Introduction
So I guess you would call me a Resident Evil fan. I didn’t really think about it until playing the most recent entry, when I began noticing all the mechanics of previous games this new one was riffing on. I've played and enjoyed to varying degrees the remakes of Resident Evil 1-4, the original Resident Evil 4, 7, and 8. Plus, I’ve opened the wiki once or twice before. But like I said, I didn’t really consider myself a fan before. Maybe it was how every game seems to end with a sour taste in my mouth, but more on that later. Point being, that when Capcom announced Resident Evil Re9uiem, the 13th mainline Resident Evil game, I knew I would play it, but I wasn’t excited per se. It was more of a yeah, that seems fun and I’ll play it if I hear good things. Months later, the game released, reviewed, and sold well, and so I decided to rent it from my local library and give it a go. Quick shout-out to your local library, by the way. Anyways, I have some notes on the experience, but my overarching note is that this is a greatest hits album in video game form.
What’s Resident Evil?
Because I said that Resident Evil Requiem is a greatest hits album in video game form one sentence ago, I feel the need to explain a bit what Resident Evil is, so my points make a little bit more sense.
Resident Evil began in 1993 with director Shinji Mikami. On the suggestion of his mentor, Mikami began working on a horror title for the PlayStation by himself at first. The next 3 years consisted of some pretty slapdash development, but eventually Resident Evil released in 1996. Despite the slapdash nature of development and some clunkiness throughout, the game was a hit and defined horror in video games for the first time. Weird camera angles, limited inventory, item management, tank controls, walking up to a crank to open a door only for it to break so you gotta walk across the entire map to find a replacement crank, finding notes on the ground of guys going “y’know maybe it was a bad idea to create giant monsters who can rip my spine out of my body,” etc. all became pillars of survival horror in games that continue to this day. The game itself featured its main characters trapped in a spooky mansion that became overrun with zombies, with that cool setup ending in an underground lab revealing the whole thing to be a conspiracy orchestrated by the Umbrella Pharmaceutical Corporation.
With this success came two more main entries and a couple of spin-offs, with Resident Evil 2 taking place in the fictional Raccoon City as Leon Kennedy arrives in the city for his first day of work, only to find it overrun with zombies, and he must navigate his escape. Cool setup that once again ends in an underground lab, with the whole event being a conspiracy caused by the Umbrella Corp. But as the entries went on, they got a little more up their ass about their own lore with more and more underground labs by Umbrella and every game ending in a fight against a wall of snot. More importantly, however, the games were becoming more action-focused as time went on. After all, it's hard to have a game about stopping global conspiracies, just about walking around scared in the dark, so the games began to have more of an action bent but never fully committed. It always started with that spooky start, but it couldn't keep it up. Ending action sections always feel kind of half-assed. With this, the games began to become bland, and they needed a change.
Then, on my birthday in 2005, Capcom released Resident Evil 4. This was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment that revolutionized video games the second time in the same series. Gone were the fixed camera angles (where the camera only showed one angle per room), and now the camera was free to move with the player’s control. There was free aiming instead of auto-aim and a full commitment to action and fun. You play as Leon Kennedy, on the search for the President’s daughter in Spain, where a village has become overrun by a cult worshipping a mind-controlling parasite. Resident Evil 4 leant into an Army of Darkness kind of campy vibe that gave it that crucial edge. Sure, it still had the Resident Evil hallmarks of picking up documents, item management, the beloved Leon Kennedy, and ending in another fucking underground lab, but it may as well have been a stand-alone title unconnected from the series. Resident Evil 4 was electrifying, and I’ve reviewed its remake and sort of the original. Both games are phenomenal, and you should play them like right now. Fuck it, I’ll stop writing to play them right now.
But with this electrifying change into a more action-oriented territory, Capcom shifted the series into increasingly more over-the-top action while taking itself more and more seriously. Once again, we’re back to the global conspiracies of the previous games as the lore begins to get up its own ass yet again. Resident Evil 5 had zombies that could wield guns and mechanics that made it feel like all the other brown, washed-out cover shooters of the day. Resident Evil 6 had explosions happening constantly and a long, underbaked story. Still ended in the lab and wall of snot, though. With a few spinoffs around the same time that reviewed poorly, the games became bland, and they needed a change.
Then, around my birthday in 2017, Capcom released Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. This game came with a first-person perspective and a brand new tight focus on survival horror. You play as newcomer Ethan Winters, who is captured and hunted by a family of hicks turned superhuman by a powerful black mold in the Louisiana bayou. Again, cool setup and in truth a great game that loses steam when it ends in an underground lab as part of a conspiracy, and you fight a big wall of snot. More games released, mostly remakes of older games, we got Resident Evil 8: Village, which had more of an action focus, and you see where I’m going with this. The Resident Evil games all kind of function in this overarching pattern, so while I enjoyed my time with Resident Evil Requiem, I am concerned for the series future.
