Resident Evil Requiem Is the Best RE Since 4

*Spoilers Ahead*

I can't believe I'm about to say this. After years of wondering if Capcom would ever recapture what made the original Resident Evil 4 so special, after sitting through RE6's identity crisis and the divisive experiments of Village, they actually did it. They pulled it off.

Resident Evil Requiem isn't just good. It's great. This is the best mainline Resident Evil experience since RE4 dropped over twenty years ago. And I don't say that lightly. From the visuals to the audio design, the gore, the voice acting, the tension, the pacing. This game is firing on every single cylinder. Capcom didn't just make a good sequel. They made a statement.

And the numbers back it up. Over 320,000 concurrent players on Steam within hours of launch. An 88 on Metacritic, making it the highest rated mainline RE entry in over two decades. A 9.5 user score, the highest in franchise history. Five million wishlists before the game even went live. This isn't a quiet comeback. This is Resident Evil kicking the door down and reminding everyone who runs survival horror.

Let me walk you through why this one hits different.

Two Protagonists, Two Completely Different Games

And here's the thing. What makes Requiem work so well isn't just that it's polished. It's that Capcom finally figured out how to solve a problem that has haunted this franchise for almost two decades. How do you balance horror and action in the same game?

Their answer was brilliant. Don't blend them. Separate them.

You play as two characters. Grace Ashcroft, an FBI intelligence analyst with zero field experience and a deeply personal connection to the case. And Leon S. Kennedy, the franchise's golden boy making his first mainline appearance since RE6 back in 2012. Fourteen years. That's how long we waited for Leon to come back properly. And man, was it worth the wait.

Grace's sections are pure survival horror. First-person perspective recommended, extremely limited resources, an eight-slot inventory that forces you to make brutal decisions about what to carry. She's not a super soldier. She's not a trained operative. She's a bookworm analyst who is completely out of her depth, and the game makes you feel that in every encounter. There's a blood crafting system where Grace collects infected blood to synthesize ammo, healing items, and one-hit stealth injectors. Every bullet matters. Every herb matters. You are constantly on the edge.

Leon's sections are the opposite end of the spectrum. Third-person, action-forward, RE4-style combat with melee attacks, parries, a hatchet, and environmental kills that are genuinely jaw-dropping. This is Leon at his absolute best. Wisecracking, absurdly competent, and looking like an action movie lead in every cutscene. Nick Apostolides reprises the role and delivers the kind of performance that cements Leon as one of gaming's most iconic characters.

And you know what makes this entire thing that much more impressive? Both characters can be played in first or third person at any time. You can switch on the fly. That kind of flexibility is almost unheard of, and the fact that it works as well as it does is a testament to how dialed in Capcom is with the RE Engine right now.

Raccoon City, Thirty Years Later

I have to talk about the setting, because this is where the nostalgia hits hardest.

Resident Evil Requiem takes you back to the ruins of Raccoon City. Twenty-eight years after the missile strike that wiped it off the map. And walking through those ruins, seeing the police station from RE2, the streets from RE3, all of it overgrown and decayed and contaminated. That is the kind of fan service that actually works because it serves the story.

The game confirms that the missile was thermal, not nuclear, which is why it's possible to go back at all. And the investigation that brings Grace and Leon together centers on a string of mysterious deaths among Raccoon City survivors showing signs of late-onset T-Virus infection. An ex-Umbrella scientist named Victor Gideon is at the heart of it, and the way the story unfolds across Grace's horror segments and Leon's action segments keeps the pacing razor sharp.

Grace's journey starts at the Wrenwood Hotel, the same location where her mother, Alyssa Ashcroft from RE Outbreak, was murdered eight years prior. That personal connection elevates the stakes beyond anything I've felt in an RE game since the Spencer Mansion. You're not just surviving. You're unraveling something deeply personal. And the game never lets you forget it.

The Visuals and Audio Are on Another Level

I need to be clear about something. This might be the best looking game I have ever played.

Resident Evil Requiem is built exclusively for current-gen hardware. No last-gen compromises. No cross-gen handcuffs. PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. And Capcom went all in on the visual fidelity. The RE Engine has been impressive since RE7, but Requiem takes it to a place I didn't know was possible.

On PC with path tracing enabled, the lighting is insane. Multi-bounce global illumination, ray-traced reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion. Every surface reacts to light the way it should. The chronic care center where Grace's story begins is dripping with atmosphere. Literally. Blood pools catch reflections. Hallway lights flicker and cast dynamic shadows that make you second-guess every corner. And the character models are some of the most detailed I've seen in any game, period.

But the audio. The audio. That's what pushed this experience from great to unforgettable. The sound design in Grace's sections is suffocating. You hear things in the walls. You hear breathing that isn't yours. Zombies retain their pre-infection behaviors, so a cook wanders the kitchen clutching a butcher knife, and a maid scrubs a mirror with blood on her lips. The spatial audio makes every creak and groan feel like it's right behind you. I played with headphones and genuinely had moments where I had to pause and take a breath.

And the gore. Oh man, the gore. Capcom turned it up to a level I wasn't ready for. The death animations for Grace are visceral. Chunks of flesh getting torn away, enemies feeding on you in genuinely nauseating ways. It's not gratuitous for the sake of it. It makes you terrified of dying, which is exactly what survival horror should do.

