You can also dual-wield weapons - which usually isn’t productive but enables specific scenarios like shooting your pistol at a zombie on your left while knifing one off a ladder to your right. But in addition to selecting them from your inventory, you can map individual weapons onto different parts of your body, grabbing a chosen rifle or shotgun by reaching behind your back or a pistol by reaching to your side. It uses the original’s familiar outlay of handguns, long guns, and a knife for close-range fighting. RE4VR’s combat is tactile and satisfying without being punishingly difficult or complicated. Armature effectively cordons off the parts of Resident Evil 4 that would be least compelling as first-person motion-controlled experiences, then puts its efforts toward building a VR shooting experience that’s smoother than many native VR shooters. The clunky mix of formats feels almost retro, but I think it’s the right choice.

Outside of cutscenes, kicking an enemy or pushing an object will also briefly shift your viewpoint to a third-person camera so you can see what Leon is doing. (You know those dreams where you’re watching a person from the outside, but you also are that person? It’s sort of like that.) Many of these scenes originally had quicktime events that involved pressing buttons, and in RE4VR you’ll see a flat overlay telling you to shake your controllers or pull the triggers at those moments.

During cutscenes, the game throws you - virtual hands and all - into a black void to watch the action on a flat screen. Resident Evil 4’s design puts the most promising elements into VR and cordons off the restīut Resident Evil 4 hasn’t been totally VR-ified. Instead, port developer Armature Studio has focused on translating a third-person console shooter into a first-person headset-based game. It’s got crisper textures and spatial audio upgrades, but if you’ve seen the game’s high-definition rerelease or the even more HD fan-made remaster, it’s not an extraordinary graphical overhaul. Unlike Capcom’s recent Resident Evil 2 and 3 console remakes, which were heavily reimagined versions of their source material, RE4VR (technically simply named Resident Evil 4) is a nearly beat-for-beat copy of the original’s narrative, enemy encounters, and level layout. Resident Evil 4’s VR version retools a horror classic with VR combat satisfying enough to make up for its myriad rough edges, producing something surprisingly fun. But the weirdest part by far? It mostly works. And Resident Evil 4 in VR, an Oculus Quest 2 version of Capcom’s 2005 GameCube game, makes a lot of tradeoffs that sound compromising on paper. Resident Evil 7 supported VR to questionable effect in 2017. VR versions of non-VR games are often at best superfluous and at worst painful - sometimes literally if you’re prone to motion sickness.

I didn’t have stellar hopes going into Resident Evil 4’s virtual reality adaptation.

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