Resident Evil: Requiem is filled with winking reminders of previous games, so I was surprised the touchstone I kept coming back to was the one Capcom surely want me to forget: Resident Evil 6. The latter set out with bold aspirations. It took all the various reinventions the series had adopted throughout the years and spliced them into one giant hunk of Resident Evil meat, hoping it would mutate into a grisly hybrid that could channel all the styles of previous experiments. Sadly, the Resi 6 Golem also dined out on ideas from Call Of Duty and Michael Bay movies, creating more of a shallow frat bro than an ultimate life form. All these years later, Requiem feels like Capcom picking up the scalpel to take another crack at that ambitious goal.
It’s pulled in various test subjects, but the core elements are the skin-crawling dread of Resident Evil 7 and the karate-kicking action of Resident Evil 4 Remake. On the whole, Requiem’s Golem is a stronger hybrid than Resi 6. The initial six or so hours of its lifespan are a triumph, trapping me under the weight of its oppressive horror before letting me slip free to get sweet revenge in a flurry of hyper-violence. The game starts to disintegrate into messy chunks shortly after, but those opening few hours are absolutely worth letting this prototype out of the lab.
Requiem’s tale initially drops us into the quaking boots of all-new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft – a jittery, untested FBI agent who could be bowled over by the squeaks of a particularly yappy mouse. As the curtain goes up, Grace’s senior officer has the splendid idea of sending her out to investigate a series of murders connected to her past.
This forces Grace down a dark path of secrets, which eventually land her in the sterile halls of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Centre, where the first half of Requiem takes place. While Grace has a little more to her than the talking plank that was Ethan Winters, her evolution from bumbling scaredy cat to hardened survivor never really landed for me in a meaningful way. However, my indifference did not extend to her gameplay.
Her first major section takes place in a small nurse’s station. I got to work doing Resident Evily things, amassing various bits to combine with certain bobs so I could open doors to find more bits and bobs to mash together. But after I traversed a particularly spooky corridor with naught but a shoddy lighter in hand, a 10-foot hag with bulbous eyes emerged from the darkness and tried to use my limbs as chew toys. My new friend, simply known as “The Girl,” kept cutting me off by slithering through walls, as Requiem’s phenomenal sound design made crystal clear when I knocked a bottle on the floor and heard the ceiling creak in response.
Cue a tense cat-and-mouse game that sets the stage perfectly for Grace’s main portion of the story, which is the closest Capcom has gotten to an old-school Resident Evil in years. After shaking my hungry playmate, I set out to leave this sanitary hellscape, exploring its corridors, unlocking rooms, completing puzzles and scrounging through blood-spattered bathrooms for stray bullets or edible shrubbery. Part and parcel for Resident Evil – but Grace isn’t a seasoned veteran with a shiny S.T.A.R.S. badge on her lapel. Even a standard zombie can summon the dreaded game-over screen if it gets a few chomps in.
One of Grace’s very first encounters is against a zombified chef, one of the many special zombies around the Care Centre cursed to continue working a minimum wage job, despite having worms gnawing at their brains. Wearing my Resident Evil veteran status proudly, I tried to run past this beefy unit instead of meticulously sneaking around him. In return, he slammed a cleaver into my neck and sent me straight back to the typewriter.
It was a formative ass-wooping that I definitely needed, because Grace’s campaign is all about using your head to solve problems rather than the end of a barrel. Ammo is so limited and enemies so dangerous that I had to refer to the tricks in my dusty Resident Evil 1 playbook, sneaking around any shambling ghouls that didn’t block my progress and letting them stake their claim on certain rooms I knew I could avoid. Honestly, I loved it. This is my favourite flavour of Resident Evil, when fear is instilled into you through little more than an empty pistol chamber and some pained groans moving closer to the room you’re hiding in.
The only real issue with Grace’s nail-biting segments is that I wanted more. None of its puzzles lingered long enough to give me the brain click I was craving. The game reintroduces Resident Evil 1 Remake’s infamous Crimson Heads, now known as Blister Heads, but they never get the time to become the absolute bastards their predecessors were.
There’s also The Girl, who, despite being the series’ most memorable stalker enemy since Nemesis, is sorely underused. She’s in the game for short bursts, but every time I’d see her towering form slither down from the ceiling, rising up into a twitching silhouette, I would proceed to have the most nightmarish twenty minutes of my life. She’s really a Lisa Trevor for a new age, and how ironic, considering The Girl shares the same fate of getting so little time in the spotlight.
