Resident Evil Village to get Mercenaries mode, VR version of RE 4 also on way

A Resident Evil showcase on Thursday revealed new details on Resident Evil Village, including a new game mode and demo details. The livestream also revealed that a VR version of Resident Evil 4 is coming. The Mercenaries game mode is returning to Resident Evil Village. The fast-paced, action-oriented mode has players clearing out waves of enemies as fast as possible. Players can take specific weapons into each stage and customize them. There’s also a new ability system that can buff weapons, increase movement speed, and more. Resident Evil Village is also getting new, strange demo. The gameplay demo will be available on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Steam, and Stadia, but with a twist. Players will only be able to play one hour of the game during a set window. North Americans will have to try the game between 5 p.m. PT on May 1 and 5 p.m. PT on May 2. They’ll be able to explore the game’s village and castle areas during that time. PS4 and PS5 owners are getting a second demo called 8 Hours in Village. Players can explore the village area for 30 minutes from 5 p.m. PT on April 17 to 1 a.m. PT on April 18. In that. They can also explore the castle for another half hour from 5 p.m. PT on April 24 to 1 a.m. PT on April 25. PlayStation owners can pre-download the demo starting today. In other news, Resident Evil 4 is coming to Oculus Quest 2. The VR version of the game is set in the first-person, which is a change from the game’s original third-person perspective. More news on the game will be revealed at Oculus’ gaming showcase on April 21. As part of Resident Evil’s 25th anniversary celebration, multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight is getting a Resident Evil crossover DLC. Details about the crossover will be revealed on a livestream on May 25. In addition to the new look at Village, the showcase featured a new trailer for the animated Netflix series Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness. The show takes place two years after the events of Resident Evil 4 and deals with a zombie attack at the White House. The show will debut on Netflix in July. This year’s Resident Evil 4 remake was an important victory for the horror series. Not only did it successfully reimagine a beloved classic, but it finally concocted the perfect action formula for the series at large. That’s an important milestone considering that Resident Evil has historically run into trouble when fully dropping survival horror in favor of blockbuster action (see the misunderstood, but undeniably sloppy Resident Evil 6). The remake paves the way for Capcom to once again evolve its series, taking another crack at the third-person shooter genre it struggled to nail. In that sense, Resident Evil 4’s new Separate Ways DLC feels like a taste of what’s to come. Capcom uses Ada Wong’s solo chapter to push its action formula even further, weaving in some exciting new tricks that are already leaving me hungry for a true spinoff. It’s not the series’ finest DLC, playing more as an asset-reusing victory lap, but it gives me hope that Resident Evil’s second decent into pure action will be much more successful this time.
Grappling forward
Separate Ways follows Ada Wong, the anti-hero mercenary on a quest to retrieve a Plaga sample for Albert Wesker during the main game. The lengthy bonus episode is a remake in itself, but it’s perhaps even more radical than the base game’s reinvention. Right from its completely new opening scene, it’s clear that Separate Ways is diverting pretty far from the original DLC. That’s a sensible decision considering how much the new version of Resident Evil 4 reworks Ada Wong. She’s no longer a careless hired gun, but a nuanced character struggling to balance her professional responsibilities with her moral ones. In a major stride forward for mobile gaming, Apple announced during today’s event that console games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 4’s remake, and Resident Evil Village are coming to the iPhone 15 Pro. These aren’t watered-down mobile spinoffs or cloud-streamed games either; they’re running natively with the help of the A17 Pro chip. During the gaming segment of Tuesday’s Apple event, the power of the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip was highlighted. The 3-nanometer chip has 19 billion transistors, a six-core CPU, a 16-core Neural Engine that can handle 35 trillion operations per second, and a six-core GPU that supports things like mesh shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing in video games. Several game developers were featured following its introduction to explain and show off just how powerful the A17 Pro Chip is. While this segment started with games already native to mobile, like The Division Resurgence, Honkai: Star Rail, and Genshin Impact, it didn’t take long for some games made for systems like PS5 and Xbox Series X to appear.
Capcom’s Tsuyoshi Kanda showed up and revealed that natively running versions of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 are coming to the iPhone 15 Pro before the end of the year. Later, Apple confirmed that Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which launches next month on PC and consoles, will also get a native iPhone 15 Pro port in early 2024, while Death Stranding is slated for a 2023 iPhone 15 Pro launch.
Historically, console-quality games like these have been impossible to get running on a mobile phone without the use of cloud gaming. Confirming that these three AAA games can all run natively on iPhone 15 Pro is certainly an impactful way for Apple to show just how powerful the A17 Pro chip is.