I have two opinions when it comes to whether or not someone should play Resident Evil 4 VR. If you’ve never touched the original RE4, there is no way you should jump into this version; anything that made (and makes) it important would be completely over your head in VR. However, if you’ve played Resident Evil 4 – especially if you’ve completed it multiple times over the years – then RE4VR should be played at all costs.
As the name suggests, RE4VR is just that. It’s Resident Evil 4, but in VR. The game’s change of perspective is immediately new – bringing it into the first-person perspective enables an intimate look at the world of the game that third parties could never afford. As a remaster of a 16 year old game, RE4VR sometimes shows its age – mostly as you get close to certain muddy textures and assets – but it doesn’t look bad by any means. As someone who’s played the original more times than I’m counting, it was always amusing to see a 1: 1 replica of RE4’s levels, characters, and monsters.
Changes specifically for VR are also welcome in most cases. The huge, interactive briefcase in which the protagonist Leon Kennedy keeps all his weapons and equipment is a blast in VR. It feels as close as possible to doing it in real life, even if you’re more or less just playing Tetris with weapons. Speaking of which, the guns look fantastic. I had a great time holding up iconic weapons like the Red9 pistol and the Striker shotgun and getting a good look at the additional details. The same goes for items around the world like keys, money, and herbs. Everything can be picked up and examined before throwing it in your inventory. I’m sure I looked like an idiot to all of my neighbors who kept staring at my hands, but they didn’t know that was the first time I was getting up close and personal with a yellow herb – their loss.
Combat received the most significant makeover in RE4VR, and that got me across the moon. As is well known, the original changed the typical third-person camera perspective from fixed angles to what is now the modern behind-the-back view. But there were still tank controls, which meant Leon was only moving in the direction he was looking. Also, he couldn’t move when aiming or shooting. While it was revolutionary for the time, there is obvious narrative and mechanical dissonance in the original’s gameplay. The game presents Leon as an American badass action hero, But once you get it under control, you still stumble around like the same old fool of past Resident Evils. RE4VR completely foregoes this model if you choose to play with full motion mode enabled instead of teleporting. I can’t recommend it enough; It combines the mechanics and the story in ways that the original never did.
Freewheeling in a combat arena will fundamentally change the way enemy combat works in RE4. Rather than trying to face a range of enemies and do as much damage as possible before they reached me, I was constantly on the move, adapting my play style to the moment, and going offensive against enemies rather than defensive. Right from the start I had a lot of fun walking around shooting enemies like a virtual John Wick. I figured RE4 would never feel “new” at this point in my life, but RE4VR has completely changed the way I play one of my favorite games. It felt fresh, exciting, and completely different than any playthrough of RE4 I’ve had in the past 16 years. For the first time in ages, I stopped going through the moves, and iconic moments like the early village encounter, the fights of El Gigante, and the mine cart roller coaster have rarely been more fun.
Moving RE4 into first person perspective also adds a lot to its horror – though it’s still not the scariest thing you can play on the market. There’s an inherent tension in being surrounded by enemies in VR, especially when you’re overwhelmed. The many incredibly large bosses are also incredibly threatening when you see them towering high above you. More than once, RE4VR hit my heart to the neck as I tried desperately to out-maneuver any threat that was approaching me. Occasionally this exacerbated some problems with tracking two-handed weapons that failed to register one of my hands or input like cocking a shotgun or aiming at a scope. Fortunately, this was a rarity, but it resulted in some annoying deaths nonetheless. Until I unlocked the Striker, which allowed me to shoot an automatic shotgun with one hand like I was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 – but cooler.
In 2020, I played the original RE4 front to back three times. It’s something I usually do games for comfort; I can recharge and take off without much thought. RE4VR has completely turned my relationship with a game I know better than most. If you’re a fan of RE4, have access to an Oculus Quest 2, and don’t mind the morally and ethically questionable need to have a Facebook account to play an Oculus game, I can’t recommend RE4VR enough. It’s like breathing new life into an old, familiar feeling.
