I don’t plan to say too much about this since I’m mostly reviewing this for how the VR version is, rather than bothering to write a detailed review of the underlying game that is rather well-known and well-liked. On balance, I really enjoyed this VR version of the game a lot. As much as I loved Resident Evil 4 when it came out and I still enjoy it from time to time, it’s far from my favorite in the series. And while there are debates about whether it holds up today (that I’ll remain neutral on for now), I do think quality-of-life changes wouldn’t hurt. This isn’t exactly that quality-of-life update, but the VR experience, while more intense, also changes the game up in ways that make it feel fresh and even more engaging and not at all like a game as old as the original is (other than the graphics still being fairly 2005-esque).
The main differences are just those combat capabilities enabled by the VR experience. For one, it’s a lot more immersive. Your weapons are all on you, with handgun at your right hip, ammo on your left hip, knife on your left chest, grenades center chest, healing left shoulder, and two-handed gun on your right shoulder. As may be evident from that description, it can be a little easy to grab the wrong thing from time to time and that definitely happened throughout my playthrough, but you get a lot better at finding the sweet spots for each with muscle memory. Further, with this setup you’re able to use multiple things at once in ways you couldn’t really do in the original, for instance dual-wielding. Personally, I think the dual-wielding advantage has been a little oversold online as it has to be a two-hand weapon and a handgun/magnum. There are some combos that work but honestly not that many and you can’t reload either weapon without dropping the other, nor can you pump any shotguns or chamber rounds for bolt-action. Still, it’s pretty cool and again feels immersive being able to do whatever you want with each hand, including keeping a knife out or healing while continuously shooting. Similarly, reload speed is based on your own movements so you can’t actually upgrade it since it’s however fast you can physically reload, which eventually feels really cool and snappy once you get used to it. They also made sure to individualize the reloading motions, differentiating from a magazine loaded from the bottom into the Blacktail or a clip dropped into the top of the Red 9. I also just in general felt a lot faster and more agile in moving around in combat because I could just turn irl rather than wait on a scrolling speed. All in all, it makes the game feel fairly action-packed even though in some ways the original may be a little clunky by today's shooter standards.
While I mostly really liked these immersive elements, they do cause some issues from a gameplay perspective. For one, the ability to move at your own speed, once you get good at it, can make the enemies seem like they’re moving through molasses by comparison. Early on when getting used to the controls, you’re probably just as sluggish and awkward, but later in the game, enemies just couldn’t keep up with me. This wasn’t a big issue mainly because it just felt really good so I didn’t mind if it made me inherently kind of overpowered. Another issue is that in the first-person, it can sometimes be really hard to know an enemy is behind you since you have even less field-of-vision, which is worsened by the fact the original’s kind of shitty spatial audio is not improved and enemies a floor above/below or on the other side of an adjacent wall sound like they’re right next to you, leading you to ignore it when they actually are right next to you muttering in your ear. Even beyond the fluidity, the shift in mechanics does mess with the balance of the game. Even on Professional, I’ve always found Resident Evil 4 kind of easy, but the VR version enables you to do so much more that some encounters are fairly trivialized. Further, some really silly strategies can prove extremely effective and it’s hard to ignore them, even if they feel weird from an immersion standpoint. For instance, by far the best strategy I found was holding the bolt-action rifle “gangster style” so I could no-scope enemies and easily reload the chamber, allowing me to quickly pop off a good 8 enemies in a room at close range in a few seconds with what should be one of the slower weapons. You can’t really do this in the original since the rifle requires slowly aiming down the scope, but just given the perspective, it’s actually not hard at all to shoot enemies at close or medium range with it without using the sights or a scope at all.
The other major issue I had is a more meta problem (see what I did there?). Okay, obvious joke out of the way that it’s Meta-exclusive, this game is also a big-time motion-sickness inducer. I bought my Quest 2 specifically to play this game and made the mistake of playing it straight out of the box for like 3 hours on the day I got it with 0 VR experience. I definitely was feeling the motion sickness but since I’d never had it before, I chalked the weird feelings up to the fact I had been feeling off that morning anyway and thought I might be getting just generally sick. But no, instead I had motion sickness for multiple days and it was awful. You really need to work your way up to that level of time in a game like this if you’re unused to it and that’s a warning for anyone considering it. That said, I’m coincidentally posting this review on my 1-year VR anniversary after finishing the game this weekend. In the interim, I’ve trained my VR legs, mostly with Tale of Onogoro and some other games that I could play in short sessions that might train me to handle it. While I’m not over it yet, I’ve noticed a huge difference in my tolerance and when I came back to this game, I was able to go a good 30-45 minutes without issues and with Bonine, I could go hours. Seeing as before I was quite woozy in 15 minutes, that’s a big change already and I’m confident it’ll only improve from here. Perhaps this isn’t the place to do it, but I just wanted to briefly celebrate that along with my VR anniversary since the journey came full circle with this game. Regardless, whether you need to take Bonine or just play it in very small snippets (or perhaps if you’re one of the lucky ones who never gets motion sick from VR), this game is super fun and manages to breathe real life into a game that at this point I’m generally not all that into anymore, so I highly recommend it!
My other Resident Evil reviews:
