Having beaten the original game more times than I care to count, I defeated the iconic first El Gigante encounter in record time and, practically none of the game’s bosses can keep up with your increased speed.

Side-stepping a Ganados as they lurch towards you becomes second nature, as does sprinting up to an enemy, pointing a rifle right in their face and then pulling the trigger before backpedaling to safety. So, yes, Resident Evil 4 feels fundamentally easier than it ever has. But, as strange as it is to return to the game with this newfound mobility, it’s stranger still to play a VR experience in which you can’t walk directly left or right, and the full freedom mode very much feels like the way the game is meant to be played. Now, for what it’s worth, you can play Resident Evil 4 VR with these classic controls replicated as best as possible in the settings menu and I’m sure purists will get a kick out of revisiting the game in this way. It sounds a little rusty and, in truth, it is, but it’s also impeccably calculated, with no single encounter over the game’s 10 – 15 hour campaign (depending on your familiarity with it) feeling phoned in. Any time you raised a weapon up to fight, Leon would stop dead in his tracks and you could no longer walk. The original Resident Evil 4 was a game of astonishingly deliberate flow Leon couldn’t side-step, making it incredibly difficult to get out of harm’s way, switching out guns meant diving back into the inventory every few seconds, and scoring vital headshots to save on limited ammo was a really tricky affair. But the game gives and takes in pretty much equal measure. This, as you can probably imagine, causes friction in some areas, and opportunities in others. The content of the game might be the same, but actually playing it is a fundamentally different experience.

No more canned reload animations and no long ladder climbing but, in-trade, you can walk and aim, there’s dual-wielding weapons, full freedom of movement and much more. No longer does Leon sluggishly drag the aim cursor across the screen with all the urgency of a tortoise, enemies are instead at the mercy of your own marksmanship. Gone is the defining over-the-shoulder camera, replaced with a first-person view. Resident Evil 4 itself was something of an overhaul for the series, ditching the static-cameras and (at least partially) the tank controls of the original games, but it’s almost unrecognizable here. Resident Evil 4 VR doesn’t squander that opportunity.ĭeveloper Armature has paid meticulous attention to almost every angle of the original, bringing the entire campaign over to Quest 2. It’s not often you get the chance to experience something so cherished with fresh eyes.

But it can just as often work surprisingly well, with moments of refreshed intensity and heightened horror. It can be messy and archaic, never more than a few steps away from an awkward screen transition or useless quick-time event (QTE).

Resident evil 4 screen shots