iPhone 15 Pro to get 'console versions' of Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, more

The iPhone 15 series may be the dictionary definition of playing things safe, but Apple’s Pro-tier phones do appear to have one pretty impressive selling point: they’re powerful enough to play “console versions” of AAA video games, including two beloved Resident Evil titles, and the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Mirage.

At its “Wonderlust” 2023 event, the Cupertino giant briefly touched on the power of the custom iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max’s A17 Pro chipset, touting USB 3 support, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, an AV1 encoder, and much more. What came as a surprise, however, was the announcement that Resident Evil Village (essentially Resident Evil 8, for those unfamiliar with the franchise) and 2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake will both debut on the iPhone 15 Pro series later in 2023.

Capcom’s two survival horror games will also be joined in early 2024 by Assassin’s Creed Mirage. The open-world adventure game is set to launch on modern consoles and PC on October 4, and Apple SVP Greg Joswiak took great pleasure in announcing that this will be the first time a console version of Assassin’s Creed will be available on a smartphone. Bizarrely, this means that Mirage is confirmed for iOS, but not macOS, at the time of this writing.

And that’s not all, as Death Stranding, the delivery-stealth-sandbox oddity from Kojima Productions, has also been confirmed for iPhone 15 Pro series devices for later in 2023.

While we’ve technically seen versions of Resident Evil (including an iOS and Samsung Store-exclusive version of the original Resident Evil 4) and Assassin’s Creed on mobile, Apple’s new processor appears to be capable of delivering a step beyond what we’ve seen from mobile games so far. Sadly, Apple didn’t confirm whether the games have controller support, pricing, or any other details.

Will we see the same AAA games come to Android? We’ll have to wait and see! Regardless, we’ll be putting the A17 Pro through its paces when we can to check whether the best Android chipsets are capable of matching the level of performance needed to run such demanding games natively.