I played Resident Evil on the iPhone 15, and it’s an alternative future for gaming

For a long time it’s felt like the dominant vision of gaming’s future has been cloud-based, with Xbox spinning up Game Pass into its be-all-and-end-all, and PlayStation starting to get in on the fun, too. Apple’s iPhone 15 launch event might not have been where you’d expect to see a counterpoint, but that’s nonetheless where it emerged, in the form of an impressive tech demo of the last two Resident Evil games running natively on iPhone 15 Pro hardware.

Now I’ve had the chance to play Resident Evil Village on my 15 Pro, and it’s heartening to report that this is more than just a tech demo – it’s a different way of looking at where gaming could go in the next few years.

How much storage do you need and what does it cost?

It’s in Testflight for now, but with access granted by Capcom, getting Village downloaded is a familiar story for those who play bigger mobile games like Genshin Impact – you download the app, you open the app, and then you download the actual content within it, a matter of 7GB or so. This gets you the first chunk of Village to play, with 13GB required for the full game, and a little bit more for the Shadows of Rose DLC.

That makes Village a pretty hefty game to commit to from a storage point of view – it’s now hogging 16GB of my 128 in total, with only a big offline Spotify library coming close to rivalling it. Still, 16GB is actually a great bit of optimisation compared to the 27GB that Village takes up on a PS5, so it’s clear that converted games won’t have to be full-sized on iPhone.

That all reflects on the game’s pricing too, which looks like it’ll involve a free trial followed by a $39.99 price tag – that’s a pretty bold strategy for what is not a very new game at this point (Village first came out in May 2021).

It’s launching with a 60 per cent time-limited discount to knock that right down, which is at least a very sensible move.

Curious display options

Loading into the game’s DLC to see how it runs, Village makes a distinctly weird first impression – it’s immediately visible that it’s not running at a level that could compete with the PS5 I played the original game on.

After the first cut scene, a foray into the settings menu makes it clear that this is deliberate on Capcom’s part – probably to avoid your phone going supernova the minute you start. Here you’ll find a baffling array of display options, far closer to the menus you get on a PC game than any mobile port I’ve played before, with the likes of mesh quality, shadow detail, screen-space reflections, and so many more, all controllable.

The whole time you get a running total of the iPhone’s graphical memory load to let you know how your phone should cope with your choice of settings, which is both handy and in-depth in a way that most people will surely not bother with.

Bumping up the resolution, texture quality and graphical effects makes a pretty clear difference, though, and it’s easy to get the game running smoothly with far more impressive presentation.

On the iPhone 15 Pro’s wonderful display, it looks fantastic, with rich blacks and clean lines, but I also used AirPlay to output it to my LG C2 OLED TV, which let me take a closer look at things.

Weirdly, this seemed to impose a gamma brightening layer that I’d rather not have had, but apart from that things held up really well – again, lighting is solid (albeit very much not ray-traced) and everything ran really smoothly.

If pressed, I’d compare graphical output roughly to a well-ported version running on the PS4 Pro, or a fictional ‘PS5 Lite,’ because it’s pretty clear to a practised eye that this isn’t as powerful as the PS5 itself (or the Xbox Series X).

That shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the fact that it’s even coming remotely close should be treated as the hugely impressive distinction that it really is.

Is this a real way to play?

Really, AirPlay is what I feel holds the key to Apple’s potential success in proper ports – because playing natively on the phone itself is a necessarily mixed bag. Obviously, we’ve known for a decade at least that touch controls are garbage for truly complicated games, and that stays the same here, with an on-screen controller obscuring the action and making precise moves incredibly challenging.

Connect a wireless controller or a grip like the Backbone One and you’re immediately cooking with gas, way more easily playing as you would on a console, but that display size still limits you when it comes to reading text and menus.

A more total port might well solve that, but it’s when I connect to my TV that things really click – my phone can be left on a table (or, even better, on a charger), and I can sit and enjoy a genuinely seamless gaming experience.

I connected an Xbox Wireless Controller over Bluetooth (something that’s very easy to do) and found it worked a treat. Controller lag isn’t a noticeable concern, something that immediately blows all but the most ideal of cloud streaming circumstances out of the water.

There are small hitches, of course, like the game being locked to widescreen even when using AirPlay, and the very high temperatures my phone reached didn’t feel particularly ideal – running to this degree of stress regularly seems like a bit of a risk.

The same goes for battery life. About 15–20 minutes of playing around robbed me of 10 per cent of my battery, and while that’s no catastrophe it still means that any real gaming session will require the accompaniment of a portable power bank.

These come together to mean that while it’s much better than the glorified tech demo I feared, Resident Evil Village still feels like it’s emerged from Apple’s proof-of-concept phase, and that more tightly optimised and adapted ports are going to have to be the real model if we’re going to get way more.

Developer support will be crucial

That’s the crucial question for me now – will we get more proper flagship games on the iPhone like this, and will they come a year or more after release, or on release day? If developers jump aboard and start supporting the iPhone as a genuine platform, this could be something special, but there’s no guarantee of that right now.

In the here and now, I’d rather play this native version of Resident Evil Village on my phone than cloud streaming it via Xbox Game Pass or even playing it remotely from my PS5 with PlayStation’s model – the lack of input lag or visual glitches makes that a clear win.

However, from clunky menus to tiny text there are plenty of kinks to work out, and the real variable is simply whether games get proper ports while they’re still hot, or whether they’ll all be late arrivals like Resident Evil Village.

Backbone / Pocket-lint

Backbone One

The Backbone One is the perfect pairing with Resident Evil Village on your iPhone – it’s great in the hand and instantly unlocks a way better experience thanks to its controls.