Despite enjoying all the trailers and just generally looking forward to any new Resident Evil game I was still surprised by how great Requiem is. While I enjoyed 7 and 8 they were first person and almost entirely with their own little cast so RE9 here celebrating 30 years (blimey…) by calling back to a lot of past storylines and play styles including the option to drop first person entirely really made this feel like the first “proper” new Resident Evil game in a long time (not counting remakes, obviously) So although my overall opinion is pretty obvious even at this point, let’s dive deeper!
Background:
Kicking off the review with a kick! (well, a head crush with a foot, I guess…)
Resident Evil: Requiem released on February 27th 2026 for PS5, XBOX Series, Nintendo Switch 2 (which looks surprisingly good!) and PC.
Made to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the franchise it’s full of callbacks and references, mostly to Resident Evil 1-3 but a lot of the gameplay and set pieces in the latter half of the game are very intentionally 4-6-inspired, so it evens out in the end. As someone who has played every Resident Evil game since the very first one in 1996 there were several moments where I was just grinning like a mad man to myself, so the celebratory aspect was a success at least!
Gameplay:
Did your wardrobe just make a sound? This might be why! (Probably not though…)
To start with there are two characters and two different play styles: new character Grace plays more like original Resident Evil and their remakes, being more horror based with limited weapons/ammo, little inventory space with the returning mysteriously teleporting item boxes that allow you to store things helping out, saving on typewriters (with limited ink ribbons on certain difficulties) and the old Fine-Caution-Danger! health system; while Leon plays more like Resident Evil 4-6, with a regular health bar, plenty of guns and ammo, an attaché case so item room is never an issue and thrust kicking enemies into oblivion. The first choice you have to make is what perspective you want, by default they recommend first person view for playing as Grace and third person view for Leon, making Grace’s sections play more like Resident Evil 7 & 8 but personally I never liked the first person view so I switched both to third person, getting that original Resi feel for Grace and crazy 4-6 Resi for Leon. No matter your favourite mainline period of the game series they’ve got you covered though!
So diving a little deeper into each then, Grace as mentioned is more tense with it being more about dodging enemies and running from them than gunning them all down, mostly set in a new hospital building. You do get a gun (as well as a very powerful second gun with very limited ammo) but in general its best if you avoid the zombies especially as if they’re killed with their heads intact they’ll eventually resurrect as a more powerful version of themselves, sort of like the Crimson Heads from the Resi 1 remake. Each character has an odd immersion-breaking wrinkle to things and with Ashley it’s a new blood draining mechanic, where you can drain blood from buckets, puddles and fallen enemies and then combine blood with scrap metal to create ammo, items that give you more health and injectors that causes zombies to explode should you jab them with it. It’s an… odd one, but as far as an extra mechanics it works perfectly fine. As well as dodging regular enemies you’ll also be stalked by a Nemesis-style invincible foe called “The Girl”, who is hurt by bright light so there’s a fun “run to a room with the lights on in a panic” thing going on sometimes, plus a few other difficult encounters that it’s best to run from. You’ll also be doing some very simple puzzle solving, including keys to one section of the building being locked in a case on the other side of the place, doors that mysteriously open with a set of glowing orbs, that sort of thing, plus discovering safe codes and such with Files and photos. Overall it can get quite tense but it’s extremely enjoyable, with the exception of one section where you have to once again play as a defenceless girl wandering around the Raccoon City Orphanage in a flashback, which while not as annoying as Sherry’s Resi 2 Remake section (this time I managed to avoid dying completely) it still wasn’t all that fun. A small blip in an otherwise great section.
Leon turns the tables at last!
When we get to Leon though we enter full-on Resi 4-6 madness set pretty much entirely in the ruins of Raccoon City. A large array of weapons and plenty of ammo means you’re encouraged to kill every enemy you see, especially as many set pieces have you unable to move on until everything is dead. If an enemy is stunned Leon can once again melee them to death or parry incoming strikes for extra damage, and he can now also use his new favourite tool in a small handaxe on his belt or even pick up enemy weapons and use or toss them himself. While there are some key/item collecting and some safes to crack on the whole with Leon you’ll be mostly shooting. There’s a motorbike action sequence as well, and a part where Leon has to use a sniper rifle to keep Grace safe from approaching monsters plus plenty of boss fights as well. Thankfully very little QTEs, so that’s one part of that era of Resi that they left in the past, so very much like the Resi 4 remake in that regard. Leon’s odd new gameplay mechanic are item boxes that act like the Merchant’s shop where you can buy new weapons/ammo or upgrade your current weapons, with a wrist detector that somehow counts how many kills Leon gets and gives him spendable currency for each one… which makes more sense than combining blood with metal to create ammo, but only just. Leon can also craft ammo but in the old combining gunpowder and scrap metal way, and has no permanent health upgrades. Overall it was good fun as the aiming and movement is nice and tight, and some of the set pieces were really well done, one on a building that was on its side so everyone was walking on windows allowing you to shoot them out from underneath foes was a good laugh. Plus a return to the ruins of RPD HQ was so much fun, especially seeing all the easter eggs and little touches laying around.
