Two for the Price of One
From the very first minutes, Requiem shows off the muscles of the RE Engine and generously throws money around. I trudge along with the main character, Grace, in the pouring rain through a gray town and watch as neon signs and streetlights blur in the puddles. The picture is so convincing and atmospheric that for a second I catch myself thinking: the Naughty Dog logo should appear somewhere here.
A couple of minutes later, the game throws me into the oppressive silence of an old hotel that survived a fire eight years ago. I listen to every rustle and flinch with Grace when a deer's head suddenly falls off the wall.
Click — and I'm already in the shoes of the second protagonist, Leon Kennedy, maneuvering through the urban madness. People scream, run, escape from the infected, cars collide with each other in panic. It all resembles the first day of the virus outbreak in Raccoon City.
Another moment — and I find myself in complete darkness, hiding from a huge mutated Girl. Then the game clicks the switch again and returns me to Leon: he spouts witticisms, crushes skulls with his boot, and shreds zombies with a chainsaw in sterile hospital corridors.
This kaleidoscope of horror and action quickly explains what the developers are aiming for. But the introduction is slightly misleading. It seems that the game will maintain this balance until the very end, but in practice, everything is arranged differently.
Rather, these are two different games under one cover. At the same time, the narrative is not divided into isolated campaigns: the stories of Grace and Leon unfold in parallel and constantly intersect with each other. Therefore, the main differences lie, of course, in the gameplay.
Grace: Almost Flawless Classic
The first half of "Requiem" is dedicated to a new heroine — Grace Ashcroft. She is a young FBI analyst who is sent to investigate a series of murders at the abandoned Ranwood Hotel. The place is not accidental for her: eight years ago, her mother, journalist Alyssa Ashcroft, one of the heroines of Resident Evil: Outbreak, who had been digging into the dirty laundry of the Umbrella Corporation for many years, died here.
Among the victims are people who survived the Raccoon City disaster twenty-eight years ago, and this detail is especially attractive to the feds. But Grace's arrival at Ranwood turns out to be only part of a carefully prepared trap.
Waking up, the girl comes to her senses in the Rhodes Hill Medical Center, which is run by the eccentric Dr. Victor Gideon — a vile, gray-faced type flaunting a snakeskin cloak. It was at his whim that Grace found herself at the epicenter of a nightmare for which she was completely unprepared.
I have already seen a lot of reproaches against Grace. Like, she's too timid and delicate. But the fact is that working in the FBI as an analyst does not involve serious combat training at all. Even Grace's personal pistol is not a service weapon, but a means of self-defense bought with her first salary, which she, it seems, has never really used.
This inexperience sets the tone for her campaign and makes Grace one of the most believable characters in the series in many years — and with a fairly strong, albeit standard, personal story packed into a purebred survival horror.
The Rhodes Hill Medical Center can easily be mistaken for a modern variation of the Spencer Mansion or the Raccoon City Police Department. Looping through the corridors of the hospital, Grace solves puzzles, looks for key cards, reads notes, sneaks on her haunches in the dark — in a word, does everything to move forward and survive.
She has a pistol and a Requiem revolver, which Grace receives from Leon. This is an extremely powerful tool — in fact, the local equivalent of a grenade launcher. One accurate shot can instantly stop a particularly dangerous enemy, and three are enough to cope even with a mini-boss on standard difficulty.
However, you can't shoot it thoughtlessly. Ammunition for the revolver can be created independently, but this requires rare resources hidden in locked boxes. To get to them, you have to look for lockpicks and carefully examine the locations. Under normal conditions, cartridges for Requiem are almost never found and are only occasionally issued in limited quantities before key encounters.
This resource economy quickly teaches caution. Ammunition and first-aid kits are almost always running out, inventory is limited, and it is often much wiser to quietly slip past a revived corpse than to waste precious ammunition on it.
However, Grace was not left completely without tools. For her, the developers came up with a separate mechanic — crafting items from infected blood. In the hospital laboratory, she finds a blood collection system and a laser microscope, with which you can analyze rare samples and discover new recipes.
