has been republished on The Screen Zone to preserve it as the original website is no longer active.