Once you complete the game you can once again unlock weapons and infinite ammo for future replays (though the infinite ammo costs A LOT, so it’ll take more than one play through to get that…) as well as viewing models and concept art. As of this review, that’s it but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they added a Mercenaries-like mode as a freebie like they did with Resident Evil 8 or the 4 Remake (correct, past me!). Overall I couldn’t have been happier with Resi 9, it paid homage to all eras of Resident Evil while tellings its own story and just generally feeling great to play.
Graphics and Sound:
Check out those… ugh, you know what? I miss blurry graphics…
As I always say with modern AAA games it’d be pretty weird if they looked crap! Realistic textures, lighting, hair movement… just everything looks great (or horrible in a “intentionally gory” way!)
Sound is great too. Voice work is top notch (Grace’s voice actor especially nails the understandably terrified reaction to being hunted by horrors in a dimly lit hallway) and the music is perfectly moody, including a great sombre remix of the RPD theme when you return to the location.
Story:
You might be surprised to find out this man is the villain!
Our opening prologue focuses on Grace Ashcroft, daughter of journalist Alyssa Ashcroft (from the Outbreak games! … Remember those?) who is told to go, all by herself, to an old broken down hotel where she witnessed her mother get brutally murdered in front of her very eyes a few years ago to investigate the latest victim of what’s being called “Raccoon City Syndrome”, where survivors of the outbreak are showing black bruising and coughing before, well, dying. Of all the reality stretching Resident Evil games do, especially recent ones, a seemingly not corrupt FBI guy sending one of his analysts, so not even an active on-field agent, an analyst, to the site of her mother’s traumatic murder by herself just confused me greatly. I was waiting for a reveal that the agent was on the books of the game’s lead villains, but seemingly not! Well, anyway, while there Grace meets Victor Gideon, a man with literal grey skin who claims Grace is the key to his plans. She tries to escape but is kidnapped by him. At the same time Leon, who is suffering from Raccoon City Syndrome, is sent to the same area for the same reason and is told by Sherry, his advisor-on-the-earpiece for the game (who mysteriously also has Raccoon City Syndrome despite her whole thing in 6 being that she can’t get infected and can even regenerate from fatal injury due to her exposure to the G-Virus) informs him of Victor Gideon, who he then spots on the street with Grace over his shoulder. As he tries to go after him Gideon intentionally injects some passersby with his mutated T-Virus and escapes in the confusion.
