I’ve always found it a bit funny that my two favorite Resident Evil games are Resident Evil 4 Remake and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard because, at least for modern Resident Evil games, they might be the two games that are the most diametrically opposed. Biohazard is a first-person game with a heavy emphasis on horror. Resident Evil 4 is a third-person game that could almost be viewed as an action game as much as survival horror. Biohazard had some of the scariest sequences that I’ve ever seen, and Resident Evil 4 had some of the craziest pacing of any game I’ve ever played.
So everything about Resident Evil Requiem felt like it was built in a lab for my exact tastes. Requiem features new protagonist Grace Ashcroft, who is in segments that feel modeled with Biohazard in mind, and returning protagonist Leon Kennedy, who is in segments that feel modeled with Resident Evil 4 in mind.
As you would expect, it’s a fun formula. It’s nice not to be boxed into one set of gameplay principles for an entire experience. But also, it feels like Capcom did a significantly better job with one element of the equation than the other, which holds Requiem back from reaching its maximum potential.
I T-T-T-Think The G-G-Grace Segments Are Pretty G-Good.
Requiem gives you a lot of freedom to play how you want, so your experience could be pretty different depending on what you do. Outside of difficulty settings, the game also lets you decide whether to play in first or third person, which drastically alters the experience. I opted to play the way the game recommends, which is to have the Grace segments in first-person and the Leon segments in third-person. The game recommends that to accentuate the strengths of each section. Since Grace’s segments are more classic survival horror, it makes more sense to be fully immersed. Since Leon’s segments can have massive set pieces and boss fights, it’s a lot easier to play in third-person.
To me, the game’s biggest strength lies in those Grace segments. I think this is where Capcom shows the most mastery of their craft. Pretty much everything about this formula works perfectly. Playing in first-person leads to an incredibly tense atmosphere, especially early on. Your bullets are limited, so almost every shot you take feels incredibly important. Even one missed shot would lead me to feel like I made a tragic mistake early on. The way zombies move is just unpredictable enough to give shooting the perfect difficulty balancing. The area you spend the most time in with Grace is a bit of a maze, but easy enough to navigate, and the game gives you plenty of shortcuts as you continue to explore, which feel amazing to find every single time. The game also rewards thorough exploration with coins that can buy upgrades that are incredibly useful, and that also feel great to find every single time.
The game also brings plenty of frights when you play as Grace. With the first-person mode, every creak and every corner turned feels scary, as you never know what could be waiting. Zombies only “fully” die if you use a very limited and specific item on them, so even if you’ve cleared out an area, there is always the possibility of one coming back as an even tougher to kill zombie. This means that you can never feel safe.
The game also unleashes multiple jumbo sized zombies that are extremely intimidating and can completely fuck you up. Simply, when the Grace segments of the game are at their best, it is has almost everything I’d want out of a survival horror game. I’m consistently nervous, I’m watching every shot I take, and I’m searching every area thoroughly for supplies and shortcuts.
My only real complaint with the biggest Grace section comes down to a lack of communication from the game about those aforementioned giant zombies that lurk around the hospital in spots. These zombies can kill you instantly. When I first encountered them, I shot one with the most powerful gun in the game, and it didn’t kill it. This made me assume that these were unkillable monsters. I assumed this in part because it fits the genre, and the Resident Evil series is no stranger to having unkillable monsters that you have to run away from and avoid (this game itself has instances of this). However, it turns out that you can actually kill some of these zombies with the right bullets or by using a certain injection in a stealthy way.
On one hand, viewing these monsters as unkillable made the game a lot scarier. Each time I saw one, my heart would race a little faster as I avoided them. However, they also made navigating the hospital extremely annoying. A lot of times, these zombies hung out in narrow hallways where you just had to wait a bit for them to pass in order to get by. This made backtracking extremely slow, as I was constantly having to stop and wait for a monster to pass, or take very long ways around to get by them. My ignorance probably led to a few extra frights, but it also slowed the pacing down a fair bit too.
Also, because I completely avoided these monsters, I was able to stock up on way more ammo than I was probably supposed to. By the end of the biggest Grace segment, I had a pretty insane amount of ammo, which slowly killed some of what makes these segments so fun. If I don’t have to value every bullet, it makes the shooting encounters a little less intense. Usually, these games keep my ammo pretty light, even when I’m very careful. This certainly doesn’t ruin the Grace segments. I still thought they were great on the whole, and some of these issues only pop up at the very end, but I do think this aspect held these segments back a tiny bit.