There’s a reason Grace’s portion of the campaign can, at times, feel like it’s sprinting to the finish line. And that reason is hard to miss, considering it flexes its chiselled jawline while cruising around in a very expensive Porsche. Yes, Leon is in this game. Yes, he’s as cheesy as ever. Yes, the one-liners are back. A personal favourite came when one of Requiem’s main baddies threatened Leon with “treatment,” just for our grizzled protagonist to grimace at the camera and retort: “The silent treatment, I hope.” Requiem goes all out with the trademark Leon goofiness. He’s essentially Batman at this point, aura-farming every opportunity he gets while cracking deadpan gags that tickled me each and every time.
Although Leon gets a meaty slice of the campaign to himself, he pops up now and again during Grace’s portion with one sole purpose: to kick some ass. And ass kick he does. From his first proper section, where I went toe-to-toe with a chainsaw-wielding zombie doctor and his undead orderlies, taking his revving garden appliance and turning them all into mulch, I knew this was far and away my favourite take on Resident Evil’s action to date.
Playing Leon is like Doom meets Night Of The Living Dead by way of John Wick. His combat is essentially a streamlined version of Resident Evil 4 Remake’s, but I found the new Leon’s capabilities much easier to chain into fist-pumping combos, as I dashed between enemies popping off headshots and executing gungfu finishers. Guns feel weighty, animations are clean, and detaching a zombie’s head from its rotting spinal cord sees them sink to the floor with a satisfying thud.
Parries also return, but without all the needless faff. A hatchet you can resharpen on the fly replaces the degradable knives from RE4 Remake, allowing you to set up strings of attacks, as you deflect a zombie’s swipe, whip out your pistol to stun them, follow up with a flying kick, and then sink your axe straight into their squishy head.
In short, Leon’s sections are raw as hell and very much welcome during Grace’s story, offering a much-needed cathartic purge. There’s a terrific Leon encounter in the first half where he storms the Rhodes Hill Care Centre, patrolling the corridors Grace has been sneaking through for the last few hours. The Blister-Head that took a chunk out of my neck on the stairs? He was still standing guard when Leon arrived, flexing the fact he’d won the staircase turf war I’d conceded to preserve ammo. Man, was it a release to volley two pistol shots into his legs and bring my axe down on his swollen cranium.
Running through the entire Care Centre as a walking, quipping tank was a tale of deeply gratifying revenge. I’d built up five hours of tension, navigating those shuffling undead lurkers and mutated nasties stalking the halls. Leon burst that tension in a storm of buckshot and blood-splattering decapitations. But Leon is more than just a recurring side character in this story. While he dips in and out of the first half, he takes centre stage in the second, with Grace only briefly returning in the final stretch. From here on in, Requiem becomes a direct sequel to Resident Evil 2, with Leon embodying the grizzled veteran returning for his Old Man Logan arc.
This mid-game switch-up is tough to talk about without spoilers. It’s also bolstered by a very promising set-up. But while I enjoyed some of the set pieces that emerged in the aftermath, it quickly buckles and becomes a bloated mess. Leon is carrying the load with his deadpan bravado, but the narrative he’s given is a jumble of endless teases with no payoff, fan service with no substance, and mysteries with no answers. Even by Resident Evil standards, there’s some silly shit in here, and the ensuing nonsense gets so ridiculous that, by the end, it stops bothering to even explain itself.
Outside of the return to a beloved area highlighted in the trailers, this section dragged for me. It doesn’t help that the majority of the explorable areas outside of the Care Centre take place in a repetitive string of beige corridors inside beige buildings that lead out into beige landscapes. Shame, because Leon’s antics are anything but beige. Gleefully ripping and tearing through foes kept my interest alive through the meandering back half, but Requiem nose-dives harder and harder the longer it chugs on. Without Grace on standby, it also loses what made my trek through Rhodes Hill so gripping: a loop that pumped my veins full of dread before replacing it with adrenaline.
I sank deep into Requiem when it was purposefully managing this tension vs purge dynamic. Grace’s elongated bouts of slow-paced stealth while hoarding ammo, evading ghouls and hiding from ceiling-dwelling abominations were like teetering on a precarious sheet of glass that I always just managed to scarper across. Leon’s brief symphonies of gory carnage were like taking a hammer to that glass. They complement each other so well. When Leon starts to dominate the game, there’s still fun to be had in spite of the dragging plot, but trudging through the darkest depths of Rhodes Hill is worth the price of admission alone. If that’s a glimpse at the future of Resident Evil, I want a bigger portion that I can really sink my teeth into.