“It comes across like homework from a class I didn’t even want to be attending."
PC | PS5 | SWITCH | XBOX SERIES |
HOW I PLAYED: I played on a PS5 with a physical copy, paired with an LG C1 and AirPods Max. My total playtime came in at 9:57:55, which honestly caught me off guard. According to HowLongToBeat, the average playthrough sits around 11 hours—and I usually land above the average, not under it.
STORY — 14/20
INTRO (5)
Some games fail because they’re broken. Others fail because they’re boring. But every once in a while, a game fails for a stranger reason: it doesn’t know what it wants to be.
That’s exactly how I felt playing Resident Evil Requiem. At times, it felt like the slow, atmospheric survival horror of Resident Evil 2. Other times, it tried to be the forward-driven action adventure of Resident Evil 4. But instead of blending those ideas together, the game ended up committing fully to neither — leaving a world that felt less like a place I was surviving in and more like a series of disconnected levels I was simply walking through.
Before getting into the details, I want to be clear about something: I didn’t go into Requiem wanting to dislike it. In fact, the first couple of hours genuinely hooked me. Grace was immediately likable, her performance was excellent, and early on it felt like the game was building toward something compelling. Unfortunately that feeling didn't last long and that initial first-date hype quickly began to disintegrate.
CUTSCENES (5)
Some of the best moments in Resident Evil Requiem aren’t the moments you’re playing — they’re the moments you’re watching.
The cutscenes are often incredibly well directed. They’re intense, cinematic, and staged with real confidence. When the game transitions into one of these sequences, it suddenly feels focused and purposeful in a way the overall pace and direction of the game mostly doesn’t.
There were multiple moments where I found myself thinking the cutscenes were actually more compelling than the sections leading up to them.
They demand your attention. The camera work, the sound design, the performances — everything is dialed up. It almost feels like the game grabs you by the head and shoves your face into the retinal scanner.
But that contrast ends up highlighting another problem.
The cinematic moments feel dramatic and alive, but when control returns to the player, the world often feels strangely sterile. Instead of inhabiting a tense, believable environment, you’re back to navigating what feels like another carefully constructed level.
It creates a strange disconnect where the story feels urgent and dramatic during cutscenes, but the gameplay surrounding them rarely maintains that same sense of momentum or atmosphere.
In some ways, the cutscenes show the version of Resident Evil Requiem that could have existed — one with strong direction, clear stakes, and a cohesive tone.
Unfortunately, the game itself rarely lives up to that potential.
WORLD BUILDING (2)
The environments reinforce this problem. Rather than feeling like you’re surviving inside a real place, the world feels segmented and artificial.
Locations feel disconnected from one another. Exploration rarely feels natural. Instead of building tension through environmental storytelling, the game often feels like a sequence of designed levels.
Raccoon City, an iconic setting in the series, is particularly underwhelming. It’s large, but empty and sparse on meaningful encounters. Rather than creating atmosphere or tension, it feels like a sandbox stripped of charm.
At several points I caught myself thinking the same thing:
“I’m not surviving a place. I’m walking through levels.”
It felt so video-gamey. So fabricated. Like a Counter-stike level. I understand that this is an abandoned apocalyptic wasteland but that in itself can still be a vibe. Instead it just felt overwhelmingly like a place designed inside a computer.
Instead of feeling tragic it was tragic.
OVERALL STORY (2)
Ironically, the story begins as one of the game’s stronger elements.
In the opening hours, I was genuinely invested. Grace is immediately likable, and her performance gives the character a lot of personality. Early moments create a sense of curiosity that made me want to keep exploring.
But once I reached the medical center, the narrative began to unravel.
For hours I found myself wandering hallways and completing objectives without any real understanding of why I was doing them. Literally more than half of this entire game is just "escaping this building". Nothing has actually happened. The game hasn't given me real reasons to care. The world wasn’t clearly explained, and the stakes never felt properly established.
The main villain is visually distinctive, but his motivations and actions remain vague. By the time you reach major locations like Raccoon City, the game hasn’t built enough narrative investment for those moments to land emotionally.
The story sets up promise but never delivers on it.
It also suffers from how vague and unfocused it feels. At a certain point, I realized I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be working towards. The game never clearly establishes its stakes, its world, or why any of this matters, leaving me to move from objective to objective without any real emotional investment or understanding of the bigger picture. It leans heavily on mystery, but withholds too much for too long — instead of building intrigue, it creates confusion and detachment. By the time the game finally starts to reveal more, the emotional payoff comes far too late. Rather than feeling impactful, those moments fell flat because the investment was never properly built in the first place.
GRAPHICS — 15/15
CHARACTER MODELS (5)
To be fair, there are areas where the game truly shines. From a technical standpoint, the presentation is spectacular.
