Name: Resident Evil Requiem Review
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T21:37:29.000Z
Duration: 13 min 40 s
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Within the hallways of the sinister sanatorium where Resident Evil Requiem's opening hours take place lie some of the most frightening encounters I've experienced in the series to date.

With my headphones on and the lights off, the ninth mainline adventure in Capcom's long running survival horror saga forced me to endure moments so palpably tense and prolonged I discovered muscles to clench that I didn't previously know I had.

Hours later, I was no longer holding my breath, but

holding my fist in the air instead as I gleefully mowed down masses of undead meat sacks like it was D day in World War Z.

In an effort to please both survival horror stalwarts and action horror advocates, Resident Evil Requiem runs the gore soaked gamut from anxiety inducing chills to trigger happy threats thrills.

The result is yet another supremely hair raising horror story, despite the fact its most potent scares have all been delivered by the time it arrives at its more gloriously gung ho second half.

Not unlike 2023's Alan Wake 2, Resident Evil Requiem initially focuses on a young FBI agent, in this case series newcomer Grace Ashcroft, a fresh faced analyst who's sent to investigate a series of mysterious deaths among the survivors of Raccoon City several decades after the 1998 outbreak, we found another body, one that exhibits the same pathology as the others we've been investigating.

Grace's flashlight lit forensic search through the grimy insides of a shuttered hotel is ultimately short lived, however, since she's soon ensnared by Victor Gideon, Requiem's main antagonist, whose menacing air, disgustingly disfigured face and greasy goggles make him seem like some sort of steampunk Emperor Palpatine.

Victor traps Grace in the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Centre, a Spencer Mansion style labyrinth of locked doors crawling with all manner of flesh eating freaks.

But thankfully help is on the way in the form of uber stylish series veteran Leon S. Kennedy.

Survival horror's preeminent Himbo has clearly seen better days.

The strange bruising on his skin suggests he's battling some sort of affliction potentially related to T virus exposure, while the shiny new Porsche he's driving implies he's also not immune to a midlife crisis, but

Resident Evil characters have historically exhibited an overly campy quality that's injected a large dose of goofiness amidst the but for my money, this inexperienced FBI agent is by far the most relatably human heroine the series has ever had.

Her evolution from Being perpetually on the brink of a panic attack to becoming self assured enough to fight back made for a journey that I found as captivating as it was consistently creepy.

Requiem allows us to alternate control between Grace and Leon at specific story junctions over the course of its roughly 10 hour campaign, but

it's the former whose predominantly stealth based sections are undoubtedly the most fear inducing.

Underpowered and under constant threat from twisted stalker ghouls that are liable to descend from the rafters at any moment, Grace's efforts to escape from the terrors of Victor's Hospital is a wonderfully stressful slab of unrelenting survival horror.

There's precious little ammo to find, a miserly number of inventory slots to manage, and

Grace moves at such a slow speed that makes timing your careful crouch walk to avoid a prowling pack of zombies an exercise in pinpoint pathmaking.

All the while, you have to puzzle through a stimulating series of body part based riddles and elaborately locked doors, never really knowing when you're going to turn a corner and come face to flabby face with a grotesquely girthy golem that's urgently squeezing its way down the hallway towards you.

I spent so much time trying to steer clear of the numerous considerable threats that on the occasions Grace was forced into her confrontations, the results really rattled me.

When played in the default claustrophobic first person perspective, her guns feel genuinely startling to fire, and

the impact of every precious pistol shot is immense.

Bullets tear the festering flesh off zombie faces, leaving eyeballs to dangle from their stems.

Yeah, and blood spatter paints the walls and persists even when you backtrack through the area later on.

The gallons of gore that covers the floor isn't just there for spectacle, mind you, since Grace is equipped with a handy blood collector that allows her to syringe up the infected plasma pooling around zombie corpses and combine it with other pieces of scrap to craft invaluable items like medkits and single use haemolytic injectors.

The latter can be jammed into the spine of an undead monster caught unaware, causing their entire body to swell up and explode in the most gloriously blood soaked manner of stealth kill possible, but

you can also use it to effectively dispose of a body you've downed previously.

I found that to be a smart move in areas I knew I'd be revisiting.

Since Requiem zombies also have a terrifying tendency to reanimate and mutate when you least expect them to, Grace's quest only grows more intense as it takes her through the suffocating shadows of the hospital's basement and beyond.

But moving through Requiem's danger filled surroundings at a snail's pace didn't just keep my nerves on edge, it allowed me to observe and appreciate the efforts that Capcom has put into enhancing the eerie behaviour of its undead army.

These are no longer the groaning foot dragging mouth breathers encountered during the original Raccoon City outbreak.

Instead, they retain traces of humanity that somehow makes them seem far more unsettling than the more animalistic werewolves in Resident Evil Village, like the ones that idly flick light switches on and off like bored toddlers, or the others that wander around muttering and laughing to themselves before suddenly collapsing to their knees to hungrily feast on the corpse of one of their former feet friends.

While Grace's plight is a desperate and deliberate crawl that had me second guessing every shadow, the ominous sounds of silence are shattered by the roar of ferocious Ultra violence when you switch control to Leon for what are initially brief tension breaking bursts as everyone's favourite former RCPD recruit attempts a not so subtle rescue mission.

These levels default to a third person view to really show off the slaughter, and

within minutes of his arrival I'd slip comfortably back Into Resident Evil 4 mode, nailing headshots and ending the undead with effortless execution moves.

