Resident Evil Requiem Review — The Best Resident Evil Ever Made?

After 30 years of survival horror, countless remakes, and one legendary fourth entry that redefined an entire genre, Capcom faces its most loaded question yet: can it do it again? The answer, delivered on February 27, 2026, is a resounding and deeply satisfying yes. Our Resident Evil Requiem review finds a game that does not merely honour its legacy — it draws from thirty years of terror to expand its lore, balance its dual DNA of horror and action, and produce something that feels genuinely new while being unmistakably Resident Evil. Developed entirely in-house by Capcom on the RE Engine, Requiem is the ninth mainline entry in the series and arrives on PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Story: Raccoon City, 28 Years Later

Resident Evil Requiem is set in October 2026 — exactly 28 years after the fall of Raccoon City. A mysterious syndrome is quietly spreading among survivors of the Raccoon City incident, and FBI intelligence analyst Grace Ashcroft (voiced by Angela Sant’Albano) is assigned to investigate. Grace is not a soldier. She is a meticulous, methodical analyst — and the daughter of Resident Evil Outbreak’s Alyssa Ashcroft, a detail that casts a long shadow over her personal stakes in Raccoon City’s buried secrets. Her path inevitably intersects with Leon S. Kennedy (voiced by Nick Apostolides), veteran DSO agent making his first major series appearance since Resident Evil 6 (2012) and visibly redesigned to carry the weight of fourteen additional years on his face and shoulders.

The story is, by the franchise’s own admitted standards, surprisingly emotionally resonant. The narrative was written by Haris Orkin, who spent two and a half years on the project, and the care shows. Where Resident Evil stories have traditionally been best described as gloriously trashy B-movie horror, Requiem reaches for something more: Grace’s investigation into her mother’s past and the conspiracy linking Raccoon City’s ruins to the modern day gives the game a personal throughline that keeps the stakes feeling human rather than purely bombastic. The two protagonists’ journeys entwine naturally rather than feeling scripted, and their dynamic — cautious analyst meets battered veteran — generates genuine chemistry.

The finale does stumble somewhat. Several plot threads introduced in Grace’s early chapters feel underexplored by the time credits roll, and a handful of narrative decisions in the third act invite the kind of head-scratching that the series’ harshest critics have come to expect. But Requiem earns its emotional beats far more often than it fumbles them, and the mid-game convergence of both storylines produces one of the strongest sequences in the franchise’s entire history.

Gameplay: Two Protagonists, Two Completely Different Games

The defining design decision of Resident Evil Requiem — and the one that elevates it above a safe sequel — is the commitment to making Grace and Leon feel like they are protagonists in two entirely different games that happen to share the same world.

Grace Ashcroft: Pure Survival Horror

Grace’s sections are the spiritual heir to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village. She plays primarily in first-person (with a toggle to third-person available if preferred), armed sparingly, and entirely reliant on observation, evasion, and careful resource management. Her starting location — the Rhodes Hill Care Center — is a masterclass in environmental horror. Capcom has built every room with the understanding that threat and atmosphere do more work than jump scares. Shadows have weight. Sound design is deliberately, excruciatingly good. The sensation of pushing open a door not knowing what lies behind it returns with full force, something the more action-focused recent entries have gradually eroded. Grace cannot simply fight her way through situations. She must think.

Her combat toolkit is intentionally limited, and the game is better for it. The Requiem revolver — her primary weapon — hits hard but carries precious little ammo, forcing players to choose between burning a cylinder on an enemy or saving it for the unknown. Her melee hatchet is primarily defensive, used for breaking grabs rather than aggression. This scarcity transforms every encounter into a small puzzle: fight, run, hide, or try to lure the threat away?

Leon S. Kennedy: Action-First, Unapologetically Fun

Leon’s sections are a deliberate tonal reset. He arrives with the heavy firepower, the battlefield confidence, and the preposterous one-liners that the franchise has leaned into since Resident Evil 4. His third-person sections feel like Capcom’s love letter to action-oriented RE — kinetic, spectacular, and deeply satisfying to play. The Requiem gun (his signature revolver, distinct from Grace’s) hits like a freight train. His MSBG 500 shotgun delivers the kind of crowd-control stagger that produces involuntary grins. He can repair his hatchet rather than scavenge for a replacement — a small but meaningful quality-of-life improvement that keeps the momentum of his sections from ever stalling on inventory management.

Importantly, Leon is also redesigned to feel his age. His movements carry a slight stiffness compared to Grace’s agility — not enough to impede gameplay, but enough to ground him in realism. He is a brilliant fighter who has taken too many hits over too many years, and Capcom has found a way to convey that without making him feel slow or unfun to control.

How the Two Styles Interlock

The genius of Requiem’s structure is that neither protagonist ever fully overstays their welcome. Capcom has paced the transitions between horror and action with surgical precision. Just as Grace’s relentless tension approaches the point of genuine exhaustion, Leon arrives to provide cathartic release. Just as Leon’s bombast begins to feel predictable, Grace pulls the game back into shadow and silence. The counterpoint is not an afterthought — it is the architecture of the entire experience, and it works to near perfection across a 10–12 hour campaign.

World Design and Atmosphere

Raccoon City as a setting has been visited, revisited, and remade across the franchise’s history, but Requiem presents it in its most haunting form yet: 28 years of decay, reclaimed by nature at the edges and still bearing fresh wounds at its centre. The Care Center, the city’s rain-drenched streets, the ARK facility buried beneath familiar ruins — each environment has been designed with Capcom’s renewed commitment to environmental storytelling. Notes, files, and visual details reward exploration without ever halting momentum. The attention to lore is exceptional; players who have followed the series since Raccoon City’s fall in Resident Evil 2 and 3 will find an astonishing density of callbacks, answered questions, and quietly devastating reveals woven through the level design.

A Photo Mode, added in the March 27, 2026 update, allows players to capture and frame these environments at leisure — a welcome addition that reflects Capcom’s confidence in how visually striking the game’s world is.

Visuals, Audio, and Performance

Resident Evil Requiem is, without qualification, one of the best-looking games of 2026. The RE Engine’s lighting engine — particularly with Ray Tracing enabled — produces atmospheric depth that genuinely makes you forget you are looking at a screen. Rain-drenched Raccoon City streets reflect neon and emergency lighting in ways that feel physically real. Interior spaces use darkness as a design element, not a graphical shortcut. Character models for Grace and Leon are the best Capcom has produced; the hair simulation in particular drew widespread comment across reviews.

The audio design matches the visual ambition. The soundtrack — composed by Nao Sato, Masahiro Ohki, and Shigeyuki Kameda — is deliberately understated during Grace’s sections, using silence and ambient sound to build pressure rather than signposting scares with music cues. Leon’s sections shift into something more propulsive and orchestral, reflecting the tonal change with appropriate scoring. Voice acting across both leads is excellent, with Angela Sant’Albano bringing genuine vulnerability and intelligence to Grace, and Nick Apostolides threading the needle between charisma and battle-weariness in a way that makes Leon feel genuinely older rather than simply re-textured.

Boss Design and Combat Encounters

Requiem’s one consistent weakness is its boss roster. Several encounters — particularly in the mid-game — feel undertuned on standard difficulty, resolving in fewer attempts than the atmosphere surrounding them seems to promise. For a game that so carefully builds dread in its environmental design, it is a recurring minor deflation when a boss encounter resolves before the player has fully processed its threat. The Insanity difficulty setting addresses this significantly, and players seeking more resistance from the game’s most theatrical moments are strongly encouraged to seek it out after a first playthrough. The final boss is a notable exception to this pattern — a spectacular, multi-phase confrontation that lands exactly as hard as the thirty hours of franchise history it draws upon.

Replayability and Post-Launch Content

Resident Evil Requiem launched with multiple difficulty tiers, a New Game+ mode, and an Extra Content Shop where Completion Points earned during the campaign can be exchanged for unlockable costumes, weapons, and concept art. Alternate costumes for both Grace and Leon — including Grace’s Apocalypse and Noir outfits, and Leon’s RE4R costume — give repeat playthroughs visual variety. The game also supports ongoing seasonal engagement through its collaboration events calendar, which has already included a Fortnite skin crossover (Grace was added to Fortnite on launch day) and further brand partnerships throughout spring 2026.

Final Verdict: Resident Evil Requiem Review

Our Resident Evil Requiem review ends where the game itself does: with a sense of genuine admiration for what Capcom has accomplished in Requiem’s 30th anniversary year. This is not a safe sequel, and it is not a game coasting on nostalgia. It is a sincere and largely successful attempt to reconcile two decades of franchise evolution into a single experience — the horror of RE7, the action of RE4, the lore density of the series at its most confident — and deliver it all in a package that runs beautifully across four platforms simultaneously. Grace Ashcroft is an outstanding new protagonist, Leon has never felt more human, and Raccoon City has never looked more hauntingly alive in its ruin. The boss design needed another pass, and the finale’s narrative loose threads are a genuine frustration. But these are complaints levelled at a game that earns the right to be held to that standard. Requiem sold 7 million copies in its first two months, achieved the highest Metacritic user score in the platform’s history, and became the fastest-selling Resident Evil game ever. The series has never been healthier.

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For the latest official news and updates, visit the official Resident Evil Requiem website.