WHAT IS IT?

The ninth mainline entry in the long-shambling zombie horror series.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s brainless fun, emphasis on the brainless.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Cereza, