I played the latest Resident Evil game on my iPad Pro – and mobile isn’t ready for these games

MOBILE gaming is levelling up, with big-name triple-A games coming to smart devices.

The iPhone 15 Pro is changing the game completely, with PC and console experiences like Death Stranding and Assassin’s Creed Mirage becoming playable on Apple devices.

Capcom

Resident Evil Village launched in 2021.[/caption]

While those two aren’t available yet, we were able to get our hands on Resident Evil Village, the eighth and most recent mainline game in the series.

We tested the game on an M1 iPad Pro, and here’s how it went.

Luckily you can play with either touchscreen controls or a controller, so you can get more of a big game experience.

We opted for the controller as touchscreen controls often have your hands covering your already limited screen.

And RE Village is the epitome of this, as without a controller it feels like the whole screen is consumed by controls.

Our expectations were tempered, and we weren’t expecting the high-end PC experience coming from a phone.

However, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality we got, even from such a small device.

There are a lot of graphical options here, and as a port of the PC version, you won’t be able to push these to the max.

Even the limited ray-tracing compromised the performance too much for us, so we turned a number of these settings down.

The performance was underwhelming overall, though still impressive for a mobile device.

We would suggest that you target 30fps and medium graphical settings in order to get decent performance.

Performance isn’t the most important thing, and the gameplay experience overall matters more.

RE Village isn’t optimised for mobile, and the UI covers half of the screen with button prompts, you can’t even navigate the menus using the touch screen.

However, with a controller, the experience is much improved, and there aren’t any connectivity issues with this.

There is input lag, though, which could be unacceptable for more hardcore gamers.

This is also difficult in an action game like this, as headshots are difficult to hit, especially if you have higher graphics settings.

You also can’t play RE Village for very long on your phone, as it drains your battery very quickly, and this, of course, makes your devices very hot.

Previous-gen smartphones and tablets can’t replace handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, but M3-based Apple devices could be able to give consoles a run for their money.

Apple seems to have set its sights too high when it comes to gaming experiences on its smart devices.

The company hopes to be able to run PS5 games on its phones, so its latest tech shouldn’t be struggling to perform with this PS4 game.

The Apple version may seem like a bargain at first, but unless you have the latest-gen device, it might be the worst way to experience RE Village.

Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.