Many consoles have already hosted the Resident Evil, and on many of these came the much loved and innovative Resident Evil 4, a chapter that shifted the game dynamics (the setting and the enemies) in order to decree an epochal turning point for the series. Years later, now Resident Evil 4 VR is ready to send us back to Spain as Leon S. Kennedy, a survivor of Raccoon City who will have to help the President of the United States of America in saving his daughter Ashley. In return, we are ready to accompany him and to analyze the new one in review Resident Evil 4, available this time in VR.
The platform used to review the game, as well as the only one on which you can try the experience, is Oculus Quest 2, the viewer of Facebook stand-alone that will allow you to play many novelties in VR, as well as experience the classic games for Rift S with the simple use of a suitable USB cable. The gaming experience was also lived using Oculus Touch, controllers included in the package and which allow the management of Leon within the game in a comfortable and effective way.
Watch out for your shoulders
Let’s start immediately from the base: the gaming experience we lived for the review in Resident Evil 4 VR translates into seeing one of the most intriguing games ever transposed on one of the most popular technologies ever. In fact, if today VR is not yet so widespread, it must be said that for decades this type of technology has been in people’s minds, and just think of the amount of films of the 80s, 90s – but also modern – that they tell of fantastic worlds to live with a viewer on the face.
It should also be noted that Resident Evil has a strange relationship with virtual reality: if in fact the seventh chapter, which in turn further modernized the gameplay, was made fully playable in VR thanks to its first person view, the idea of Biohazard (Japanese name of the series) seen from the eyes of the protagonist dates back to Survivor, one of the least appreciated and most particular chapters of the series (a sort of first-person shooter). If we add to all this the track shooter for the Wii, the arrival of this becomes obvious Resident Evil 4 for VR.
What is not taken for granted, however, is the adaptation work done by the development team: if in fact many things have remained the same, such as the plot, the cutscenes (which you can see in a sort of cinematic version with a giant screen in front of your eyes , while there is darkness around you) or the game design at the base of the title, so much has been revised to adapt to a new interpretation. If indeed Resident Evil 4 has undergone many ports, this is the first reinterpretation of the title, which has never happened before (unlike the previous chapters which exist in various sauces).
Speaking precisely of the cutscene, these do not shine very much, on the contrary, they are tedious and tiring especially in the phases in which they divide the gameplay a lot, since they make the first-person point of view obsolete and returning to a more cinematic vision. Fortunately, as you advance in the game these decrease, and the gameplay phases are so fun that we immediately forget about everything.
The news, however, do not stop at the artistic part: in fact many texture and many polygons have been improved (remember that there is a difference in seeing a character on screen or in a viewer, in front of you, running towards you), also the FPS have been fixed to make the experience more fluid and above all usable, since the original version had 30 FPS, which would have made it practically unplayable in VR.
Another novelty concerns everything that is touched by prospect: the Resident Evil 4 original relied on a third person managed via an over-the-shoulder camera (different from the classic third person, much further away): this led the development team to review the entire management system linked to the weapons, which will remain selectable via the wheel. inventory but that you can also manage through gestures to be done near your body, as if you were really in that situation. All this turns into a lot of management dynamic of the action parts, which will push you to look around, to have to reload bringing the magazine from the belt to the gun, but above all to move physically. The parts composed of puzzles and common actions (opening doors, pulling levers) are instead managed with real movements to be made, so as to make everything ultra-immersive and capable of making you fall into the game experience with all your senses.
A terrifying experience
Being a title of this kind, it is impossible in review to overlook the factor terror, And Resident Evil 4 VR it is not exempt. The horror they are scary. The horror in VR they put a terrifying fear, something hidden in us: in fact they have the ability to insert us in a non-real environment, making us believe the opposite, which certainly makes everything more immersive. Obviously this does not mean making the game unmanageable as exaggerated movements are required: the title, in fact, as for the weapons, will have various modes of movement, so as to allow the experience to be adapted to the maximum to your needs. So here you can enable tunneling to avoid motion sickness, set the way the camera will be rotated and even decide to play while seated. However, all this does not exclude that, in the end, you will find yourself alone in a terrifying game world, made up of madmen and monsters ready to kill you in horrible ways, all in front of your eyes.
But one of the things that scared the most in the original game certainly concerns Ashley, the little girl ready to make you repeat a part of the game over and over again because of her “ability” to be killed: for this reason the development team, given the transposition in VR, has decided to fix something, making Ashley more resistant (depending on difficulty) and more traceable once lost. For the rest, the controls marry perfectly with the type of game, also and above all thanks to the fact that they will be immediate movements to learn, almost natural (… even if I challenge any of you to say that you have experienced an apocalypse on your skin zombie).
For the rest, the game is already known to most: we are facing one of the best – albeit not too horror – Resident Evil always, and the idea of being able to experience it in first person (more than thanks to the camera, thanks to the virtual reality experience) is something amazing that makes it clear how even a change in dynamics can make a difference. Why basically horror is scary, but at 360 degrees it becomes pure terror.
#Resident #Evil #Review #fear