The next big chunk of the game takes place in the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Centre, Gideon’s secret research facility that somehow, despite being owned by a former Umbrella researcher with GREY SKIN has been operating for 20-odd years and remained off the radar. Grace is hunted and hounded by all sorts of horrors and briefly encounters Leon, who following leads arrived there as well, and hears Gideon mention once more than she’s “the key”. Honestly the story does move forward much here, it’s all about the claustrophobic and tense gameplay (or shooty-shooty gameplay for the brief Leon parts) but Grace does meet a little blind girl called Emily who she manages to save… until she turns into a mutant creature that Leon has to put down. The act, no matter how blatantly necessary, causes Grace to run off and lose faith in Leon, running straight into Gideon who reveals he will show her the reason she was born and introduces her to Zeno, a man who looks nearly identical to Albert Wesker but wearing white with white hair rather than black with blonde hair, and who is a member of the mysterious “Connections” group mentioned briefly in Resi 7. They head to the ruins of Raccoon City, where Leon soon follows…
*Spoilers from here until the next bolded sentence!*
After fighting his way into the centre of the city, including a stay at the RPD with lots of easter eggs including Tofu still hanging around (meaning he’s now canon?!), a rematch with a mass produced “Mr. X” Tyrant and battling “Plant 43”, a sequel to one of my favourite original Resi bosses. Leon eventually finds a large previously undiscovered Umbrella lab called ARK deep underground roughly where the orphanage used to be and as he makes his way into the lab Grace is told she is one of many clones created to unlock Ozwell E. Spencer’s greatest achievement: Elpis, a virus that allows someone to control the minds of others. Leon encounters a UBCS-style group of armed guards and, in one of the highlights of the game for me, encounters HUNK, the previously bonus-game-only character who he has a fun boss fight with (including a handaxe-off… why is that weapon such a big thing in this game?) and then we enter the endgame, where we start getting plenty of reveals. We find out Raccoon City wasn’t bombed to stop the spread of T-Virus but instead bombed because Elpis was so powerful it could destabilise the world so if the US government couldn’t have it they wanted it destroyed. Grace finds out she is actually a perfectly normal girl who was adopted by Spencer while he was going through a guilt trip phase of his life (that he presumably got over by the time of his death in Resident Evil 5… either that or he went senile and regressed to his younger, more power-hungry self in his old age, which isn’t impossible…) and so when it came time to either unlock or destroy Elpis Grace choses to unlock it, as given the evidence she believed Spencer’s ultimate creation was actually his attempt at redemption: an antiviral. Zeno isn’t interested in hearing that though so injects himself with it expecting to be able to dominate minds but instead all his Wesker-powers vanish because yes, indeed, it was an antiviral.
*girly squeal*
Gideon reemerges at this point (he had previously been exploded by Leon during a high speed motorbike chase…) and kills Zeno, calling him a “cheap imitation” (so again, I assume he’s supposed to be a literal Wesker clone) and then stabs Grace, claiming that Elpis being the end to viral warfare will cause anarchy and that his idol Spencer was a genius because of it. Grace manages to inject Leon with Elpis as he had reached barely-able-to-move levels of Raccoon City Syndrome, and a renewed Leon then takes out Gideon, who mutates to reveal he had a Nemesis parasite inside him all this time (something we were tipped off to in a great file in the lab that essentially lists how Tyrants, Lickers and other things were mass-produced) With the threat dealt with Grace and Leon are saved by Chris’s personal and therefore not corrupt BSAA team and to top things off Emily is found alive within the body of the weird mutation she became. Elpis is presumably spread across the world, Spencer successfully destroying the viruses he spent his life researching (though I assume not completely as Resi 10 will still have to exist…) In a montage and a 60 page report you can read its revealed that “The Connections” is a criminal organisation that had its hands in Umbrella, Tricell and a whole bunch of other Resident Evil villainous stuff and were the ones who took over ARK during the Raccoon City outbreak and actually told the US government to drop the bomb not to stop the spread of the virus or to destroy Elpis, but to keep their new secret lab even more secret and give them the perfect experiment ground and base in which to spread bioweapons. In a post credits scene we see a mysterious group collect something off-screen from ARK after killing some BSAA agents, presumably The Connections, but what they’ve grabbed we’ll have to find out about later… maybe. This is Resident Evil, there have been a few cliffhangers that were never addressed, or only addressed in a spin-off title…
*Spoilers end here!*
Overall it’s a fun plot that has plenty of nostalgia and cheesy Resi stuff, but it’s the gameplay around it that really shines, and that’s the main thing after all…
Downloadable Content:
… I think the subtitle sums this picture up well enough!
Nothing so far, but as mentioned I assume at the very least like 8 and 4 Remake they’ll be a Mercenaries-like mode added for free later on, and maybe a chunk of bonus story DLC.
(Edit: just as I’m putting this up yesterday they announced a free “bonus game” was coming alongside some story DLC, so… I guess I was on the money there!)
Thoughts Now:
Seeing this photo, which I saw in the original game 30 years ago, still in one piece “hit me in the feels”, as the phrase goes.
The game sold 5 million in one week and has been almost universally praised, so you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ll be adding to that praise. Even on its own merits it plays great, both tense horror and all-out action are very fun and satisfying in their own genres, and add in all the callbacks and nods given I’ve been a fan from the very beginning and I can’t give this anything other than a 5. I’ll be surprised it this isn’t my game of the year, though thinking about it GTA 6 is due out towards the end of 2026, and despite their questionable morals Rockstar don’t ever really fail, so… I guess we’ll see!
Hogan Reviews 