So What’s The Cool Set Up of Resident Evil Requiem?
Grace Ashcroft, an FBI agent who’s afraid of her shadow, is sent to investigate the hotel where her mother was murdered, after a body matching the pattern of recent deaths has been found. While there, she gets captured by a big gray man named Victor Gideon. Meanwhile, series veteran Leon Kennedy is investigating the string of deaths and arrives at the hotel to find Victor Gideon leaving the scene with Grace. Leon then trails Gideon to a health care facility he runs in an effort to find out the truth behind these deaths and why he kidnapped Grace. At the facility, we see Grace and Leon take two completely different perspectives on the game as we switch between them chapter to chapter.
When you’re playing as Grace, the game is meant to be a horror game. You have the claustrophobic first-person view of Resident Evil 7 and 8, combined with a lot of mechanics from 1 and 2. You have limited inventory management, zombies that take a while to kill but can get stunned more easily, zombies that will come back stronger if you kill them, a mansion layout with a staircase in the center of the main hall, and on harder difficulties, you have the limited save mechanics of Resident Evil 1 and 2. It’s a throwback to the early tight design of the original era of Resident Evil games. And the design here is tight. I was getting quite scared trying to avoid all the zombies, as the limited ammo and health don’t make it practical to fight them, but I still had a smile on my face throughout Grace’s section. I was having fun. The new addition to the formula, one of the few, really, is that the zombies each have quirks that you can use to sneak past them or get them in a position to kill them. For instance, one likes to be in darkness and will keep flicking the lights off if you turn them on.
The scares also work for me in Grace’s section. At one point, a giant fat baby monster bursts through a wall and chases you and I, out loud, said “Jesus fucking Christ!” not loudly but y’know. The headliner of Grace’s section, which surprisingly isn’t in it that much, is an unkillable stalker monster. Harkening back to Jack Baker from Resident Evil 7. I did find this monster scary in its introduction. So much so that I felt like turning the game off and stopping. Even more so when it broke the cardinal rule of these games by bursting into a save room. However, I do think by the second or third section with the monster, you get how it works well enough to not be too scared by it. It doesn’t become annoying, but rather it becomes a decent challenge to overcome. Even if by the end I’m flash-banging the shit out of the thing and moving around it, no problem.
Ultimately, what Grace’s sections work is control. When you’re caught by a zombie, you’ll start to run away from it and maybe bump into more zombies on the way. Lose enough ammo, and you’ll be unable to shoot a zombie later on. The fuck ups pile up and make you lose control of the situation. Good horror comes from the characters not having control over the situation, not knowing what’s next, and their safety being in question, and the actions of the player can make that lack of control natural. That early section of the game is so strong for this reason. But even if you do get control of the situation by carefully planning and conserving your resources, that gain of control is fun because you feel smart for having planned those steps. Either way, control makes Grace’s section excellent.
What’s equally but differently fun is Leon’s sections. Leon gets the third-person action of Resident Evil 4-6, but mostly 4. If Grace is a horror final girl, Leon is an action star. Leon starts his section, roundhouse kicking zombies that don’t laugh at his terrible one-liners. It’s a good way to let off steam after Grace spends her section cowering in fear and sneaking around zombies, that you get to run in afterwards as Leon and shotgun blast the heads off of every zombie that stood in your way before. It’s an incredible lurch to go from 1st person horror to 3rd person action, but it works for the most part.
It’s just as much fun as it was in RE4 to suplex zombies into the pavement as it is here. Leon’s weapons have a good punch to them, and the zombies seem like they notably get downed in fewer hits from Leon than with Grace so as to not disrupt the flow. Leon practically gets all the boss fights and the action set pieces, which can be a lot of fun. Most of all, I just like Leon. He’s a good character, and hats off to his voice actor, Nick Apostolides, who has played him as the young, bright-eyed Leon in Resident Evil 2 Remake to the now grizzled 50-year-old in Requiem without ever missing a step. It shows great range on his part in making this seem like a continuous character with a large arc. I was willing to buy his arc of a guy who is reliving some part of the trauma of the events he experienced in 2. Set all that aside, however, his one-liners rock. When Victor Gideon is about to torture Leon and says “if you won’t answer my questions then I guess we’ll have to go straight to your… treatment.” as he picks up a syringe, only for Leon to say “the silent treatment, I hope.” it doesn’t make a lot of sense as a response or a joke, but that’s what he’s been since RE4, so I was saying “I LOVE YOU, LEON” in my impression of Troy McClure doing the Planet of the Apes musical every time he was on screen.
