Resident Evil 4 VR getting Mercenaries mode free next year

The alert folks at Biohazard Declassified spotted a trailer for Resident Evil 4 VR that was seemingly uploaded to the Oculus YouTube channel ahead of time and quickly set to private, but not before they ripped a copy and uploaded it themselves. As you can see above, it announces that the fan-favorite Mercenaries mode will be coming in 2022 as a "free update on Meta Quest 2". (Yep, the Oculus Quest is being renamed the Meta Quest as part of the Facebook company rebranding to Meta.)

Virtual reality

(Image credit: Valve)

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Mercenaries is the arcade-action mode that's been sporadically present throughout the Resident Evil series, coming and going unpredictably. After being left out of RE7 and the remakes of RE2 and RE3, it was back in Resident Evil Village and as tense as ever—though it was a purely singleplayer mode, since presumably Capcom plans to cater to multiplayer fans with Village's delayed six-player bonus spin-off Re:Verse. The trailer doesn't mention whether RE4VR's Mercenaries mode will have multiplayer or not.

In the original Resident Evil 4, Mercenaries was available as an unlockable extra after finishing the campaign. The two other unlockables, Assignment Ada and Separate Ways, are also absent in the VR version. It sure would be nice if they showed up as well, and while we're dreaming Resident Evil Village would be amazing in VR.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.