There’s a version of Resident Evil: Requiem that could have been an absolute disaster. Two protagonists. Two completely different gameplay styles. A first-person horror game and a third-person action game crammed into the same package. Nostalgia bait stretched across twenty years of franchise history. On paper, it sounds like exactly the kind of bloated, identity-crisis mess that RE6 was. And yet – somehow, maddeningly – it works. Most of the time.
Resident Evil: Requiem is the best mainline entry in the series since RE4 Remake. That’s not a qualifier I throw around lightly. I’ve been with this franchise since childhood, and I went into Requiem with high expectations and a healthy amount of dread. What I got was a game that genuinely surprised me – not because it reinvented itself, but because of how confidently it synthesized everything the series has been building toward. It’s a greatest hits album. The question is whether a greatest hits album can also be a masterpiece. The answer here is almost.
Two Games, One Vision
The central gamble of Requiem is splitting its runtime between Grace – a new FBI agent navigating the Chronic Care Center in slow, suffocating horror – and Leon, who gets the full RE4 Remake action-hero treatment, only more fluid and more aggressive than anything he’s done before. Leon’s combat toolkit in this game is the best it has ever been. The movement, the animations, the feel of every weapon – all of it is tuned to a level I didn’t think was possible coming off RE4 Remake.
What makes the back-and-forth between these two characters work is exactly what you’d expect: contrast. Grace’s sections are tense, slow, and resource-scarce. You’re always underpowered, always listening for footsteps, always one bad decision away from burning through your last ink ribbon. Then the game hands control to Leon, and the release is palpable – he barrels through enemies with a confidence that feels almost cathartic after Grace’s claustrophobic crawl. I was never in a section wishing I was playing the other character. Both halves kept pulling me forward.
That said, one of the most promoted pre-release mechanics – the idea that your choices with one character would meaningfully impact the other’s experience – largely didn’t materialize. Enemies you leave behind, environmental interactions that carry over – the promise was there, but in practice the two storylines rarely intersect in a gameplay sense. It’s a missed opportunity, and it keeps the dual-protagonist concept from reaching its full potential.
A smaller frustration: Leon’s finisher animations – those brutal, close-range gun assassinations shown in pre-release footage – are wildly inconsistent. I saw them a couple of times randomly early on and almost never again. I still don’t fully understand what triggers them. I suspect it’ll click on a second playthrough, but on a first run, it felt like a mechanic the game kept forgetting about.
Grace and the Weight of Being New
Grace is the heart of Requiem, and the game knows it. Her sections carry the horror identity of the whole experience – and they deliver. The stalker enemy that haunts her throughout the Chronic Care Center is one of the best additions to the franchise in years. It’s a direct spiritual successor to Lisa Trevor from the REmake – relentless, unsettling, and designed to make you feel genuinely hunted. The sections it appears in have an Alien: Isolation quality to them: you’re doing your best to avoid it while completing objectives, and every encounter raises your pulse.
Grace’s upgrade system – antique coins exchanged at a parlor – is interesting in concept, but it quietly disappears after the first act. The parlor vanishes, the coins stop appearing, and Grace just… continues without it. What makes this easier to accept than it probably should be is that you can still use leftover coins for crafting later in the game during Grace’s sections, so it’s not a complete dead end. But structurally, it feels like a feature that lost its nerve halfway through. The result is an uneven split: Grace upgrades in the first third, Leon upgrades for the rest of the game.
Grace’s story arc also suffers in the back half. What starts as a compelling character study gets somewhat sidelined as the plot shifts focus. Story beats that should develop her feel like contrivances to keep her out of the way rather than meaningful character moments. Leon’s emotional arc – a grizzled veteran confronting mortality, guilt, and two decades of loss – feels more thoroughly realized. Grace deserved equal weight, and doesn’t always get it.
Raccoon City, Again – and It Still Hits
I felt excitement returning to Raccoon City again. The game is roughly split 50/50 between the Chronic Care Center and Raccoon City, and when the latter opens up, it is the best part of the entire game. The environment rewards exploration, the atmosphere is thick with franchise history, and – importantly – Capcom actually followed through on something they planted seeds for across multiple games. They went back and finished an idea. That’s not something they always do, and it’s genuinely appreciated.