All that said, Leon’s sections might get a little too much action by the end. You get the second half of the game as mostly Leon and some Grace, as opposed to the mostly Grace and some Leon of the first half. You get a weapons shop and the attache case management of Resident Evil 4, though without the fun merchant, which condenses the growth of your arsenal in those games into half the time, and without much of the personality. I’m also not sure why you get a limited inventory attache case as Leon, considering you can’t store items, and there was never a moment when I had too much inventory for what I could carry, like you do with Grace. I mean, I know why the attache case is here; it’s because it’s a throwback to an old game.
References to Old Stuff
As indicated by my references to the old game in the review thus far, most of Resident Evil Requiem will remind you of older stuff in the series. I didn’t find any idea, besides the zombies having their own personality in Grace’s section, that was new. There’s a bit with a car driving towards you, like in 4, the snarky remarks about “who builds this shit” from Grace, like in 7, and we return to Raccoon City, the setting from 2, and so on to infinity. Not to say that I think the game is one filled with references like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. In that game, references and callbacks are meant to endear you to a plot without a lot of good substance. Rather, in Resident Evil Requiem, these references are meant to be pieced together to give you a good time by giving you all the good ideas of the Resident Evil series. Like I said, it’s a greatest hits album. And we like listening to our favorite bands play the hits, which is why we like them. Even if it is old stuff, it’s stuff we fell in love with that completely works in the context it's presented.
Not to say that clunky references aren’t in the game. One of the boss monsters from RE2 just shows up, and we kill him non-ceremoniously. The bit in Raccoon City as a whole takes some time in locations we spent time in during RE2, trying to convince us of Leon’s character arc. Oftentimes showing us flashbacks of his time in RE2. Which kind of worked for me, but not so much for others. Leon’s arc throughout the games is this: he started his journey as a cop. In Resident Evil 2, he arrived in Raccoon City to start his first day as a cop, only to find the city overrun with zombies. Throughout the game, he fails to save most of the people he meets, and takes a train out of the city as the place he swore to protect gets nuked by the U.S. government to control the spread. So Leon’s character arc, the game tells us, is of a guy who fails to save people, and he feels the need to protect and save Grace, just to save anyone. As this game goes to Raccoon City, we tie together Leon’s failure with his chance for redemption. I’m willing to believe that the Leon in the remakes of 2 and 4 has survivor's guilt and he’s having redemption, but you don’t need to throw an old locale and an old boss at me to convince me of that.
I don’t know why, but I’m surprised the game ends in an underground lab, and you fight a wall of snot. I feel like such a schmuck every time. It’s like even though I’ve been to tons of theme parks, I’m still surprised it ends in the gift shop. So sure enough, the game takes more of a turn to over the top action at the end, as the game gets more up its ass about the lore of the Resident Evil franchise, going back to grand revelations about the founder of the Umbrella Pharmaceutical corporation, and the main villain becomes a wall of snot. As is tradition. But every time it happens, it deflates a lot about the whole experience. We spent most of the game in this great hook of an interesting villain, claustrophobic horror, and a well-designed setting. Only for the game to end in hoard rushes and lame giant monsters, where we mow down a ton of enemies and are learning about how this all ties together with the past games. It's boring because you’ve seen the game be more interesting with less.
A perfect example is when you’re fighting armed guys. Towards the end of the game, in the lab, you’re confronted by men with guns, whom you have to shoot and kill in a brief cover shooting section. This is egregious for two reasons. Firstly, you haven’t really developed the skills to fight armed guards throughout the game. Fighting zombies through third-person shooting out in the open or slow creeping first-person stealth is different from shooting military men in a firefight where you’re hiding behind a chest-height wall. It’s a weird lurch because it’s asking for skills from the player not developed throughout the runtime of the game. And we only use this new skill once and never again. Because of this, the section is more difficult in an annoying way than this being a meaty challenge. Secondly, the game has spent most of its run time in survival-horror or action-horror, and just shooting armored machine-wielding guys is less interesting. The zombies in Grace's section are tough as nails challenges you have to puzzle your way around, and Leon’s section makes them fun canon fodder with both sections using the environment of the Rhodes Hill Medical Centre and the destroyed Raccoon City to their advantage because those sections were intelligently designed around them. The section with the armed guards does not feel tightly designed. The lab section as a whole feels like there's a lack of thought in its design. Even if the visuals of the lab are pretty good.
How Up it’s ass does the game get about the Lore of the Franchise?
Another issue with the lab is that the game begins to get up its ass a little about its lore. In fairness, the game tells you this is about Umbrella and Raccoon City’s destruction within the first hour, but the lab section takes the great hook from the opening and blows it out.
