Resident Evil 7 Biohazard is the latest AAA title to hit Apple’s platforms. The game originally released back in 2017 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and has since graced multiple other platforms, including Nintendo Switch and even the defunct Google Stadia. Now, it’s available on the iPhone 15 Pro, all iPad and Mac models with M-series chips.
RE7 is a highly acclaimed entry in the RE library, even by the series’ generally high standards. It was a return to the franchise’s roots, with a heavy focus on survival horror over the action and gunplay that had dominated the previous few games. It was also the first to switch to a more intimate first-person view of the character, making the body horror extra visceral and effective.
RE7 tells the story of Ethan Winters, whose wife has been missing for three years until one day she sends him a cryptic message summoning him to a house in the backwaters of Dulvey, Louisiana. While it’s horrifying enough, nothing could have prepared Ethan for the horrors that await him there.
RE7 was a fantastic return to form for a series originally known for its survival horror gameplay. It’s easily the scariest game in the entire series, particularly the opening mission, which often leaves you frozen in place, too scared to move, even though you’re only supposed to walk through this seemingly empty house. The long, dark corridors of the opening area are particularly reminiscent of PT, a short horror demo made by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro for a game that never came.
RE7 makes incredible use of darkness, the tunnel vision your flashlight causes and the dilation of your pupils as you enter a new room in the house or turn your camera around. Your mind begs for more information from your eyes than the game will give you, as you’re hyper-aware of every creaking noise coming from this dilapidated old place. Did you see anything moving in the shadows up ahead? Well, too bad, because that’s where you’re expected to go next.
RE7 on Apple platforms is the exact same game that was previously released on other platforms. On iPhone, the initial free download from the App Store is 1.19GB. After that, the game will ask you to download another 10GB when you launch it. Should you choose to purchase the full game via in-app purchase, you will need to download another 14GB. When fully downloaded, the game will take up approximately 25GB of storage space without DLC and 31GB with DLC.
The DLC for the game includes the Gold Edition upgrade, which includes an additional story mission “End of Zoe” and two mini-games called Banned Footage Vol 1 and Vol 2. The Gold Edition upgrade costs $20 on top of the $20 for the full base game. However, you can still download the base game for free, which includes the first chapter.
The review will focus on the game’s technical performance as tested on the iPhone 15 Pro. Like Village, RE7 brings back adjustable graphics settings and resolution, but in a more minimalistic manner. You don’t get the full PC-like graphics settings that you do in Village, but there are three graphics presets available that allow you to switch between performance prioritization, graphics prioritization, and a balanced mode.
Starting with the Prioritize Graphics preset, the game presents an impressive picture considering its age and platform. You’re given dense foliage in the few outdoor scenes you have early on in the game with decent texture resolution, shadows, and slightly hazy but present screen-space reflections on bodies of water. Indoors, you’ll notice niceties like volumetric twilight rays piercing the musty interiors, along with cascading shadow maps. And when enemies try to stab you in the face, you’ll notice a gentle depth-of-field effect on the blade.
Going from Prioritize Graphics to Balanced has a fairly minor impact on the visuals to the point where it’s not immediately apparent at all. Only after much nitpicking was it possible to notice even blurrier screen-space reflections, slightly lower resolution shadow maps, and reduced ambient occlusion.
There’s nothing subtle about the Prioritize Performance preset, however, which looks noticeably worse. There’s reduced geometric density outdoors, with less foliage and simpler meshes for the plants. Texture resolution is absolutely destroyed to the point of being almost non-existent. You also lose all screen-space reflections, volumetric lighting, and ambient occlusion. Depth of field is also of lower precision, giving the appearance of a screen blur rather than a soft camera blur. Finally, shadows are noticeably blockier.
Prioritize graphics • Balanced • Prioritize performance
The game also lets you choose your resolution. On the iPhone 15 Pro, you could choose from the native 2556×1179, 2342×1080, 1952×900, and 1560×720. The game then apparently uses MetalFX temporal antialiased upscaling to upsample the image to the display’s native resolution if you choose a lower value. However, there were noticeable checkerboard artifacts across the image, even when running natively, suggesting that the game may be making use of the RE engine interlacing feature, which runs the game at half the resolution on one axis.
The resulting image can be quite soft at times, but the game’s design lets it get away with it. RE7 has a heavily post-processed look with significant lens blur effects and chromatic aberration, along with motion blur to almost create a found-footage horror film look. The softer look helps achieve the VHS quality the game is aiming for, though it can be a bit too soft at times, particularly during the actual VHS video sequences that play in some chapters.
Overall image quality is still quite good though. Most of the game takes place in very dark environments, which hides a lot of the visual flaws, and what is visible looks good enough. The performance preset takes a big hit but remains usable, while the higher presets would look better on devices with more GPU processing power and memory.
The game renders in true ultra-wide on the iPhone, so you get a wider field of view compared to 16:9. However, some of the pre-rendered cutscenes still play in 16:9 with black bars on the sides.
In terms of performance, RE7 once again delivers. The game is known for its exceptionally light rendering load, which is why it was one of the few AAA titles on the base PS4 to lock in at 60fps at the time. The performance preset on the iPhone targets a similar 60fps lock, while balanced and graphics lock in at 30fps. Setting the game to 720p and the performance preset finds the iPhone 15 Pro holding at a near-locked 60fps most of the time. In fact, the device doesn’t even seem stressed, as it barely gets warm at all. You can try cranking up the resolution, but the difference isn’t really noticeable.
Unfortunately, the more notable visual upgrades of the balanced and graphics presets come at the cost of halving the frame rate. Now, RE7 is the kind of game you can play at 30fps for the sake of its intentionally slow gameplay. But once you get used to the buttery-smooth 60fps of performance mode, you’ll struggle to use any of the other presets, no matter how nice they look.
If you think otherwise, you might want to go for the balanced preset. The graphical preset looks much better, but it often fails to hit 30fps, even at the lowest resolution. Also, the phone’s hardware gets pretty warm while playing, as these presets put a lot of strain on the phone.
One final note on visuals concerns HDR. RE7 on iOS takes advantage of the excellent HDR displays on the iPhone 15 Pro models. However, the game is even more aggressively dark in HDR, making it only suitable for playing in dimly lit or completely dark environments. If you’re having trouble seeing things, you can turn HDR off at the expense of some brightness and contrast in the highlights. You can also further calibrate the image in SDR, which you can’t do in HDR.
RE7 features touchscreen controls similar to the previous two RE games on the platform. The controls work reasonably well at first if you’re mostly just walking around and not firing weapons. However, once you’ve got weapons, it’s difficult to aim, shoot, and move all at once, since these are essentially controller buttons overlaid on a touchscreen. The game flatly recommends using a controller every time you launch it, so it might be best to take that recommendation seriously. And no, there’s no mouse and keyboard support.
Finally, RE7 on iPhone supports iCloud cloud storage and syncing. It’s a universal app that works across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS after purchase, and your saves can be synced and accessed across all of those platforms. As before, you can’t transfer your saves from other platforms like Steam.
Overall, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard is an impressive title on the iPhone. The game’s age and bright visuals help it perform like a champ even on this pocket-sized device, and the visuals are perfectly viable on the small screen. All while being one of the best horror games ever made. With all that in mind, RE7 on the iPhone gets an easy recommendation. Just make sure you bring a controller and a spare pair of pants.