The hemolytic injector becomes a key tool. With its help, you can quietly sneak up on an enemy, give him a "prick", and after a couple of seconds it literally swells up, scattering scraps all over the room.
Like the Requiem revolver, it can destroy even a particularly strong enemy in several uses. However, the developers have built a clear balance: enemies killed in this way do not leave infected blood for crafting new injectors. And blood alone is not enough — other resources are also required.
However, if you scrupulously search every corner, at some point you can still turn a deficit into a surplus — and this, it would seem, should slightly spoil the atmosphere of horror. However, the campaign for Grace is built with such surgical precision that this does not happen. The longer you play, the more it seems that the developers know exactly where the player will stop, where they will try to hide, and which corridor they will turn into next.
This is especially noticeable on the maximum difficulty "Madness". It's not just about increasing the damage of enemies. The developers actively exploit the memory of the player who has already completed the game once, changing the location of items, improvements, and opponents. Micro-changes appear even in staged scenes and the behavior of monsters, which increases tension and adds an element of surprise even in a familiar scenario.
At the same time, regardless of the difficulty, the environment, lighting, sound, and behavior of monsters are designed to direct the player's attention and control fear, creating a dense and very atmospheric horror adventure.
I can't count how many times during the playthrough I caught myself thinking: how do you manage to do roughly the same thing for thirty years — and surprise and involve so much every time that, even after completing the game, you start a new playthrough as if mesmerized?
I especially want to praise the work with enemies in Grace's campaign. The developers added an elegant touch that refreshes the view of familiar zombies. The infected here retain habits from their past lives — and this makes them not only more diverse, but also much more disturbing.
There is a maid with OCD who unsuccessfully tries to wipe blood off the floor (God forbid you leave a mark in front of her); a deafening singer who continues to wail her posthumous song in the lounge bar; a corridor servant obsessed with saving electricity; and other infected people stuck in the habits of their former lives. When you listen to their hoarse, broken phrases, a chill runs down your spine. It seems that under the mask of the monster there is still a frightened person hiding, desperately trying to escape from this trap.
Special mention should be made of the stalkers, each of whom patrols their own zone. The scariest of them is the Girl. This is a mutated creature almost three meters tall that cannot be killed. Segments with her are always a nervous game of hide-and-seek in complete darkness.
However, the more you learn about her origin, the more you feel the tragedy of a broken fate and even begin to sympathize with her. I would even say that she is written better than the main antagonist, about whom it is only known that his mentor was Ozwell Spencer — and his mother, apparently, was Anarchy, as Viktor Tsoi bequeathed.
Another "kid" is more funny than scary — the fat Chunk, who suffers from gluttony. He is so massive that he can barely squeeze through the corridors and therefore moves painfully slowly, constantly grumbling and whining not to be laughed at. His fullness can be turned to your advantage by luring ordinary infected people to him, whom Chunk will easily crush, trying to get to Grace's coveted skull.
If you are looking for a weak spot in Grace's campaign, it is the puzzles — and even then, with a big stretch. The developers take out the good old key cards, safe codes and colorful stones from the bins, dust them off and put them back into use. These are mandatory obstacles that slightly slow down the progress of the story, but rarely make you really rack your brains. However, this is exactly what you expect from a game called Resident Evil.
You can remember games where the puzzles are more complex and more closely related to the lore. But, honestly, the Resident Evil formula suits me quite well. The series has never particularly competed in the ingenuity of puzzles with the same Silent Hill, and Capcom seems to have reasons to stick to this approach. It maintains a good balance and does not scare away the mass player — because not everyone comes to horror games for complex tasks.
And I almost fell into a stupor when I encountered an age-old situation: I have an empty pistol in my hands, there is a box of necessary cartridges in front of me, but... all the inventory slots are occupied. The game stubbornly does not allow you to pick up ammunition until I free up a slot, although it would seem that what could be easier — immediately load the magazine into the pistol?