The graphics are absolutely state of the art, with detailed environments and character models that look incredible throughout the experience. During the first couple of hours while the game was still fresh I actually said to myself "oh they're just showing off at this point".
ENVIRONMENTS (5)
The environments are undeniably impressive on a technical level—outrageously detailed, with gorgeous lighting and an almost obsessive level of visual polish—but at the same time, they left me feeling strangely disengaged. I can’t tell if it was a lack of immersion on my end or something inherent to the game’s design, but I rarely found myself stopping to take in the world the way I did so often in Silent Hill 2 Remake for example.
Requiem looks incredible, no question, but for me, that detail never translated into atmosphere or memorability. It felt less like a world I was exploring and more like a backdrop I was moving through—visually stunning, yet ultimately forgettable.
SPECIAL FX (5)
The visual effects are also particularly impressive. The physics-driven blood splatter system is both realistic and exaggerated in a way that fits the tone of the series perfectly. Encounters often feel more intense simply because of how visually chaotic they become.
AUDIO — 12/15
AMBIENCE (4)
I really liked the game’s music. It leans into an eerie atmosphere, driven by cool, synth-heavy textures that, at times, reminded me of Armored Core VI. There’s an almost apocalyptic, sinister edge to it that fits the tone well. Overall, the music and sound design are a strong highlight.
BOSS MUSIC (3)
The same goes for the boss music. It does its job well—even if no individual tracks really stand out on their own, they consistently set the tone and elevate the encounters.
SOUND DESIGN (5)
The sound design is another standout. Small details add a surprising level of immersion — like the sound of Grace's footsteps subtly changing depending on the surface she’s walking on. At one point I noticed the difference between walking across tile and stepping onto a corpse, with the sound of blood squishing beneath her feet. Moments like that show an incredible level of audio craftsmanship.
These technical achievements make it clear that a lot of effort went into the game’s presentation. Unfortunately, strong visuals and sound design can’t compensate for the deeper structural issues with pacing, mechanics, and world design.
PERFORMANCE — 9/10
FRAME RATE (4)
The frame rate was silky smooth throughout my entire playthrough—the game never once stuttered, slowed down, or showed any noticeable dips in performance.
STABILITY (5)
The game itself was incredibly stable. Even if the mechanics didn’t always feel fully tested or thoughtfully designed, the technical performance was polished and consistently fluid. I was able to do everything the game asked of me and interact with the world without any issues whatsoever.
GAMEPLAY — 23/40
CONTROLS (4)
The game controls really well, and everything I liked about the Resident Evil 4 Remake is back. You can toggle between weapons on the fly, reload while walking, and the overall movement just feels great. Even the little things—like smashing boxes—are surprisingly satisfying, and aiming or interacting with the environment feels extremely polished. I was especially impressed with some of the guns in the game. One of my favorites was a new submachine gun that had an incredible visceral response; every shot felt punchy and satisfying to fire.
One of the biggest standouts in Resident Evil Requiem is the addition of both first- and third-person modes. The game defaults to first person during the sections where you play as Grace, and those sequences control really well. The camera feels exceptionally smooth, and the sprint speed is tuned nicely—it’s just fast enough to feel distinct from walking, but still slow enough that the tension remains when you’re trying to flee from an enemy.
MECHANICS (2)
Playing as Grace, enemy grabs quickly became one of the most frustrating mechanics in the game.
The intention is clearly to create tension, but in practice they often feel like failures of controls or hit detection rather than enemy skill. In a third-person action game, when your inputs don’t correspond cleanly to what happens on screen, the result isn’t tension — it’s frustration.
Instead of feeling like you’re being outplayed by enemies, it often felt like I was fighting the game itself.
Some of the game’s new ideas are actually interesting on paper.
The blood collection mechanic, for example, could have added depth and variety to both combat and exploration. But the game never gives these systems enough time to evolve or become meaningful.
They’re introduced briefly and then mostly forgotten, which makes them feel like yet another disconnected layer on top of the already fragmented experience.
The weapon upgrade system doesn’t just fail mechanically — it breaks immersion. You collect points and suddenly upgrade weapons through an abstract menu interface with no context, explanation, or grounding in the world. Resident Evil 4 had the merchant, Dark Souls had Andre… Requiem has the ChatGPT Armory. Imagine if there were a lone survivor in Raccoon City, hoarding guns and scraps and helping Leon along the way — it could have given this otherwise meaningless area some real presence. Instead, I kept asking myself, who made this? how are my weapons magically upgrading themselves? holy shit this feels dumb. It doesn’t make you feel powerful or engaged; it’s a hollow, jarring interruption that highlights how disconnected the mechanics are from the world and reinforces the game’s empty, absurd feeling.
What makes this frustrating isn’t that Resident Evil Requiem tries new ideas. The series has always evolved. From the fixed-camera tension of the early games to the action-heavy design of Resident Evil 4, reinvention has always been part of its identity.
But those games still felt cohesive. Their mechanics, worlds, and pacing all pushed in the same direction.
Requiem doesn’t feel like an evolution of the series. It feels like a collection of experiments that were never fully shaped into a single vision.
And that’s what makes the experience feel so strangely hollow.
The enemy grab mechanic was incredibly frustrating while playing as Grace, but what was equally triggering was how enemies could seemingly walk through bullets. They were absurdly spongey — I can’t tell you how many times I blasted a guy point-blank with a shotgun, only to get bitten on the neck anyway. It wasn’t tense, it wasn’t scary, it was just infuriating. The combination of grab attacks and indestructible enemies turned combat into a chore at times, not a thrill, making it feel like the game was actively mocking me.
Enemies in Requiem can also drop their weapons, but the mechanic feels under-utilized and never comes close to being as satisfying as it was in Ghost of Yotei.
Too often, a red “cross” appears over the interaction prompt, preventing you from picking them up or using them at all. That same frustration extends to the explosive red barrels—an element that’s been used so effectively in past entries, but here feels awkward, cumbersome, and unnecessarily difficult to leverage in combat.
During the very first moment you take control of Leon, you’re able to pick up and use a chainsaw dropped by an enemy. It immediately feels like it’s going to be a standout mechanic—something the game will build on and revisit often. Instead, it shows up maybe two or three more times across the entire experience. It was like a game that turns out nothing like the reveal trailer. What happened?
It’s just another example of Requiem flashing moments of brilliance, only to abandon them before they’re ever fully realized.
PACING (2)
The pacing also contributes to the feeling that the game is dragging its feet.
Key mechanics are introduced extremely slowly, and meaningful player empowerment comes far too late. Nearly seven hours into the game is when you finally gain access to meaningful weapon upgrades as Leon.
By that point, you’ve already spent a huge portion of the experience navigating encounters without the tools or progression systems that could have made those moments engaging. Sure, Grace has her own mechanics for upgrades, but just dropping Leon in that late in the game felt so clumsy and out of place to me. Combined with the disconnected level structure and uneven encounter design, the pacing feels sluggish rather than suspenseful.
One thing that nearly broke me was regaining control of Grace near the end of the game, after hours of playing as Leon. Suddenly, in a completely new area, all of her equipment, tools, and coins — things she couldn’t possibly have carried with her — were available again. I was not able to simply dismiss this a video game magic. It was absurd. Layer on the blood collection mechanic suddenly making a cameo, and it became overwhelming. I literally had to put my controller down and talk myself into finishing the game. And I was already bored and frustrated with this thing. By that point, I was completely removed from the experience; nothing felt real, nothing felt earned, and the game’s world had entirely lost any sense of cohesion.
The issue isn’t just pacing—it’s cadence. Like a symphony full of talented musicians, but no conductor keeping them in time, Requiem constantly felt out of sync with itself.
UI/UE (3)
If I had to sum up the UI and user experience in just a couple of words, I’d call it uninspired and bland. Mechanically it does the job, but it feels incredibly sterile and boring. I made a similar critique in my review of Resident Evil 4 Remake, so maybe I’m just not a fan of modern menu design trends—but even so, it feels like a missed opportunity. The interface could have had much more personality and style, something that the game overall was desperately lacking.
BOSS QUALITY (2)
The boss fights were probably the single biggest letdown in the game for me. Their mechanics often felt unclear and frustrating, and several encounters left me wondering, “What just hit me?” instead of making me feel hungry for the kill.
A giant, fairly generic spider boss in particular just doesn’t scream Resident Evil to me.
Rather than feeling thrilling or strategic, many of the fights come across as chaotic and hard to read. The spider encounter is a good example—messy, confusing, and lacking clear, readable mechanics.
Earlier moments in the game briefly hint at more interesting ideas, like a boss that interacts with lighting mechanics, but those concepts are never really developed or pushed in meaningful ways. My success in boss fights mostly felt like accidents rather than triumphs.
Great boss fights rely on readable systems, clear cause-and-effect feedback, and the satisfaction that comes from mastering the encounter. In Resident Evil Requiem, victories often felt less like the result of skill and more like simple luck. Instead of feeling accomplished when a fight ended, I mostly just felt relieved that it was over.
There were a couple of mini-boss encounters but they were so chaotic they forced me to lower the difficulty level. These didn't add anything meaningful to the game for me.
