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The power of M1 chip

Resident Evil 4 remake is now available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. But not for all of them. The game is available on the ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌, the ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌ Max, iPads that have the M1 chip or later, and all Apple Silicon Macs. I own an iPad, but it’s the older model. However, I have an iMac that has the M1 chip, so I did want to try how the game runs on it. I played Resident Evil 4 remake on my PS5 and gave it an astounding 5/5 review. The game was superb. Let’s see how the game does on Mac.

Back to the survival horror

The story of Resident Evil 4 goes as follows: Leon S. Kennedy (a protagonist from previous games) was sent to a rural Spanish village to search for the president’s missing daughter. She was kidnapped and her trail leads to Spain. Soon, Leon finds that the villagers are hostile and they try to do everything to stop him from going on his rescue mission. The villagers are implanted with parasitic arthropods called Las Plagas that turn them into evil beings. So, this is the beginning of the story and it will develop into so much more. I did like the story overall and all the characters and villains.

Gameplay, Controls and Visuals

I played this on my iMac (2021 with M1 chip) and I used PS5 controller Dual Sense. The controller has haptic feedback and adaptive triggers features, but they weren’t available when playing with iMac. It still didn’t ruin my experience with the game. I could’ve used mouse and keyboard, but I’m more console player so I’m more used to controllers.

The gameplay is identical to the console version. You kill enemies, collect loot, upgrade weapons and try to progress to the next area. Leon can also do more melee attacks and the knife had a bigger role this time. The knife can be used to parry and block enemy attacks, block chainsaw attacks, do sneak up kills, do the final blow to killed enemies before they could turn into monsters. Even some of the boss fights had live knife fights. I don’t blame to be a great video game player, so I played this on the easiest mode, yet I did die a couple of times. To be honest, it was more of the lagging performance of the game that made me die in dire situations.

The controls felt OK. In the beginning, it felt like there was a little lag, but I noticed soon after that lowering the graphical settings made the game run much smoother. I played this on 60fps mode, and I think it only felt like true 60fps on lower settings. There’s a lots of settings for the controls and I suggest you go through them if you’re not satisfied with how the controls feels.

Visually the game looked beautiful in higher graphical settings. It still had some lower texture qualities and slow texture downloads; it was obvious when you looked at things more closely. In lower graphic settings, the game still looked okay, not the greatest, but at least as good as some PS4 Pro games would look. Well, actually, it was something between PS4 Pro and PS5 games.

The Overall Technical Performance

I’m gonna put it right out here; I had issues with running the game. Well, the game itself ran pretty well—in low settings. But when I put higher and more demanding graphical settings the game felt slower, it stuttered and skipped frames, and it even crashed twice. I mean hard crashed as in my iMac shut down completely. So, I played the game in lower settings to avoid this issue. In the settings were clearly shown how much memory you have in your usage. It was 3.38GB of graphical memory and I don’t recommend you to fill it up completely as the game might start crashing (I remind you that I have iMac with M1 chip). I have strong believe that this game will run much better with M2 and M3 chips, because with M1 it was almost there, but not quite.

What Ya Buying, Stranger?

Resident Evil 4 isn’t a bad game at all; it is a masterpiece as a remake. I did enjoy my time with the game on my iMac, but I still prefer the PS5 version. I’m not a super tech-savvy person, but still, I could see some issues with the overall performance of the game. But, is it the ultimate version you should play? No, it isn’t. Even though the game did suffer some technical issues, it is 100% playable, and Capcom has done a great job to get it to the newest Mac computers.

I do recommend this if you own a compatible Mac, it’s even 50% off until January 17.

Resident Evil 4 is available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

SCORE:

4/5

“Visually the game looked beautiful in higher graphical settings”

RELEASE DATE: December 20, 2023
GENRE: Action
DEVELOPER: Capcom
PUBLISHER: Capcom
PLATFORMS: Mac (reviewed)
iPhone
iPad
PS5
PS4
Xbox Series X|S
Windows

 

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