Looking for a comprehensive Resident Evil Requiem Review? We’ve got you covered! The return of the iconic survival horror game has arrived, and with its return, a new threat looms over the survivors of Raccoon. Here is our Resident Evil Requiem Review.
Developed and published by Capcom, this survival horror adventure delves into a biological threat that can tell a harrowing new story for once rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy. Follow the threads which take him on a journey to investigate a new threat, this time a global one, which is the least of his worries as survivors of Raccoon start to die. Joined by Special FBI Analyst Grace Ashcroft, the 2 of them have an intertwined fate which leads them down a road where Raccoon City’s ashes are still a fresh memory.
STORY
Starting the game, you get introduced to the new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, an FBI Intelligence Analyst who is being sent into the field to investigate the latest victim. The bad part of this deal is that she is being sent to the Wrenwood Hotel, which is where her mother died 8 years before. Once the player takes control, the weather is abysmal with rain coming down, and a very unfriendly atmosphere on the street, even to the point where a clone of Mr X bumps into Grace.
As Grace’s section of the game gets underway, she finds that the Wrenwood Hotel is just a trap to get her there and meet with a mysterious, shrouded man, Victor Gideon. Upon meeting with him, Grace is kidnapped, and the game switches you over to playing as Leon, who is just arriving at the Wrenwood Hotel, just in time to see Gideon carrying Grace out.
As events unfold, Grace and Leon’s paths cross, and they eventually find their way to the infamous origin of the pharmaceutical company and Bio-weapon creator, Umbrella. Welcoming Leon home to Raccoon City, changed and decimated, it holds a whole assortment of nasties waiting from spiders to legions of zombies. Raccoon City is the vacation destination for anyone, right? Realistically, Raccoon is when the game switches, in a sense, from Grace being the Focus to Leon, and things start getting more action-packed.
Mechanics, Graphics, & Technical things
Mechanically, the game functions as a combination of Resident Evil 7/8 and Resident Evil 2/3 Remakes, depending on how you prefer to play the game. The reason for this is the difference in the perspective of play, defaultly the game wants you to play Grace’s sections as a First Person, whereas Leon’s are designed for a Third Person. This is to do with the player’s preference and how you would like to handle the game as a whole, but this was my preference.
The typical mechanical elements of the game are locomotion, interaction, and combat. Not much is different between the two playable characters; however, things slightly differ in combat situations and puzzles. While combat for Grace is more clumsy and handled through the First Person Perspective (if you picked this), Leon has way more deliberate and meaningful motions. How this is meant to be reflected is as simple as Experience. Grace is an Intelligence analyst with little field exposure; Leon, on the other hand, is a 30-year veteran who has combatted the threat of bioterrorism countless times, even having survived Raccoon City. Experience is also reflected in the way in which the characters react to the world around them. Leon, having a background in fighting bioterrorism, knows not to react to absolutely everything that moves, even if it’s trying to kill him; he only reacts to threats and strategically drops them without too much to worry about. Grace, on the other hand, jumps at almost everything, and is more of a damsel in distress character, which Sherry is in the Resident Evil 2 Remake. While Grace knows she needs to stay calm and collected, both her lack of experience and her history make her a perfect character to play the starring role in a horror game, if not a little irritating at times.
One of the most unsettling parts of the game was when I was playing as Grace. This came about when I revisited an area I had previously cleared of hostile entities and figured I was safe… big mistake that turned out. One of the dead undead decided to stand up and attack me while I was trying to work out if it was a dead zombie, as opposed to the undead zombies walking around. This shouldn’t be confused with the Mutated Zombies, which look like their heads are swollen.
Although there are dual protagonists for the game and the game switches you at the required timing, there are specific interesting sequences of mechanics for each Leon and Grace. For Grace, who is a timid and withdrawn character who jumps at her own shadow, she has the Blood Collector. Leon, on the other hand, has a powerful melee trait letting him devastate enemies and parry attacks with a combat axe. Both are interesting to use; the blood collector is used to gain crafting resources for Grace, and Leon has the ability to quickly dispatch enemies who are either stunned from gunfire or melee, meaning he doesn’t need to waste bullets on undead masses. Another thing that Leon has is the Kill Tracker, which keeps count of the kills you make as Leon, and it rewards you with points you can use to level up your weapons.
One thing which I need to highlight is a spesific animations for Grace. The reason for this being highlighted is the fact that I played the game from Grace’s perspective in First Person, meaning that this animation was in full view all the time, and it got irritating. The animation I am referring to is when you ADS as Grace in First Person with the torch out. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the way she brings her Left hand to support the gun feels all wrong, but that is probably because it breaks the immersion of the game. Because it is easier to show you, there is a GIF below showing going to and from ADS, which has been slowed to show what I mean. Basically, when you have something in both hands, you have 2 options: the first is to drop one item, and the second is to combine actions. Grace does the latter in an attempt to keep the light pointing in the direction she is aiming while stabilising the gun to be able to shoot. This is all well and good, but because of how the animation plays, she would have dropped the torch. It would be far easier for her to adopt Leon’s method of aiming with a gun and torch, but as is stated, Grace isn’t a field agent.
Graphics-wise, it’s impressive, characters look real, and the dark, spooky environments of the game look like you wouldn’t want to walk their halls without being lit up like a Christmas tree. The way the motions work is nice as well. In the early game, when you regain control over Leon in the attic, Gideon brushes Leon’s hair, and it is made to look like the hair is separated into strands, adding to the depth of the graphical power the PS5 can output. Likewise, zombies have cloth physics and hair physics, so if there is draping cloth on them, it will react after a skeletal motion rather than at the time the motion is performed. Resident Evil 2/3 Remakes had this as well, however, in Requiem it feels more true to reality.