Leon Is the GOAT and This Game Proves It

Look, I'll be honest with you. I've always been a Leon guy. RE2 was my entry point into this franchise, and watching that character evolve over the last twenty-plus years has been one of the most satisfying arcs in gaming. But Requiem takes it to another level.

Leon in this game is confident without being cocky. Funny without being cringe. Dangerous without being invincible. The one-liners land. The combat feels incredible. And the way his story intersects with Grace's, the way he becomes this reluctant mentor figure while dealing with his own symptoms from the T-Virus exposure. That's good writing. That's character work that respects the history while pushing the story forward.

The fact that Leon and Sherry Birkin are working together again, decades after he saved her as a child in Raccoon City? That hit me in a way I wasn't expecting. These are characters that have been through hell together, and the game treats that history with the weight it deserves.

Credit where credit's due. Capcom has been on an absolute tear since the RE2 Remake in 2019. RE2, RE3, RE4 Remake, Monster Hunter, and now this. Whatever they're doing internally at that company, it's working. And Requiem feels like the culmination of everything they've learned over the last decade.

Grace Ashcroft Is the Future of This Franchise

And I can't talk about this game without giving Grace her flowers. Because she deserves them.

Grace is not your typical RE protagonist. She's not a cop. She's not a soldier. She's not even particularly brave. She's a scared, introverted analyst who gets thrown into the worst situation imaginable and has to figure it out in real time. And that vulnerability is what makes her sections so terrifying. When Grace is cornered, you feel cornered. When she's out of ammo, you feel the panic. When the stalker enemy that pursues her through walls and ceilings shows up, your heart genuinely races.

Angela Sant'Albano delivers a phenomenal performance in the role. The voice acting, the motion capture, the way Grace's hands shake when she holds a weapon. This is the kind of character work that makes you care about what happens next. And after the mixed reception of Ethan Winters in RE7 and Village, Grace feels like Capcom learned every lesson and applied them.

I'll say it right now. Grace Ashcroft is the best new Resident Evil character since Leon himself. And I think she's going to carry this franchise forward in a major way.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Let me break down what this launch looked like, because the scale of it is hard to overstate.

Within ninety minutes of release, Resident Evil Requiem had 267,000 concurrent players on Steam. By Friday morning, it had blown past 314,000. It peaked at over 320,000. For context, the RE4 Remake topped out at 168,000. RE Village hit 107,000. RE3 Remake managed 60,000. Requiem nearly doubled the franchise record on its first day. If you combine the peak concurrent numbers of the last three RE games, they still don't match what Requiem did.

That is just insane to me. A single-player, $70 survival horror game cracking the top ten all-time Steam player counts for single-player titles. In a market where everybody told us single-player is dead, where live service was supposed to be the only path forward, where every publisher chased multiplayer and games-as-a-service for half a decade.

And here comes Capcom. With a single-player game. With no microtransactions. With no battle pass. With no multiplayer component at all. And it becomes the biggest launch in franchise history by a landslide.

That tells you everything you need to know.

Link to SteamDB RE Requiem charts - https://steamdb.info/app/3764200/charts/

This Is Capcom's Era. Full Stop.

I make these kinds of statements carefully. But right now, in 2026, I don't think there's a single publisher in the industry firing as consistently as Capcom. The RE2 Remake was a masterpiece. RE4 Remake was a masterpiece. Monster Hunter Wilds, despite its rocky PC launch, has become a phenomenon. And now Requiem sits at an 88 on Metacritic, the best-reviewed game of 2026 so far, and the highest rated new Resident Evil entry in over twenty years.

Six years of development went into this game. And at one point during that process, they scrapped an open-world online concept and rebooted the entire project in 2021 to refocus on single-player. Read that again. Capcom had a live-service concept on the table. They looked at it. And they said no. They went back to what works. They went back to what players actually want.

How many publishers would have had the discipline to do that? How many would have looked at the live-service trend and committed to a ten-to-eighteen hour single-player campaign with no recurring monetization? Not many. And that decision is a huge part of why Requiem is as good as it is. There's a singular creative vision here. There's a team that was allowed to focus on making the best game possible without chasing trends or quarterly earnings projections.

That's what it looks like when a company trusts its developers.

This Is Resident Evil Coming Home

Resident Evil Requiem is the game I've been waiting for since 2005. And I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean that as someone who has played every mainline entry, every remake, every spin-off worth playing, and who has watched this franchise stumble and recover more times than I can count.

RE5 was fine. RE6 was a mess. RE7 was a bold reinvention that worked but felt like a different franchise. Village was ambitious but uneven. The remakes were exceptional but they were remakes. Requiem is the first new Resident Evil game in over two decades that feels like it has the full package. Horror that actually scares you. Action that actually thrills you. Characters you actually care about. A story that respects the legacy while building something new. And a level of visual and audio polish that sets a new standard for the genre.

Capcom didn't just make a good game. They made the game. The one that proves this franchise still has more to say. The one that proves survival horror isn't just alive but thriving. The one that proves you don't need live service, battle passes, or microtransactions to have the biggest launch in your franchise's history.

Is it perfect? No. The back half leans a bit more into action than horror, and some critics noted that the pacing shifts in the final act. But those are minor complaints against what is otherwise a landmark release. And honestly? When the worst thing people can say about your game is "the ending is slightly more action-focused than I wanted," you've done something special.

Go play this game. Experience it blind if you can. Trust the process.

Capcom is back. Resident Evil is back. And it's not even close.

PlayStation Store

Metacritic RE Requiem page

Steam Link