Resident Evil Requiem — Review

Score: 9/10

Thirty years into a franchise that arguably invented survival horror as a commercial genre, Capcom faced an awkward question: what does a Resident Evil game do for an anniversary? Requiem answers it by refusing to pick a lane — and somehow, that indecision becomes its greatest strength.

This is a game that spends its first half genuinely terrifying you and its second half handing you enough firepower to level a city block. It shouldn't work as well as it does.

Two Protagonists, Two Entirely Different Games

The dual-protagonist structure is the smartest thing here. Grace Ashcroft — an FBI analyst and daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft from Resident Evil Outbreak — carries the horror half, while Leon S. Kennedy takes the action half, split roughly 50-50 across a campaign that runs around nine hours on a first, thorough playthrough.

Grace's sections are the most frightening material the series has produced in years. She's slow, physically vulnerable, and starved of resources and weapons, forced into stealth through the opening areas of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center — closer in DNA to Resident Evil 7 than anything since. Her inventory is genuinely restrictive, with survival hinging on crafting tools out of whatever you scavenge from your surroundings. The sanatorium hallways where the opening hours play out contain some of the most frightening encounters in the entire series — the kind of prolonged, palpable tension that has you holding your breath without realizing it.

Then the game hands you Leon, and the tone flips completely. The back half trades held breath for raised fists, mowing down hordes of undead with the gleeful excess of a war movie. Roundhouse kicks, absurd set pieces, motorcycle chases that ignore physics entirely — it's the schlocky, over-the-top Resident Evil that has always run in parallel to the scary one.

What's impressive is that neither half feels like filler. Both are fully realized takes on what this series can be, and the transition between them lands as an escalation rather than a betrayal.

Fear Built on Powerlessness

What makes Grace's half work isn't jump scares — it's the consistent, sustained removal of your options. Ammunition is scarce enough that every shot fired is a decision you'll second-guess. Crafting materials force constant triage between what you need now and what you might need later. Enemies you can't kill have to be routed around, learned, and outlasted rather than defeated.

This is survival horror in the classical sense: the tension comes from resource management as much as anything on screen. Capcom clearly understood that the scariest thing in a Resident Evil game has never been the monster itself but the moment you realize you don't have enough bullets to deal with it. Grace's sections are built entirely around engineering that realization over and over, and they're devastatingly effective at it.

Level Design That Remembers the Old Games

The environmental design is quietly one of Requiem's biggest wins. Areas loop back on themselves in the way the best classic entries always did — locked doors that make sense hours later, shortcuts that open up and reshape how a space feels, safe rooms placed just far enough apart to make the walk between them a genuine gamble.

Returning to Raccoon City could easily have been empty nostalgia, but the version rendered here has a weight and specificity that earns its place. The city isn't presented as a museum of series history; it's presented as a wound, and the game is smart enough to let the environment carry that rather than having a character explain it.

A Genuine Masterclass in Refinement

Mechanically, this is Capcom operating with total confidence. It's the product of thirty years of accumulated lessons, and it shows — a tour de force of gameplay refinement rather than reinvention. The result is one of the most robust marriages of horror and action the series has ever attempted.

The RE Engine work is exceptional too — arguably the best use of it yet, paired with a genuinely strong script and excellent performances. Lighting does an enormous amount of the heavy lifting in the horror sections, with darkness used as a resource to be managed rather than a visual effect. Sound design is equally strong: the specific creak of something moving in an adjacent room, the shift in ambient tone when you've been noticed, the audio cues that teach you what's coming before you can see it.

Grace and Leon Actually Work Together

The pairing could easily have been a gimmick. Instead it's the emotional core. At its heart this is a story about two people whose lives were shattered by the worst day of their working lives, who then risk everything to save someone else — earnest, corny, and entirely sincere in the way this series has always been at its best. Grace's connection to a mother murdered years earlier gives her a personal stake beyond survival, while Leon arrives already ill and racing a clock he doesn't fully understand.

The two function as mirrors of each other — Leon as a reminder of where this series has been, Grace as a signpost for where it might go next. For a franchise that has spent three decades building an increasingly baroque continuity, that's an elegant way to honor the past without being trapped by it.

Grace in particular deserves credit as a new addition to a cast this established. Introducing a rookie protagonist alongside one of the most beloved characters in the series is a difficult balancing act, and she holds her own — timid and out of her depth in a way that makes her sections work mechanically, while developing enough spine across the campaign that her arc feels earned rather than assigned.

Replay Value and the Long Tail

A roughly nine-hour campaign might sound slight, but this is a series built on replayability, and Requiem leans into it. Collectibles are threaded meaningfully through the environments rather than scattered arbitrarily, files fill in continuity gaps that reward players who've been here since the beginning, and the dual-protagonist structure means a second run naturally emphasizes different things.

Knowing where the resources are fundamentally changes how Grace's half plays — what was a desperate scramble becomes a route-optimization puzzle, which is exactly the transformation the best entries in this series have always offered on repeat runs.

Where It Plays Too Safe

The plot and writing are the weakest link, and the boss battles underwhelm relative to the standard encounters. There's also a sense that the anniversary framing amounts to playing the hits rather than genuinely reflecting on the series' legacy — and for a supposed convergence point, the absence of Jill, Claire, and Ada is conspicuous.

The Verdict

Requiem isn't the bold reinvention some hoped a 30th anniversary entry might be. What it is instead is close to a perfect distillation of everything this series has ever done well — genuinely terrifying when it wants to be, gloriously stupid when it wants to be, and confident enough to be both in the same campaign without apologizing for either.

The story doesn't fully justify its own ambitions and the bosses underwhelm, but the moment-to-moment craft here is exceptional. This is arguably the strongest Resident Evil sequel in years, and a reminder that a series doesn't necessarily need to reinvent itself when it's this good at being what it already is.