Capcom has had several excellent video game releases this year, and there are more hot titles on the way. If you can tear yourself away from Resident Evil 4, its Separate Ways DLC, or Street Fighter 6, you can free yourself to crush prosecutors in crazy courtroom capers or slay monsters in the coming weeks and months. We put three upcoming Capcom titles through their paces at a recent Capcom showcase including Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, Dragon's Dogma 2, and Resident Evil Village for iPad and iPhone.
(Credit: Capcom)Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy
Capcom’s Ace Attorney games are a series of comedic visual novels centered on courtroom drama, with supernatural sleuthing thrown into the mix for narrative spice. The franchise debuted in 2001 on the Game Boy Advance and has enjoyed multiple sequels and ports since then. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy follows Phoenix Wright’s apprentice, the titular Apollo Justice, who must defend his clients from an eccentric cast of prosecutors.
The three games included in the trilogy are Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies, and Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice. Capcom has given the three games a graphical facelift, with delightfully sharp models and brighter visuals than the Nintendo DS and 3DS originals. The trilogy also features minor improvements for smoother and more accessible play. This includes a backlog system that lets you review previously read text; a chapter selection feature so you can replay your favorite episodes; and a story mode that auto-plays the game, so you can sit back and enjoy the plot.
Besides the obvious graphical improvements that looked clean and beautiful on a docked Nintendo Switch, the gameplay remains relatively unchanged. The demo required lots of reading, with a focus on evidence inspection and witness corroboration. Despite how dry that sounds, the Ace Attorney titles are charming, and their comedic elements add levity to the tragedy that these legal dramas entail. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy heads to Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One on January 25, 2024.
Our Favorite Capcom Games You Can Play Right Now
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (for PC) Review
3.5 GoodMonster Hunter Rise (for PC) Review
4.5 OutstandingResident Evil 4 (Remake) Review
5.0 ExemplaryResident Evil Village (for PC) Review
4.0 ExcellentStreet Fighter 6 Review
5.0 Exemplary See all (5 items) (Credit: Capcom)Dragon’s Dogma 2
This dark action-RPG looks and plays like the original Dragon's Dogma, so if you’re a fan of that game, you'll probably dig this one. You play as the Arisen, a cursed warrior who ventures across a supernatural fantasy world to slay a reborn dragon. You defeat monsters using one of four starting vocations (archer, fighter, mage, or thief), each with their own unique skills and weapon styles. Aside from a few remapped controls, the core mechanics remain faithful to its predecessor.
Skills are powerful strikes with added effects and special properties that you can mix into your vocation's basic combos. For example, the fighter's Blink Strike is a useful gap-closing lunge. The limit of six skills per class felt restrictive in the original game, so contending with a mere four in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is even more disappointing.
There has been some integration of these skills into your core move set, as situational attacks. Skyward Lash, a high-striking attack meant for aerial foes, now automatically occurs whenever you use a basic attack combo on an airborne target. Likewise, each vocation has a finishing blow for prone enemies. Fighters perform a ferocious down-thrust on grounded foes, and archers deliver a mighty kick. We hope that many other skills from the original game are integrated into your core vocation’s move set so the four-skill limitation isn't as noticeable.
However, battling monsters is just as satisfying as it was in the original game, if not more so. Dragon’s Dogma has strong ties to classical mythology, so it features impressive representations of fabled beasts that are as faithful as they are grotesque. These creatures cohabitate with humanity and other sapient tribes, though generally cause trouble more often than not. In one portion of the Dragon's Dogma 2 demo, a griffon descended upon livestock near the outskirts of town, while ogres menaced travelers outside the city. Dragon's Dogma 2 even has interactions between monsters, a feature not in the original game. For example, during one of the TGS showcases, a saurian lizard-man attempts to spear a wayward harpy. It all serves to give the world a lived-in charm.
Monsters look awesome in action thanks to the game’s distinct art direction, which is faithfully inspired by medieval heraldic artwork. There's a Monster Hunter-like quality to the larger boss encounters. Every creature is exquisitely animated and thoroughly engrossing to fight, and we did our best to seek them all out during our demo session. We found an ogre, a cyclops, and two griffons during our time, but other players in our group discovered a minotaur (a new addition to the series). A Capcom representative mentioned that the demo contained a drake, but we did not find it.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is tremendous fun, despite our reservations about the skill limitation. Attacks are easy to execute, and the monster variety and their robust vulnerabilities offered much combat nuance. The downside? The frame rate wildly varied in the demo we played, depending on the on-screen action. However, Dragon's Dogma 2 has no official release date yet, so there is potential for improvement from now until launch. The game is expected to release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
(Credit: Capcom)Resident Evil Village (for iPad and iPhone)
Compatible with the iPad Pro (2021 or later), the iPad Air (2022), and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, Resident Evil Village returns to haunt Apple’s handheld devices in all its gory glory. We fired up a pre-release build running on the iPad Pro and were impressed by the game’s visual fidelity on the tablet's relatively small screen. Our curated demo, which covered Village's opening hours when Ethan encounters the Lycans, played out just as it did when it first launched on consoles and PC in 2021. In fact, its jump to Apple’s mobile hardware hasn’t changed much in terms of gameplay, which is incredibly impressive.
The mobile version seems strikingly similar to the Mac port released last year. That release included MetalFX support, and it’s found here, too. MetalFX is Apple’s answer to AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and Nvidia DLSS. It acts similarly to those technologies, rendering frames at a lower resolution and then upscaling them. It’s what helps graphically demanding games maintain high resolutions and frame rates on lower-end hardware.
A quick look at the game’s settings revealed multiple options to maximize performance, visuals, or find a sweet spot in between (there were options for variable frame rates, as well as 60 and 120 frames per second caps). A small window displays an example of the image with settings applied, plus how much of the iPad’s bandwidth is being utilized across the games’ system.
Why You Should Game on a PCHowever, playing Resident Evil Village proved challenging, as we encountered significant input delay; the provided Xbox controller and touch-screen controls had just enough lag to miss a shot. Hopefully, that's something that can be amended prior to the game’s launch. Otherwise, this new release is almost identical to the previous one and makes for an exceptional showcase of Apple silicon.
Resident Evil Village will set you back $40 and will only include the original game but not the Winters’ Expansion that includes Third-Person Mode, The Mercenaries Additional Orders, or the Shadows of Rose scenario. Those add-ons will be available at launch but will cost an additional $20. Resident Village doesn’t leverage Apple’s Universal Purchase feature (this release only covers the iPad and iPhone), but Capcom will implement cross-save functionality that will work with the Mac version. There will also be a portion of the game available for free, so you can try it before you buy it. Resident Evil Village drops on October 30.
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