Leon Voice “Well… Now He’s Really Dead”
After each Grace segment, the game switches to Leon, who is an over the top badass. My only problem with the Leon segments early on is that they were a bit too short. The pacing in his first few segments gets absolutely insane in the best Resident Evil 4 type of way. There are multiple big fights with a seemingly never ending stream of zombies coming at you, or tricky boss fights that test your aim and movement ability. But I felt like they were always over before I could truly feel like I was engrossed in them.
That changes midway through the game, when you finally get to play as Leon for an extended stretch. Unfortunately, and much to my surprise, this turns into easily the worst segment of the game. It’s not atrociously bad or anything. I’d still say it’s fine and has a few genuinely great moments, but this segment mostly misses what I think most of us would want and expect from a Leon segment. The area that you explore is huge. It’s very wide with several buildings that have multiple levels and lots of twists and turns. It’s easy to get lost and spend a fair bit of time just wandering around while fighting the occasional zombies. There are still moments where the pacing picks up big time, but it’s way less often than I would have expected. This segment feels like a much more prototypical survival horror segment, but it also isn’t particularly scary, and that’s not great.
For whatever reason, the game never fully recovers after this segment, for both the Leon and Grace segments. You end up with a big set-piece moment that should have been cool as hell, but it never really gets to the levels of something like the Resident Evil 4 mine cart ride. The game throws out some moments that long time fans might appreciate, but the level design continuously gets weaker from there as well. This culminates in a final area that is decent enough from a gameplay perspective, but also really takes away almost all of the tension that the game had in earlier levels. It is also very weak from an exploration perspective. I felt like the bosses in the back half of the game are considerably weaker than some of the earlier ones as well. There are also a few other segments where the game has you fighting enemies that are a fair bit more mobile, which does not work great with the generally clunky movement that you purposefully have in these games. There is also a non-combat segment that just didn’t really do it for me.
Once again, I wouldn’t say the game is ever bad, even in its weakest moments. The core gameplay in Requiem is good enough to carry the game no matter what the design is around it. But it is genuinely sad how the game reaches some incredible highs and then never gets there again.
Leon Shed A Single Tear When They Nuked The Only Hollister In Raccoon City
I felt somewhat similarly about the story. Requiem is probably the most engaged I have ever been with a Resident Evil story (I generally find them completely uninteresting), but my enthusiasm slowly faded over time. The game slowly gets more and more in the weeds with its past lore as you go. It could be interesting if you are someone who is super plugged into the entire series’ history, but as someone who has never found it all that great, the deeper in it went, the less into it I was.
Requiem’s main goal seems to be to tell a new story while still tying in the past. Grace is a brand new character in the series, but she is also the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, who was in the Resident Evil Outbreak games. Grace is probably the first Resident Evil character that I have ever cared about. Most characters in this series just don’t work for me. I tend to find them either too stereotypical, too over the top, or just plain boring (hi, Ethan Winters). Grace actually felt real in a way a lot of characters in this series don’t tend to. She carries a lot of trauma and reacts to all of the crazy shit going on around her in a way that actually makes sense. I mostly enjoyed her performance as well, as Angela Sant’Albano feels appropriately nervous and terrified at the situation she is in. Admittedly, the over the top stuttering gets a little old, especially after Grace has thrown Molotov cocktails and shot hundreds of zombies, but she is by far the most grounded Resident Evil character that I have ever seen, and this made me feel even more engaged with her segments.
Leon remains likable enough as a grizzled vet who has seen a bit too much and clings to his boy band haircut no matter what. However, the game’s occasional attempts at giving Leon some emotional depth never quite work, and Nick Apostolides delivers Leon’s patented one-liners with such little enthusiasm that they couldn’t even make me smile in an ironic way. In terms of gameplay, story, and character, I found myself significantly more interested in the Grace segments.
The Next Resident Evil Game Will Be RE10. Or REX. T-Rex. Prepare For Leon Fighting Dinosaurs.
Requiem is no doubt a very good video game. Capcom knows how to make these games. The core loop of satisfying exploration mixed with tension and strong gunplay still works really well. I haven’t even mentioned how strong the visuals and sound design are. Unfortunately, while Capcom seems to mostly have a great handle on what made Resident Evil 7 Biohazard a great game, they seemed to have forgotten what made Resident Evil 4 amazing the further in they went. I was excited for Requiem as a combination of my two favorite Resident Evil games, and I ended up wishing they had just leaned harder into making a “Biohazard 2” with Grace instead.
I think this formula has an insane amount of potential and promise, and I’d like them to continue to attempt to make more games in the series in this fashion. But at least this time around, one half clearly shines a lot brighter than the other.
Score: 8.0/10
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