While it’s often looked down upon, especially by PC stalwarts, gaming has always been part of the Apple ecosystem. Without an Apple II, you don’t get Wolfenstein, and without a Mac, you don’t get to Halo or Destiny.
Still, it’s not hard to see why the Mac is often the butt of so many gaming jokes. For so long, gaming has been something of an afterthought in the Apple world, especially on Macs. It’s only recently that Apple has gotten around gaming on its mobile platform through initiatives like Apple Arcade, not to mention the money it makes via App purchases, a practice it defends with sheer brutality… ask Epic Games.
Not that Apple isn’t trying to find space for games, spending up big to get some specific AAA titles shifted over to the Mac as native code. We’ve already seen titles like Resident Evil Village head to iOS and Mac, and now it’s Resident Evil 4 remake, one of the best games ever.
I won’t waste your time telling you that the remake is worth playing, because you probably already know that – and if not, here’s Kotaku US’s review to remind you. Quick spoiler here for my own review: Resident Evil 4 on the Mac or iPhone is the same Resident Evil 4 remake it was nine months ago, and it’s still an excellent game. If that’s all you need to know, your reading work here is done. But of course, there’s more to say than that, so please do stick around.
I was intrigued when Apple and Capcom offered me early access to Resident Evil 4 remake on iOS and macOS.
Honestly, part of that was because the remake was sitting on my “I know the original is excellent, must get around to playing it” pile, so I was going to be coming to it fresh. However, I was also intrigued to see how well Apple’s Metal platform could handle AAA titles because Apple’s claim around it has long been that the current generation of Macs should be able to “run the most demanding games with ease”, while it’s equally been touting the gaming prowess of the processors lying in its pricey iPhone 15 line.
I’m going to split my observations here between the Mac and iOS versions because they do present slightly different challenges to how Resident Evil 4 runs – and, as a result, how much you’re likely to enjoy it.
Resident Evil 4 for macOS: A Tale of Hardware
Tested on: MacBook Air M2 16GB RAM
Being an AAA game, I couldn’t get started with Resident Evil 4 immediately because the download isn’t a small one. Right now, the Testflight build on my MacBook Air tells me it’s taking up 66GB of space, and that does take some time to come down the pipeline, though it’s feasible once it’s in general release that Apple might mirror it a little more closely around the world to speed up download times. I accidentally discovered I could speed up the download rate markedly by using a VPN to be in the US rather than Australia, but that could be a quirk of the test flight process for providing early code to Mac apps.
Then, it’s a question of the precise Mac that you’re running it on. I’ve not played the similarly-hyped Resident Evil Village Mac port that came out last year, but I note that pretty much every reviewer there was using a MacBook Pro, typically with one of the higher-end M2 chips packed under the hood. That’s a classic play for any hardware review to go slightly off track because if you give the reviewers the shiniest toys, they get the biggest smiles on their faces, even if that’s not what everyone buys.
In my case, I was running on a nearly-baseline MacBook Air, specifically the M2 model. Not to worry, because from a specs level, Resident Evil 4 should run on any Apple Silicon Mac. If you’re still rocking an Intel Mac, sorry, it’s not for you, and if you’ve still got a G4 Cube under your desk, I applaud your frugality in making it last this long, but… no.
In my case, though, I’m not using the top-end M3 MacBook Pro at all, so I did have to dial back my expectations for how well Resident Evil 4 might run. The recommended settings for my configuration sat at 1920×1080, 30fps with MetalFX Upscaling set to the “quality” (rather than “performance”, which you’d need for an M1 Mac).
I probably don’t need to tell you that this isn’t a recipe for high-end gaming in late 2023, even if it is decent to see that kind of thing run well on what is still an integrated GPU. Apple’s competition here is more in the integrated Intel GPU lines than anything shiny from the likes of AMD or NVIDIA, basically.
Resident Evil 4 worked acceptably well at those settings – it’s certainly playable as long as you’ve paired a compatible Bluetooth controller – but with some obvious graphical limitations at play, especially when the game moved from cutscenes to in-game action. Frame rates remained steady at 30fps (or below) if constrained this way. If I hadn’t sat through the installation process, I probably would have thought this was a virtual Xbox Game Pass copy that sometimes used the Mac screen as an intermediary.
