Resident Evil 4 was one of the most accomplished remakes of 2023, a modernised, bold reinterpretation of Capcom’s 2005 action-horror classic. It looked great too across current-gen platforms as well as PS4, with great lighting detail and excellent art design. As the year closed out, Capcom delivered RE4’s first mobile port. As a part of Apple’s recent triple-A gaming push, Resident Evil 4 is now available on iPhone 15 Pro and M1 and M2 based iPads, representing the fastest of Apple’s mobile hardware. So is the game hung up on performance and configuration issues like Resident Evil Village? Or is RE4 a capable conversion of the console code?
Resident Evil 4 was for the most part a current-gen console and PC experience, but Capcom also shipped the game on PS4 console systems. 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. There were a range of lighting cutbacks as well, including a reduction in the number of shadow-casting light sources, and absent screen-space reflections.
Those cutbacks need to be kept in mind, because the PS4 code proves the closest match of all the console versions for the results seen on iPhone. Unlike Resident Evil Village, RE4 doesn’t have a PC-style settings menu, so we’re effectively getting one basic visual experience on the platform, with some options to adjust lens distortion, depth of field and motion blur, like we saw on all console versions of the game.
The first thing that should stand out here is that the iPhone version has a very obvious blue tint for some reason. It’s also much darker than the PS4 version with the default brightness and I’d recommend anyone else playing the game in SDR do the same. Textures look pretty similar for the most part between the two versions. If you look closely though, the iPhone code does feature some noticeably lower-res texture art through a lot of the game’s environments. These aren’t huge differences, but the world just looks a bit blurrier and less well-defined in general. Curiously, a lot of the same issues with texture loading were seen on PS4, despite the iPhone’s much faster storage.