One thing Requiem quietly removed that I felt more than I expected to: the map completion color system. In previous entries, areas would shift color once you’d cleared every collectible and point of interest – a simple but effective signal that told you when to move on. Without it, I found myself less compelled to sweep rooms thoroughly. In a strange way, it freed me from that obsessive completionist burden, and I moved through the game at a more natural pace. Whether that’s a loss or a gain probably depends on the player.
A Story That Earns Its Nostalgia – Mostly
The story is lore-heavy in the best possible way. The callbacks to Spencer, Umbrella, and the roots of the Raccoon City incident all land with real weight for long-time fans. The files are well-written. The voice acting and motion capture across the board are the best in the series – possibly the best in any RE game, surpassing even RE4 Remake. Grace, Leon, Emily, and Victor are all given performances that elevate the material.
Then there’s Zeno – presumably a Wesker clone, and one of the most intriguing threads in the game – who never gets a proper boss fight. That’s a significant missed opportunity. A character that fascinating deserved a real confrontation, not just the ending he gets.
The bad ending deserves a mention. Leon’s death ending reads less like a meaningful alternative and more like a curiosity – abrupt, unceremonious, and immediately undercut by the game itself. I don’t think it was meant to be taken as canon. But in a strange way, it’s the closest this franchise may ever come to letting Leon die, and there’s something quietly poignant about that. Make of it what you will.
Boss Fights and the Parry Problem
On my first playthrough, I went in focused on the story and experience rather than the difficulty challenge – and on Standard Classic, the game largely lets you do that. But Leon’s parry system is so generous and responsive that, by the final boss, I was mashing L1 through nearly every attack before dumping bullets into a weak point. The finale felt less like a climax and more like a formality. That’s not how a final boss should feel.
I’ll also note: Grace has no boss fights at all. Every boss encounter belongs to Leon. That’s a structural choice that reinforces the action/horror split, but it does mean Grace’s sections lack a certain kind of punctuation – the cathartic, high-stakes confrontation that would cap off her horror arc. I suspect Insanity Mode tightens a lot of this up with restricted parry windows and more aggressive enemy behavior. I haven’t gone there yet. But on a first run, the boss design is the weakest part of the package.
The Soundtrack Deserves Its Own Paragraph
I’ll keep this brief because it doesn’t need much analysis: this is the best Resident Evil soundtrack since RE4 Remake. Leon’s sections pulse with heavy, industrial darkness. Grace’s sections haunt you with something more delicate and unsettling. The save room theme is immediately iconic. The sound design – enemy audio, environmental ambience, dialogue mix – is superb throughout. This is a game that rewards headphones.
Replayability: More There Than It Looks
At launch, Requiem is lighter on post-game content than some of its predecessors. There’s no Mercenaries mode, no second campaign. If you’re measuring it against RE2 Remake – which remains the gold standard for replayability in the modern era – it doesn’t quite match up. But there’s still Insanity Mode waiting for those who want a genuinely brutal revisit, and I’m currently chasing the speedrun trophy, which has given the game a completely different energy on repeat runs. Whether that’s enough will depend on what you’re looking for.
Final Verdict
Resident Evil: Requiem is a game that pulls off something I genuinely didn’t think was possible: it synthesizes twenty years of franchise identity into a single, cohesive experience without collapsing under its own weight. It feels like RE2. It feels like RE4. It feels like RE7. It even feels, in some corners, like RE6 – but the version of RE6 that could have been great. And unlike RE6, the whole thing actually holds together.
Its weaknesses are real: the dual-character impact mechanic didn’t deliver on its promise, Grace’s arc loses momentum in the second half, the boss fights are too easy on standard difficulty, and Zeno’s absence as a proper final confrontation is a genuine letdown. But none of these break the experience. They just keep it from being perfect.
What lingers after the credits roll is the feeling of coming home – not to a place that’s comfortable, but to one that’s familiar and still capable of surprising you. Raccoon City, again. Leon, again. But with enough new blood, new ideas, and new dread to make it feel earned.
8.5 out of 10. The best mainline Resident Evil in twenty years – and I say that knowing exactly how much weight that carries.
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