The main villains of the game are hunting an underground lab underneath Racoon City. No, not the underground lab in 2. No, not the underground lab underneath the one in 2 in 3. An underground lab inexplicably underneath all the previous ones. In this underground lab, the founder of Umbrella, Oswall Spencer, developed a brand new bioweapon right before his death. Also, right before his death, he gave away a child, our main character, Grace Ashcroft. So, because we know that he developed a brand new bioweapon and Umbrella experimented on children, the villains make the Hail Mary assumption that Grace is somehow the bioweapon or can unlock the bioweapon. None of this is true. Grace is just some child, and the bioweapon is actually a cure to all variants of the bioweapons Umbrella ever developed. The key to accessing the cure is a password screen that, if you type in the wrong password, blows up.
I find this reveal kind of funny, but it is pretty dumb. It’s such a big jump for the villains to assume that Grace is a bioweapon or could unlock it. Their only evidence is a video recording of a girl who looks like Grace wandering around an Umbrella-controlled orphanage. But we know this isn’t Grace. She was given to her adoptive mother as a baby and stayed with her until her mother was murdered when she was in college. So who is this? What’s this reveal? Some bullshit that shows why the villains make their big plan? More than likely, it will be explored in the DLC that was announced the week the game came out. But as the game stands by the credits, the villains and Grace are interesting until we get to the end, where it’s just dumb and confusing.
The most egregious example of the story kind of falling apart at the end also relies on the game being a greatest hits album. The Resident Evil fans among you may remember Albert Wesker. He’s the closest thing to a series antagonist the franchise has and was present in some form or another for most of the games (even if in passing or easter eggs). That said, he was killed in 5. So you can imagine my surprise when Albert Wesker kind of shows up in Requiem. I say kind of because the mid-game reveal is that this guy, Zeno, is the main antagonist of the game. Despite the fact he looks just like him, has the same superpowers, roughly the same motivation with a thing for Umbrella’s founder, dresses the same, and has the same voice actor and face capture actor as Wesker, he is not Albert Wesker. This twist that we clearly see Albert Wesker, but is just a different guy and is killed by the end of the game, shocked me. It’s once again playing the hits by playing the Albert Wesker song, but it's too much. Bringing back a dead villain, calling him something different, having him be kind of uninteresting, then die, is bewildering.
What does this mean for the next game?
Resident Evil games tend to follow a pattern, but so does the franchise. The first game is electric, then the games get too action-focused and up its own ass, so the series practically reboots itself with an almost stand-alone title that has different gameplay styles and a change of scope with a good hook. This happened with RE4 and RE7. It's a cycle. And sure enough, that’s true here. But unlike the games that right before the soft reset, we have some hanging threads here. The previous games have been setting up a criminal organization called The Connections, which the main villains here work for. At the end, Leon Kennedy says he has a call from the main character of RE 1, 5, 6, and 8 (yes, I know he’s not the main character of 8, but he’s on the fucking box art, so let’s be real here). We are told this call is for “something important.”
My point is that we’re probably not getting the rebooting/reinventing RE10. The global conspiracy shit of the Resident Evil games necessitates that we get to more action-oriented gunplay and shooting waves of monsters, which is so boring when it happens. How can you fight a global criminal organization by being a cowering guy sneaking in the dark with a gun that has 1 bullet in it? Especially when this series is known for going to the action-focused nonsense as we get to the global conspiracies. I have a sinking feeling that the next game will be huge action that somehow out bores the giant monster fights of Requiem.
So, Do You Recommend Requiem?
I know I spent the past paragraphs kind of lambasting the game, but I would recommend Resident Evil Requiem. Grace’s and Leon’s sections are so much fun until the final 2 hours of this 12-hour experience. I was scared, but I was having fun. The design of the Medical Center is so tight you can’t help but marvel at it. Plus, Leon Kennedy is here saying shit like “erm, I think I want a second opinion” when a zombie doctor picks up a chainsaw. It’s good stuff, I just think it kind of falls apart in the final hours. You have to wade through some bullshit as the game begins to wrap up, and you’re desperately hoping it will wrap itself up a little quicker. Sure, there aren’t a lot of new ideas here, but it’s a greatest hits album. You love the stuff of the older Resident Evil games, and here it is, repackaged in a new context for your pleasure. If you’re a fan of the series, you might even enjoy these mechanics and the big dumb reveal even more.
I’ll also add, as an addendum, that I played this game on the Switch 2 (switch to what?). It’s a surprising day-and-date release on other consoles, and I would like to say that the game runs perfectly on Switch 2 (switch to what?). I never had a dip in frame rate or thought it looked ugly when playing on TV or handheld. Sometimes during handheld, there would be that lower quality fuzz around a character’s hair, and the battery drains like a mother fucker when you’re playing on the go, but ultimately it’s a perfectly good way to play the game. I love having games on the Switch 2. Beating the final boss of Resident Evil Requiem on the way home on the LIRR will be a pleasant memory of my time with the game.