To my surprise, however, Requiem quickly pushes the insanity meter Beyond Resident Evil 4 into Dead Rising levels of delirium by allowing Leon to actually wield a chainsaw to carve through the zombie crowds.

Leon's sections are up tempo and gruesome to a degree that left me giddy, and

almost every major zombie Leon dispatches is met with a delightfully deadpan dad joke where Grace must use the scarce amounts of scrap in her surroundings to make her own rapidly destructible knives.

Leon is toting a powerful hatchet that can be easily maintained with an everlasting flint.

While Grace has to carefully count each round in her small handful of handguns, Leon enjoys an extensive bevy of teeth rattling boomsticks, from beefy shotguns to head splitting sniper rifles.

Plus, if Leon gets bored of his own weapons, he can use someone else's.

After killing a zombie who drops a fire axe or lead pipe, he has the option to smoothly scoop it up and launch it at another enemy nearby, which is every bit as slick and satisfying as the similar sword flinging feature of last year's Ghost of Yotei.

Simply put, there's no off position on Leon's ass kicking switch, and

in addition to his surging slaughter of zombie hordes.

It's also within Leon's levels that the bulk of Requiem's appropriately epic boss encounters take place.

There are plenty of colossal clashes to be found here, from brand new behemoths to brilliantly reimagined threats from previous Resident Evil stories, and

there isn't a single Del Lago sized dud among them.

I particularly loved how this hulking nasty subverted my expectations of how Resident Evil boss fights should play out.

Sure, being tasked with blasting the glowing weak points that cover a marauding monster's torso is nothing new.

That is, until you realise that while piercing each swollen blister does inflict damage to the beast, it also spews streams of infection onto the zombie underlings around him and instantly mutating them into brawnier forms of backup for you to contend with.

that doesn't mean Requiem doesn't still find creative ways to ramp up the challenge.

Playing as Leon is such a consistently violent delight that it's a little disappointing that the Mercenaries mode isn't a feature of Requiem after its welcome inclusion in 2021's Resident Evil Village.

Come on Capcom, you're going to give me a version of Leon who can violently split skulls with a hatchet and do a lumbering leatherface impersonation with a swinging chainsaw and you're not going to allow me to unleash him in a score Chasing Time Attack mode?

Here's hoping it will be patched in as a post launch addition like the free update that Capcom eventually provided for the Resident Evil 4 remake.

As much as I love Leon, though, I do wonder if perhaps his sections become a bit too dominant once Requiem settles into a more action oriented groove in its second half as the story moves beyond the grounds of Rhodes Hill and deep into what remains of Raccoon City.

Let me be clear, Resident Evil 4 is my personal favourite instalment in the series, so it certainly gave me a great deal of pleasure to once again wield a military grade arsenal and pull off skull shattering finishing moves as the series hunkiest mutant murderer.

But after playing almost exclusively as Leon through a roughly five hour stretch towards Requiem's conclusion, I did find myself yearning for a few more tastes of Grace's superbly nerve shredding stealth sections as a more regular change up from Leon's comparatively scare free carnage, that desire was eventually gratified to some extent by a terrifyingly taut late game tiptoe through a facility crawling with some truly menacing monsters.

Returning from the series past but given that the story ended soon afterwards, my overriding impression of Requiem that it was very much a game of two halves, the former predominantly a slow and steady scare a thon and the latter largely a run and gun splatterfest.

I very much enjoyed both flavours in their own right.

I just wish for the sake of its pacing that they'd been blended together a touch more over the full course of the journey.

Instead, Requiem is a bit like ordering a whiskey and coke and having it served in two separate glasses instead of being mixed into one.

To be fair, Grace's absence from a significant stretch of Requiem is justified within the context of its story, and

overall it's a tale that gripped me harder than a zombie nurse gnawing on my nose.

There are a number of blindsiding twists that cast new light on the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the ambitions of its founder, along with an excellent mix of zombie riddled locations both fresh and familiar to puzzle and pummel your way through, and

plenty of vital notes to collect along the way.

Some of these memos are crucial to understanding the intriguing mystery behind Grace's abduction and the truth about her past, while others are just genuinely funny gags to help ease the tension.

After encountering a specific zombie type in one medical wing that was obnoxiously singing at the top of her lungs, I got a good laugh out of uncovering a doctor's report that had diagnosed her with Main Character Syndrome.

There's also one particularly iconic location that Leon explores that I'm reluctant to spoil here, but

it's jam packed with fun Easter eggs that it a real thrill to revisit as someone who's been enjoying Resident Evil adventures ever since the T virus made its first outbreak on a black bottom CD for the original PlayStation.

Like the result of an experiment conducted in an underground Umbrella Corporation lab, Resident Evil Requiem successfully splices two separate strains of survival horror together into the one highly inf new mutation.

It signals the return of a series legend and the arrival of a likeable new lead amps up the gore to a new stomach turning standard and unleashes a scarier breed of zombie alongside some truly beastly boss fights.

The lack of any meaningful side content like the Mercenaries mode is a touch disappointing, and

I do wonder if a slightly more consistent balance could have been struck with the ebb and flow from jaw clenching moments of tension to all out assault rather than front loading the story with frights before giving way to a more bullet riddled back half.

Even so, from my first trembling steps into its shadows, all the way to the tremendous Titan sized takedown at its climax, Resident Evil Requiem kept me completely absorbed and consistently entertained, whether it was all hair raising or all guns blazing.

For more IGN reviews, check out our verdicts on God of War, Sons of Sparta, and Reanimal.

And for everything else, stick with Ignition.