At first, I thought that the game was running in an appalling fashion, but that was 100% down to me running it after a hefty day of writing articles over at Gizmodo AU, forgetting I still had a bunch of browser windows, Photoshop and more in the background. Like any other game, if you don’t give Resident Evil 4 the resources it needs, it… won’t play well. Be kind, reboot your Mac before playing Resident Evil 4 if it’s a slower, smaller beast like mine.
Me being me, I couldn’t just leave it there, so I dialled up the quality as far as the MacBook Air M2’s screen could go – no fancy 120Hz “ProMotion” for me, sadly – into the kinds of settings best used for an M3 MacBook Pro… with predictable results. I didn’t even need the Metal HUD to tell me that the frame rate was dropping below 20 on higher-quality graphics settings because it was blindingly obvious it was so.
The kicker, I think, for the Mac is going to be the price. From the early test build I’ve seen, it would appear that pricing sits at $85.90, which is a high console game price, especially for a title that isn’t brand new. Yes, that’s roughly what you’d pay right now for a PS5 copy, but the comparable PC platform here is Steam, where (at the time of writing), I could grab Resident Evil 4 for PC at $42.74. Yes, it will be more expensive when it goes off sale, but you and I both know that there’s nearly always a Steam sale around the corner, while Mac gaming sales are considerably less common. Paying twice as much, even for a truly great game like Resident Evil 4 can’t help but sting.
Resident Evil 4 for iOS: Great… but small
Tested on: iPhone 15 Pro
The iOS version of Resident Evil 4 is a slightly different kind of prospect. For a long while now, I’ve railed in premium phone reviews that it’s all well and good, delivering more capable CPU and GPU performance year after year, but without heavier-duty apps to make the most of them, it’s something of a wasted effort.
Resident Evil 4 is an app that definitely makes use of the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro processor, as well as its 120Hz display screen. The visual disparity between this and the Mac version couldn’t be more apparent, though, of course, the smaller 6.1-inch display screen does allow the iOS version to rather paper over some cracks in display fidelity in a way that the MacBook can’t.
Again, be ready for a really long install process, and one, in my case, asked that I not close the app while it was downloading the primary game data. That may be a quirk of the test flight process, but I just dropped it on a wireless MagSafe charger and got on with my day. Thankfully, a handful of phone calls over the day didn’t seem to crash out its install. Be ready to sacrifice a fair chunk of your iPhone’s storage capacity to make way for Resident Evil 4, though, as it takes up over 30GB with a full install.
It is wild to be playing a AAA game natively on a smartphone; one of my family members walked past as I was playing and immediately assumed I was streaming it from somewhere, but they were wrong. The iOS version doesn’t give you the same level of quality tweaking as its Mac sibling, but it really doesn’t feel like it needs it, either.
What it does need is some kind of game controller to make it playable in any way. Capcom has included onscreen touchscreen inputs, but they’re just awful for trying to play in any coherent way; you’re either going to be staring at your fingers rather than the action or being all too easily killed because you tapped the wrong section of the screen all the time. I paired up the iPhone 15 Pro with a cheap K-Mart controller that included a screen clip, and this is also what you’ll really need to make Resident Evil 4 work on an iPhone – though I could see how with a simpler stand on a suitably equipped iPad you might not need that particular step as well.
The reason for the clip is that, like the iOS version of Village before it, it’s neat that you can play Resident Evil 4 on an iPhone, but there’s no getting past that smaller display screen or the way that it chews up battery power like some parasite-possessed villager on a lithium bender. The next time I need a really quick, brutal way to kill an iPhone’s battery, I know which app I’ll turn to.
Resident Evil 4 remains an all-time classic, and the remake’s polishing around the edges made it a little bit better. It’s great to see more gaming titles hitting Apple platforms natively, and this is mostly well done… with the slight caveat that it really only makes sense if you’re entirely ensconced in the Apple ecosystem for the vast majority of your gaming needs.
Image: Capcom, Kotaku Australia
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