Full-fat Resident Evil Village on iPhone is a captivating tech demo – but hard to recommend actually playing

Apple’s made some big moves to support Mac gaming over the past year, with ports of Resident Evil Village and No Man’s Sky, plus the Game Porting Toolkit translation layer that allows Macs to run PC games. Finally those moves are beginning to pay dividends for Apple’s much more popular iOS and iPad OS devices as well, with the port of RE Village for iPhone 15 Pro and M1 and M2-based iPad models.

This port promises the full-fat game experience, somehow delivered on a device that can fit in the palm of your hand. Today we’ll be evaluating Village on the brand new iPhone 15 Pro, to see just how well this beautiful console and PC showcase translates to a pocketable gadget. Is this a genuinely good experience, or do the mobile concessions simply cut too deep?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t emphasise how amazing Resident Evil Village looks on the iPhone right off the top. This is an extremely accomplished visual effort that is very similar to the existing console releases of the game, and the graphics are astonishing. Village is, bar none, the best-looking mobile title I’ve ever seen. The incredible quality of the PBR materials and environmental density really stands out on a six-inch screen, with no obvious cuts or modifications from the game’s appearance on more power-hungry systems.

That’s for good reason too, as Village is essentially a straight conversion of the Mac release, with all the options available from that version preserved for iPhone. There are a dazzling array of tweakables to explore, just like a PC game, with the ability to scale up or scale down the visual experience as you see fit – so let’s dive in and see exactly what they do in practice. I’m using a mix of low and medium settings at maximum resolution for the following tests, with the exception of the setting that’s being modified.