But no, we are still not allowed such luxury. You have to throw away small things or come back later. At such moments, you realize how much Capcom does not want to part with some features of the old design, even in small things. I scolded other modern horror games for this, so I can't help but scold "Requiem" — well, how much can you, it's already 2026!
Otherwise, thanks to careful directing and design, even familiar mechanics work flawlessly and make you experience new emotions. Grace's campaign looks like an almost perfect modern interpretation of the classic Resident Evil. But this is only half of the game.
Leon: style, testosterone and some more zombies
The second half drastically changes the tone, giving the reins to a veteran of the series — Leon Kennedy. If Grace is a "rookie" who flinches at every rustle, then Leon is a hardened fighter and charismatic action hero who meets zombies with a solid arsenal and signature barbs.
The contrast between the characters is immediately striking. What was a deadly threat to Grace often becomes only a temporary obstacle for Leon. Where she cautiously sneaks through the corridors and counts every bullet, he confidently moves forward, juggling weapons and clearing the way with shots, ax blows and spectacular finishing moves.
To put it simply, mechanically this is a direct continuation of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Leon gets a small axe that is used in close combat: it can be used to attack, parry blows and finish off opponents. Unlike knives, it does not break, but requires periodic sharpening — this can be done right during the battle. In some situations, the game allows you to pick up enemy weapons and immediately use them against them. A couple of times she even gives out a chainsaw to arrange a fan-service massacre.
But it's not just the arsenal that impresses (there are minor questions about it), but how it's all implemented. Leon's animations are a real showcase of how much money and attention Capcom has invested in the details. When he reloads his weapon, he pinches the flashlight with his cheek, freeing his hand. When shooting, the movements look confident and calm — the hands do not tremble, unlike Grace's hands. Even such small things constantly remind us that we are dealing with a person who has been destroying evil spirits for most of his life.
Special mention should be made of contextual finishing moves. At first, it seemed to me that there were not so many of them. But, as the name implies, their diversity strongly depends on the context — on how exactly the finishing move occurs, what weapon is used and where it occurs. When, after starting a new game for the fourth time, I tried to just run past one of the zombies, Leon took a step forward, let the enemy pass by him, and then coldly shot him in the back of the head and smashed his head through his shoulder — at that moment I wanted to scream with delight!
Such details are not necessary, but they create a feeling of an expensive, carefully thought-out project, which can be counted on the fingers today. And it's not just about the budget, but about what it was spent on — and what, perhaps, it was not spent on. Therefore, I am still forced to slightly scold Leon's campaign.
To begin with — what about weapons? Yes, formally there is approximately the same set as in RE4: pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, rifles — several types in total. As in RE4, there is a clear weapon upgrade with improved basic characteristics, but there are no unique improvements that would noticeably change the feeling of shooting. However, this is not the biggest omission, but rather my personal "wishlist".
The main problem of Leon's campaign is its structure. Most of the game takes place on the brown-yellow streets of Raccoon City, where, with the exception of a few staged moments, surprisingly little happens. I expected that Leon's segments would be a real massacre — as dense as in the Resident Evil 4 remake. But I just got a strong action game without any special ambitions.
If you methodically search the locations and look into every abandoned building, it becomes noticeable that the battles are distributed in a very thin layer. The game rarely confronts you with a large number of enemies at the same time, and there are almost no situations where you have to improvise, adapt to the situation, use the environment, or at least maneuver between shelters. Leon usually just moves along the route and methodically shoots the emerging threats.
The key word here is "almost". The game has really excellent episodes: a tense skirmish at a gas station, a raid on the roof under mortar fire, a stunning motorcycle chase, an atmospheric shootout in the server room, a battle on axes a la Krauser and several more nostalgic and fan-service moments that I will deliberately not reveal.
The problem is that the pauses between these scenes are too noticeable. The game seems to push for an aggressive style—awarding credits for kills, encouraging the purchase of new weapons and upgrades, as if saying, "Play hard, destroy everything living and non-living." And I really destroyed zombies even when it wasn't necessary. But at the same time, the game rarely allows you to truly floor it during a standard playthrough.
