Feburary 27th, 2026 - Resident Evil Reqiuem (2026)

4/5

Complex feelings on this one! Easily one of my most anticipated games Ever, nearly selling out of physical copies via pre-order alone. Me and my friend finished it on launch day, in one sitting. Time played: 10 hours, 36 minutes. We played it "co-op", me taking the Grace sections, and her taking the Leon ones (my favorite RE game being 7 and hers being 4 made this an easy choice).

The first third was stellar. Grace is a great protagonist, just connected enough for series veterans to recognize the lore, but still a fresh face that new players could have fun with. I love the 7-esque first person limited resources play through the hospital, and the limited safe areas. This section really makes you feel Grace's fear, with her stumbling run and panicked breathing. The small sections of gameplay with Leon are an extremely welcome reprieve, but are just slightly too short to get comfortable. Leon's sections play like boss fights, and he's pure competence, able to take run-of-the-mill zombies down using just melee if you wanted, but you never get to stay with him too long before heading back to Grace's Worst Work Day Ever.

There's a lot of familiarity to chew on, Gideon's hospital feels like the original halls of the Spencer mansion, and Emily is incredibly reminiscent of Sherry in RE2. However, the enemies have evolved into the truly nightmarish that had me stress pausing to check my map every few steps with the fear of an unbeatable stalker enemy behind me. The Girl is easily the best example, our first encounter with her being extremely up close and personal, with very little room for running errors.

In act 2, primary gameplay switches to Leon, and even changes a little. While his previous segments felt very reminiscent of RE4, the reuse of the 5 style UI, and the spread out setting of outer Raccoon City lend to a section that feels incredibly like RE6 (including a beautifully over the top motorcycle fight/chase sequence culminating in driving up the side of a collapsed building). While I find this section to be a slight slog, with an excess of ground to cover with only a couple truly unique setpieces, it's not bad to see (and I am assured it was pretty fun to play as well).

Act 3 blends Leon's and Grace's sections fairly equally, and is just a continuation of previous, with Grace facing new iterations of the Lickers, while Leon fights Umbrella security with some neat boss encounters.

My main point of contention with RE9 it it's story. I adore Grace, and the mystery of why Gideon wants her, and why her mother Alyssa was killed, is incredibly compelling. Using blood as a method to transfer memory (specifically Spencer's) is a little far fetched, but this is Resident Evil, and fully within the realm of something these scientists would research in this world. Where things start to get messy, is in act 2.

At the end of act 1, in the bowels of the hospital courtyard, Emily is injured, eventually leading to her death and subsequent mutation. She attacks Grace, and then is killed by Leon. It is not an exaggeration when I say my friend and I screamed out loud when Leon fired that first shot, despite Grace begging him not to. She leaves Leon, refusing any further help he may give, and ends up travelling with Gideon and a new, yet familiar face, Wesker Zeno. Zeno takes Grace to Raccoon City, and reveals that Emily was one in a long line of clones of Grace, as she has been specified as the perfect host for the memory transfer experimentation. Leon, fresh with traumatic flashbacks from his time in the demolished RPD building, confronts Zeno, who sends a new iteration of the Tyrant after him. Zeno and Grace leave while Leon escapes, and both head underground to the Ark, a secret Umbrella research base below Raccoon City, beginning act 3 of the game.

There, Grace escapes Zeno and she and Leon begin working together to destroy Elpis, Spencer's last project before his death. Upon viewing a video left by her mother, Grace finds out that Spencer regretted his work on bioweapons, and had adopted an orphan who he called his hope. This baby was Grace, who would then be adopted by Alyssa after Spencer's passing. Leon, barely mobile with how far the T-Virus has progressed in his system, meets with Grace, and they face Zeno. Here, the player is given a choice. Destroy Elpis or release it. Destroying it leads Zeno to kill Leon and Grace escapes alone, while Zeno dies in the Ark's slef destruct sequence. Releasing it leads to the reveal that Elpis is an antiviral that strips Zeno of his Wesker powers and cures Leon's Raccoon City Syndrome. Gideon returns from his death in act 2, revealing he is part of the Nemesis bioweapon line, and Leon fights him for our final boss battle of the game, before he and Grace are rescued by the BSAA, at the command of Chris Redfield.

I have several gripes with this series of events. Zeno for one, only ever appears in roughly 15 minutes of cutscenes, looks, talks, and moves like Wesker, with no explanation as to how or why. Clones are entirely possible, such mechanics of the RE world are shown in 9 and even in 6, but there is no actual evidence of where Zeno has come from. It really feels like screenshot Youtube thumbnail bait to get people to think he's Wesker when he isn't. There is no gameplay element to his existence.

Additionally, the setup for the good ending to be releasing Elpis is incredibly lacking. After leaving RPD, the clone storyline is dropped in favor of Grace herself being the key to Elpis, and Zeno wants her to put in the password to obtain it. Spencer's video with Alyssa mentions his work on bioweapons as being similar to Pandora's Box, and then subsequently calling Grace his hope for the future. If this theming had been carried through the whole game, it may have worked more effectively, but the only other time is at the beginning where Alyssa calls Grace her hope right before she's murdered. The stepping stones to releasing hope (Elpis) from Pandora's Box (Umbrella) are barely visible, especially when you have Leon on the other side making Grace promise to destroy Elpis, thinking it's a new kind of virus.

The character arcs are fairly flat too. While I see the general idea of each character's journey, like Grace from a fearful girl who blames herself for the bad things that happen around her to someone who works towards the right thing against all odds, we never really see the progression from point a to point b. Additionally, a lot of Leon's trauma revolves around wanting to help people, and not feeling like he's made any difference in the past 30 years (such as Marvin and Kendo). However, this is ENITRELY undercut by the fact that instead of Hunnigan guiding him via comms, he is constantly speaking to SHERRY BIRKIN, the girl who calls Leon and Claire her CLOSEST FRIENDS in RE6. It loses a lot of its impact.

Smaller grievances include the inclusion of Tofu as an easter egg with both audible and movement cues that really sour the previously somber tone of RPD, and the exclusion of Claire, especially considering Sherry is in this game, and that Claire was in Raccoon City just as long as Leon and should also have Raccoon City Syndrome, though she doesn't appear in the list of deaths.

Ultimately, it just feels like a lot of loose ends and a little heavy on the nostalgia bait (though nothing nearly so bad as some movie franchises are doing right now), but with fun gameplay and a near perfect first act, I had a lot of fun with Reqiuem.