85
An excellent survival-horror opening, undermined by its weaker action driven
second half.
The franchise looks again to splice horror with action, but does it's 9th installment finally find the balance?
SPOILERS
This is my second time playing a Resident Evil game, the first being the remake of RE:2, which was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. The atmosphere was simply amazing, but what I loved more than anything were the horror-survival elements that scared me witless and challenged me in every hallway I dared venture down.
Requiem, in many ways, felt like playing a follow-up to that game, with another maze-like environment with the Rhodes Care Center and plenty of the same mechanical and aesthetic goodness found in that Raccoon City Police Station. This time, however, things looked even more graphically impressive, and came with a larger scope, expanding on the settings, monsters, and gameplay to bring more variation and drama.
Navigating our fledgling FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft through all this turned out to be fantastic, with the first section of the game up there with some of the best I’ve played. Despite all her incessant stuttering (and her shockingly sluggish movement), Grace proves herself to be a likable and capable main character, with that innate helplessness and resource-starved context making for many tense and tactical moments in the face of all the different horrors lingering around corners.
I personally enjoyed all the first-person hide-and-seek and movement-based work I had to put in to guarantee survival, and the infected, whether standard or gigantic variety, looked amazing and came with tons of personality and grotesqueness, violently clashing with me in brutal and satisfying ways. My reactions and accuracy had to be locked in, and when I failed to do so, I was savaged in ways that verbally shocked me.
If I were to make some comparisons with RE:2, I would say the Care Centre portion (and game in general) was too generous with its items, meaning management and considered trade-offs were minimal. I also had to apply artificial rules on myself to limit saving in order to increase the feeling of jeopardy. The puzzles were too easy as well, and often silly, like stuffing organs in a corpse to grab a wristband. Ultimately I didn’t have to think or plan too much, which is disappointing given that survival-horror is built on such dynamics.
There are a few things it did better, however. Having zombies retain flickers of personality kept things fresh, and their unforgiving wobbling and stun patterns made for some frantic trigger moments and the game’s real challenge. The Girl and Fat Boy, I thought, brought excellent tension, especially in the basement, and the sound design is exquisite. When Leon is injected into the story to switch up the rhythm from survival to action, with his chainsaws and sniping, it also added a lot of fun.
That formula with Grace and Leon in that first half was perfect actually, and should have been maintained throughout the game. When we move exclusively to Leon in Raccoon City its solid moment-to-moment action, but feels bland atmospherically and killed the narrative momentum. I still found enjoyment blasting my way through zombies with my ever-increasing arsenal, but the gameplay and tone with Grace were so much better. I personally just prefer survival horror mechanics over the arcade ones. The bike chase, for example, did absolutely nothing for me, and gunning down giant dogs more easily than your run-of-the-mill zombie whilst flying over skyscrapers felt silly.
Having these big setting and temporal jumps detracts from things too. Part of what made RE:2 so good was the connectivity between different environments, which felt seamless, overlapping its areas and progression for a perfectly paced experience. They got much of that wrong here, with the occasional dull sequence, and arguably even making the iconic return back to RCPD feeling a bit underwhelming and forced. When we finally arrive at the Ark facility, some of that magic returns, but it did feel linear with the map design.
The story is unforgivably bad too, and had no reason to be. It sets up the premise well enough, with our main character Grace seemingly caught up in the schemings of the mad but memorable antagonist Dr. Gideon. He’s formidable and the mystery is primed, but when the second half arrives, he and the rest of it all are quickly dumped for a new antagonist named Zeno, sitting at the centre of what becomes an increasingly generic and confusing story.
I knew nothing about this man, and the game gives you nothing further to learn. You don’t even get a boss fight with him. Instead, the plot arrives at its climax and Grace’s alleged integral role ends up being completely meaningless, revealing that both Gideon and Zeno were clueless about what Elpis was and its purpose. I’m also confused as to why Gideon didn’t take Grace to the Ark facility when he first captures her at the start of the game, given his belief that she was essential to get things rolling.
There’s lots of lazy and unsatisfying writing like this to be found, unfortunately, probably peaking with the return of Emily, but the clone narrative and Leon’s lack of pursuit of a needed cure was also noted. The game really didn’t need to try and force some grand plot, or even Ark, into things. A terrified girl inside a clinic, grappling with her past and overcoming fear was more than enough to be compelling, and was indeed brilliant for that first half.
VERDICT
The game is immense fun, and undeniably of high quality in many ways. There's plenty of exciting, tense, and gloriously visceral moments, but its ambition of meshing survival horror and arcade slaughter together is handled so well in its first half that you can't help but feel disappointed with the lack of balance and momentum that unfolds in the second. The monster designs, environments, and atmosphere range from perfection to OK, and with a better story and more challenging mechanics, this could have easily been one of the best entries in the franchise.
RATING BREAKDOWN
Gameplay
87
Visuals
86
Story
58
Music / Sound
90
BONUS
concept design
FINAL
85