One boss late in the game that was unbelievably -uhhg- just crap. How did this make it into the final game? The fight consisted of the enemy walking toward me, taking shotgun blasts to the face, getting staggered, I’d pick up ammo, and it walked toward me again — rinse and repeat. The cutscene leading into the fight was ten times more interesting than the fight itself. I couldn’t believe how dull it was. Was I missing something? Could the low difficulty option I selected really have made the fight feel this lifeless? Either way, it was one of the most underwhelming boss encounters I’ve experienced in a long time.
ENEMY VARIETY (3)
Honestly, I wasn’t very impressed with the enemy variety in the game. The vast majority of enemies are humanoid types that mostly feel like the same creature wearing different costumes. Some of them have unique moves or weapons, but in practice they end up feeling pretty similar. Overall, I think Resident Evil Requiem would have benefited from a wider range of enemy types rather than just re-skinned zombies, and definitely more mini-bosses or larger threats that come in different shapes and sizes.
GAMEPLAY VARIETY (3)
There were some puzzles in requiem but far too few. This was another huge disappointment — puzzles have always been a highlight for me across so many titles in the series. Sure, there were a couple of notes scattered around with combinations for safes and keys to collect, but I wouldn’t call those actual puzzles. They didn’t challenge me, engage me, or make the world feel interactive; they were just filler tasks in otherwise empty spaces.
Obviously, we get the opportunity to play as two characters, with Leon and Grace’s portions taking turns driving the game forward. Grace’s sections default to first-person and focus more on exploration, while Leon’s lean heavily into action and gunplay. On paper, this might sound like a nice way to mix things up, but in practice the shift feels disjointed and uneven. Grace’s exploration segments never feel fully realized, and Leon’s action-heavy portions lack the tension and polish that might have made the contrast interesting.
The game is completely absent of anything reminiscent of the shooting galleries from Resident Evil 4, and upon completing it, all I got was an additional difficulty mode unlocked. There are no Mercenaries, no Assignment Ada, nothing to extend or deepen the experience. For a series known for clever post-game content and replayability, this was a huge missed opportunity. Overall, it was majorly underwhelming.
REPLAYABILITY (2)
That sense of detachment extends beyond the bonus content and ends up defining the entire experience. Resident Evil: Requiem often feels like it’s made up of small, disconnected pieces—systems, story beats, and mechanics that work in isolation but never quite come together into a cohesive whole. The bonus content only reinforces that feeling: weapons you can’t immediately use, lore locked behind post-game credits, and files that might have added clarity if they were integrated into the main story. What it ultimately feels like is the developers finishing the game and then suddenly realizing they should probably add something extra. It’s presented as “look at all this stuff you can do,” but instead of feeling rewarding, it comes across like homework from a class I didn’t even want to be attending—tasks to complete rather than content that meaningfully enhances the experience. The problem is only amplified by how surprisingly short the game is, and the fact that it grants access to the second ending immediately after a single playthrough makes the overall experience feel even more limited. Instead of enhancing the game, it all contributes to a sense of fragmentation, as though its most interesting ideas were split apart rather than woven into a unified package.
BONUS — 1/3
The game is kind of strange in how it dishes out accessibility options; they're more like presets rather than detailed parameters. But it does offer a button hold instead of a button mash so that get's 1 point.
OVERALL — 74/100
GOOD
Resident Evil: requiem made it clear that the developers were terrified of disappointing fans. Every risk is carefully neutered, every mechanic feels watered down, and the game constantly hesitates when it could have been bold. Requiem never trusts the player, the story, or even its own systems enough to take chances.
The result is something that feels overly safe — polished on the surface, but creatively cautious and emotionally empty underneath. Strip away the strong presentation, particularly the sound design and visuals, and what’s left is a surprisingly forgettable experience. It gestures toward a fragmented, Quentin Tarantino-style nonlinear structure, but instead of feeling deliberate or stylish, it comes across like a series of disconnected DLCs awkwardly stitched together.
PROS
✅ Stunning visuals and character models
✅ Strong cutscene direction and performances
✅ Excellent sound design and atmosphere
✅ Smooth performance and polished controls
CONS
❌ Disconnected world and lack of immersion
❌ Frustrating combat (grab mechanics, bullet sponge enemies)
❌ Underdeveloped mechanics and poor pacing
❌ Weak bosses, no puzzles, and minimal replayability
TLDR: 74/100 (GOOD) A visually stunning but creatively hollow Resident Evil that can’t decide what it wants to be — packed with great ideas that are either underdeveloped, disconnected, or outright frustrating, resulting in an experience that feels more like a series of lifeless levels than a cohesive survival horror game.
PICK UP (Resident Evil Requiem) HERE:
PlayStation: https://www.playstation.com/en-ca/games/resident-evil-requiem/
Xbox: https://www.xbox.com/en-CA/games/store/resident-evil-requiem/9NMFWR0NRLZS
PC: https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/3764200/
CHECK OUT OUR VIDEO REVIEW HERE
0 Comments