This is especially noticeable when you play the game again. So, during a speedrun for "platinum," I noticed that when you stop clearing each location to the last bullet and start moving exclusively along the plot, the game suddenly turns into a much denser and more dynamic adventure.
Shootouts follow one after another, staged episodes fall into a clear rhythm, and the entire campaign for Leon begins to work as you would expect: as a brutal, concentrated, and spectacular action movie in the Resident Evil universe, also technically implemented at the highest level.
Capcom's Technological Showcase
Capcom is once again squeezing the most out of RE Engine. Resident Evil Requiem is the most beautiful part of the series and, perhaps, one of the most impressive games of its generation. Yes, there is no huge open world here, and this inevitably simplifies the work of artists. But the scale of the work done is no less for this.
The locations are literally drowning in details. Blood and dismemberment are frighteningly realistic, and you can talk endlessly about sound and animations—I have already mentioned some things, but I still continue to pay attention to them. Yes, the decorations here are mostly static, and shots do not leave noticeable marks on surfaces. But Resident Evil has never strived for a fully interactive environment.
This is a carefully directed attraction, where each scene is built with almost jeweler-like precision. Therefore, frankly, it is pointless to reproach the game for the lack of physical interactivity, although this once again reminds us how conservative Capcom is, even against the background of periodic experiments with the gameplay formula.
Special praise is deserved for the work with light and shadow. Lighting here becomes a real tool of directing: it directs the player's gaze and places visual accents in the frame.
For example, the moment the Girl appears in the nurses' room could easily be in the top of the most spectacular appearances of monsters. And this is not a cutscene, but simply perfectly constructed angle, light, and scenery.
Even without ray tracing, the game looks great. But with ray tracing enabled, shadows and reflections become truly mind-blowing. The game has many wet surfaces and light sources of various shapes and shades, so modern technologies are revealed here especially effectively—of course, if the hardware allows.
On my system with GeForce RTX 4070 Super, I had to enable DLSS in "Balance" mode to maintain ray tracing and keep more than 90 frames per second, but the final result was definitely worth these compromises.
However, technically the game is still not perfect. During the playthrough, I encountered stutters, loads, and rare frame rate drops several times. I played with the Capcom hair simulation system enabled, originally developed for Pragmata, and while Grace was alone in the frame, everything worked perfectly. But when Emily with the same lush hair appeared nearby, the frame rate suddenly collapsed from 120 to 12 frames per second and did not recover until I restarted the game.
Fortunately, I did not encounter other serious problems. Capcom traditionally copes well with the optimization of Resident Evil, and here it also managed to avoid unpleasant surprises. Whether just an excellent horror game can take the main prize of "Game of the Year" today is a big question. But there is almost no doubt that Resident Evil Requiem will be remembered more than once at the main ceremony of the season.
Verdict
Resident Evil Requiem is easy to recommend to any fan of the series. Capcom managed to combine the two main directions of the franchise in one game—claustrophobic survival horror and spectacular zombie action.
Grace's campaign looks like an almost perfect interpretation of the classic Resident Evil formula and is quite capable of standing alongside the best episodes of the series.
However, Leon's campaign, for all its spectacularity, is still inferior in density and drive to Resident Evil 4. Therefore, for those for whom the fourth part remains the standard of the series, it may seem that there is simply not enough Leon here.
But for those who love the series in all its manifestations, Requiem works almost flawlessly. The game not only confidently combines different styles of gameplay, but also finally moves the overall plot of the franchise forward, answering several long-dusty questions and leaving a bridge for future stories—which was so lacking during the "Winter family saga."
Resident Evil Requiem is one of the strongest original parts of the series in many years. It perfectly understands what fans love about Resident Evil, but, trying to be all versions of Resident Evil at once, it cannot become ideal for everyone. So it turns out that Resident Evil Requiem is too good to be the best. Because everyone already has their best Resident Evil.