Resident Evil 4 VR (Meta Quest, 2022)

We’ve only begun to nibble at the corners of what’s possible in a VR game. The last ten years have seen developers making baby steps into the medium and it’s exciting to think about what’ll be possible a decade from now.

That VR’s creative limits are so vast should make something like Resident Evil 4 VR a bit retrograde. This is a 17-year-old game that’s been ported to everything under the sun already, here with a VR upgrade that’s bolted onto the existing design without any consideration for balance, enemy AI, or difficulty.

But it rocks so so hard.

First up, Resident Evil 4 remains an incredible action game. I first played it back on the GameCube on its original release, but didn’t return to any of the re-releases. Unlike so many titles that came and went this stuck in the memory and heading back out to do battle with Las Plagas was like stepping into an old but comfy pair of boots.

The story is adorably silly schlock, the characters are insanely camp, the setting is perfect Hammer horror, and Leon S. Kennedy’s one-liners remain hilarious. Let’s just say that there’s a reason every generation gets an ever-shinier HD re-release and that there’s a full remake on the way.

But in VR? Holy hell it’s fun. The console versions put careful limitations on movement and aiming, with the combat designed around Leon not being able to move and shoot. VR does away with that, giving you full 360 awareness, letting you zip around the arena like Doomguy, popping domes with a gun in one hand, slashing with a knife in the other, and spin-kicking and suplexing your way through the mumbling hordes.

Much of the tension of the original is gone, replaced with an outright power fantasy that syncs up with Leon’s cutscene bravado. The enemy AI just isn’t designed to cope with you being able to circle strafe around them at high speed and every boss can be beaten without breaking a sweat (Krauser in particular is a complete walkover).

The freedom of movement and aiming is theoretically balanced out by having to manually reload your guns by slamming in a new clip and racking the slide, but after the first half hour you’ll be at John Wick levels of reloading speed so it quickly proves a non-issue (and anyway, it just leaves you feeling cooler overall).

Perhaps stripping the carefully tuned balance out of Resident Evil 4 is blasphemous, but it’s difficult to argue with the sheer pleasure of carving through the game like a hot knife through parasite-infested butter.

On top of that, despite the graphics only having been given a minor overhaul (mainly to increase detail on enemies and NPCs) they somehow still hold up in VR. This matches what I saw in the Metal Gear Solid Boneworks VR mod, where I found the brain instinctively fills absent details in low-poly 3D spaces in a way that makes them feel more believable than they actually are.

There are a couple of wrinkles. The cutscenes park you in a black void with a cinema screen in front of you. Reworking every cutscene in the game to play out from a first-person perspective would be a titanic effort (they’d need to be redone from scratch), but even so it’s jarring to be frequently thrown out of the game and stand there twiddling your guns while staring at a non-interactive video. Plus it doesn’t have DLCs ‘Separate Ways’ and ‘Assignment Ada’, which is a bit of a bummer.

But, all being told, that’s a tiny little fly in a vat of top-quality ointment. I had way more fun in Resident Evil 4 VR than I expected to and, though I hate to admit it, enjoyed it a smidge more than Half-Life: Alyx. Whether it’s worth picking up a Quest 2 for is up to you, though as this is unlikely to ever get a port elsewhere due to it being funded by Zuckerbux, this may be the only platform you’ll ever see it on.

Is it the best version of Resident Evil 4? Honestly… yeah. Maybe.