Review – Resident Evil Requiem

After another, Capcom gives Resident Evil space to breathe with a new title. Requiem takes place 30 years after Raccoon City was obliterated by a missile, at the end of Resident Evil 3. Grace Ashcroft, an FBI investigator, is following leads on victims of an unknown disease. Her boss tasks her with investigating a new body at the Wrenwood Hotel, placing the protagonist in a delicate emotional situation: her mother, Alyssa, was murdered in this same hotel 8 years ago.

Investigating the abandoned hotel, once consumed by fire, Grace finds a clue hidden by her mother before she died, but is soon surprised and kidnapped by Dr. Victor Gideon, the new villain of the series. Cut to Leon arriving near the hotel and spotting Gideon running away with Grace on his shoulder. And to make life difficult for our fringe hero, now older and more experienced, Giden turns civilians into zombies. And so the chaos of the new adventure begins, taking Grace and Leon to unexpected places. Or almost.

During these initial events of Resident Evil Requiem, the player already has an idea of ​​what the sessions with Grace and Leon will be like. Although the game offers options to switch the view from first to third person, Requiem presents Grace’s sessions in the FPS style, as established in Resident Evil 7. The reason is obvious: the format’s effectiveness in leaving the player tense, immersed in the environment. And also to represent Grace’s distress and fear, with many moments of stealth. After all, she doesn’t have Leon’s combat experience. But if you want to play Leon in first person, the game allows that too. It depends on the player’s taste or for those who prefer to avoid it.

Blood, gunpowder and requiem

This dynamic between two protagonists works very well in Resident Evil Requiem, with encounters and disagreements happening all the time. Grace knows how to shoot, of course, but her sessions are very different compared to Leon’s, in which there are usually shootings, explosions and axes everywhere. In terms of resources for creating items, what changes between them is just the type: Grace collects blood from enemies, while Leon needs gunpowder, but both use scrap as raw material. While Leon uses his tactical ax for submissions and can sharpen it at any time to recover his durability, Grace uses improvised knives that break and needs to find (or create) hemolytic injectors to stealthily eliminate enemies with a single injection. They are just different ways of performing the same action.

Arriving at Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, the game’s first major map to explore, Grace encounters a blind and confined little girl named Emily. It is at this point that the plot starts to get really interesting. Grace starts using a blood collector to have this important crafting resource, as well as finding transfusion bags that function as a refill for the collector. There’s just one problem: there is a blood limit and if the bag has more than it can fit in the collector, the difference is discarded. A weird limitation, but okay.

Your initial upgrades are unlocked with ancient coins in a small room, and blood samples analyzed under a laser microscope give improvements through the creation of steroids (increase maximum health) and stabilizers (increase firepower and stability). Leon has a scoring system when eliminating enemies and finding valuable items, the points of which are exchanged for weapons (the usual ones, with upgrades), grenades, vests and ammunition at a supply station. In other words, Resident Evil Requiem follows the same formula as before, including the amulets. The only thing really different in the arsenal is the Requiem, a large-caliber weapon that takes down any enemy with a single shot.

Resident Evil Requiem brings some new enemies, such as the pustulent head and the pustulent host, which are hard work and require different tactics to defeat them. The creature in the trailers, an immense and disfigured woman, also sets the tone for what is to come. However, as incredible as it may seem, the people who really shine in this new game are the zombies. We see some of them with traces of humanity, saying things, trying to follow a routine. And they appear in greater variety, surprising the player at every moment.

If you follow the Resident Evil series, you know that Leon is infected with the T-Virus, as is his partner Sherry Birkin. And as announced by Capcom itself, we know that at some point Leon will return to Raccoon City. In other words, classic enemies, a visit to the RPD, among other things, are to be expected. But to avoid spoilers, what I can say is that Requiem ties the current plot very well with past events. It’s a very well told and more down-to-earth story, in general. It doesn’t have that madness of the past, like we saw in Resident Evil 4 and Village. And it offers a good duration, around 15 hours.

Requiem boosted by Path Tracing and DLSS 4

Resident Evil Requiem is an extremely beautiful game, surprising the player at every moment with its setting. Whether in a closed or completely open location, the art direction is exquisite, even though the locations are taken from the series. RE Engine has always surprised me, but this time it blew my mind once and for all. Right at the beginning, with Grace walking along the city sidewalk towards the Wrenwood Hotel, you see everything: rain, smoke, cars passing by, stores with colorful signs, reflections everywhere, and physics that you don’t expect, like umbrellas swinging as the NPCs walk.

As if the quality of the RE Engine wasn’t enough, which in my opinion surpasses Unreal Engine 5 in many aspects, the game features Multi Frame-Gen and Ray Reconstruction, in addition to Reflex if you have a high GHz monitor. I don’t have a NASA PC, but I was able to enjoy the game in all its glory with an RTX 4070 Super, running at 1440p on a 165GHz monitor. My setup has a Ryzen 7 5700X, 32GB of DDR4 3200 Mhz memory and the game was installed on an SSD.

Once the shaders were loaded, my configuration looked like this:

• Resolution: 2560×1440
• Frame Rate: Variable
• Ray Tracing: Path Tracing
• Hair strands: Yes
• Texture Quality: Normal
• Texture Filter Quality: High (ANISO x16)
• DLSS in Quality mode, Frame-Gen 2x
• Reflex: Enabled + Boost

All other settings were on or at maximum, except Shadow Quality, which I left at High to balance with the total use of VRAM and not weigh down the processing load. With that, I had an average of 80-90 FPS for most of the game, except for two specific areas in Raccoon City (playing as Leon) that apparently were not well optimized for Path Tracing. The best way is to wait for updates.

Capcom and its fear of failure

Although I really liked Resident Evil Requiem, it’s hard not to look back and see that this new game doesn’t do anything very different from what we saw previously. We have the same weapon selection hud and the same item creation system as Resident Evil 4 Remake, the old coins from RE 7 and Village, the Mr. Raccoon dolls to find, among other examples. There are some special moments, especially with Leon, but they don’t last long. Just like the bosses, all uncreative and with the same weak points they always have.

It may be just me, but it seems that Capcom is afraid of its current audience. Maybe because they did market research and saw a very different reality from the 90s and 2000s, when Resident Evil games offered much more challenges and intelligent puzzles. Proof of this are the most recent remakes, which modified the puzzles to make it easier on Generation Z players. Requiem itself barely has any puzzles (all of which are ridiculously easy) and even offers two “Normal” modes, one modern and one classic, the latter of which should be more difficult and it isn’t.

The “Insane” mode, unlocked after finishing the story for the first time, does not live up to its name. Just produce a bunch of hemolytic injectors for Grace to explode, use Leon’s stolen parry and abuse Requiem (with the upgrades) and that’s it, no one can stop you. Not even poor Gideon, a super interesting character but they forgot to delve into his private story. Or does Capcom have DLC hidden up its sleeve? I hope so, as the story ends with many loose ends.