One of the really nice graphical things is that the containers of liquid actually show the liquid moving inside the bottle in the inspection viewer. While it is only a tiny thing in relation to the way the game works and plays, it is a really nice one, which adds a bit of depth. We have seen this most prominently in the GTA 6 trailer, and more and more games, at least from my personal experience, have been simulating this effect, much the same as the jiggle physics. In a way, we can classify the Hair physics under that jiggle physics as moving produces a form of reaction out of physics-based rigged systems, such as hair.
Although a small part of the game, since its confind to Rhodes Hill, I wanted to include it so no one else needs to. Once you take control of Grace, you can find a lighter, which will illuminate the very dark and treacherous world of the hospital you have been brought to. Since it’s a lighter, I wanted to try burning things like in Indiana Jones or something, but sadly, the light will not burn things like the plants to give some more light to the world… and believe it, you will want a lot of light to fend off the blind monster. Still, although it didn’t work, it throws some nice shadows and light-based effects over the world.
Before we close the Graphics section, it is worth noting that at the very beginning of the game, you are able to see that the glasses which Grace is wearing reflect the computer screen. Why is this important, you wonder? Well, later in the game, when you have control over either Leon or Grace, you can find glass or mirrors, which won’t reflect your character and look murky. Unlike Glass and Mirrors, through the game, we also have water reflections in Wrenwood at the beginning. Which show some reflections of people and the world, remember water is dependent on the angle you are to what is reflected, unlike glass. In addition to the water reflections, there is also a nice material overlay of rain landing on characters if you are close enough to them to catch it.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, Requiem, out of all the Resident Evil games I have played, is probably the best. I might have only started on Res 2 (the remake) and missed the spin-off games and Res 4 (all the way) to this point, but Requiem was a thrill from start to end. It also threw some strange aspects into the mix, which made me sit back and think about the effect of the game as a whole, like the battle outside the quarantine zone of Raccoon with the Giant Spider (don’t worry, we don’t plan on showing our multilegged friend).
Other aspects which are thrown in are characters like the infamously returning father of the Umbrella Corp, Oswell Spencer. Although Spencer is long dead by this point, killed by the hands of Albert Wesker and shown to the player in Resident Evil 5 through a flashback that Chris Redfield has, Oswell Spencer’s legacy thrives and even plays a role in Biohazard and Village… surprisingly enough. Who would have thought that 30 years on from the incident in Raccoon City, the beginning would signify the end, and that it was all tied to the founder of Umbrella? Whether some plot that was dreamt up back when the original games came out or something that the team felt like they needed to close off Requiem’s story isnt as straightforward as it seems, and I really enjoyed the twists and turns it took, but I will say this, if this was dreamt up back when the Raccoon incident in 2 happened in 1998, this story was worth the wait with 1 major flaw. This one problem is only a personal thing, but instead of a game which pulled Leon Kennedy back to Raccoon, I would have liked a story which saw the survivors of Raccoon returning. Meaning Leon, Jill, Clair, and Sherry all return to where it all started for them to find something Umbrella had buried deep under the city. That’s not to say Requiem isn’t worth it, because it’s probably a way better story than having the survivors returning, but it seems like it should have been personal for the aforementioned, at the very least.
Getting back to Requiem, one of the biggest things which kept me guessing was Gideon, at least until Grace makes it out of Rhodes Hill. This was because of Gideon’s impact in both the trailers and the connection to Grace, which was only amplified when Leon and Gideon met in the streets of Wrenwood. This all changed once you enter Raccoon, as you get exposed to certain individuals who shed light on what’s actually going on, and a clearer picture of Requiem’s story falls into place, ironic really.
As a side note, if you are familiar with the Resident Evil 2 remake, you will know that there is a Tofu Survivor mode. This is more of a joke character mode where you play as a person-sized block of tofu in a beret… yes, this is much like the S.T.A.R.S. team. Back to the point, once you arrive at RPD in Raccoon City and you are going through the remains of the building, you can find, down the corridor behind the office Leon would have resided in, the Tofu Survivor, making an appearance out of the collapsed section of the building.
One thing I haven’t touched on is the settings, and they really are packed with things to alter the way you play. One of the biggest things is when you boot the game up, which is you are asked to input your age. This is the first game I have played with this option, and although it doesn’t seem to do anything and is easy to bypass (which we do NOT advise if you are underage), I have to wonder what the purpose of this was. If it were checking the age on a user account, it would need to access the system information for Sony/ Microsoft, etc. because now to have online functionality, we need to provide user age verification on the system to use community tools, this is what I would expect this to be tied to. However, instead, you just input a number for your age. Other settings that caught my attention are the fact that you can change the Movement Type between walking and running, Dot Sight Perspective, which is when you aim with a weapon that has a dot sight, and you will either go into first person or stay in third person. The final setting, which is interesting, was the Item Pop-up. This controls what an item will do when you interact with it for the first time, typically in Resident Evil games. When you interact with an item for the first time, you will have it pop up on screen so you can look at it. This setting will let you set this viewer for the first time, interacting with all the items you pick up or only the important ones.
Overall, Requiem isn’t the Resident Evil game I would have liked, but it is the one we got, and it blasts through any, and all expectations to deliver what should feel like Leon’s last outing. Pacing for the game is good with events not happening too fast or too slow, and zombies tend to keep the player guessing, so you would always feel uneasy. Bosses and metabosses are also well designed, as they are not too difficult or too easy to combat, all with their own weaknesses and patterns. The likes of the blind hunter in Garce’s Campaign and Tyrant in Leon’s come to mind.
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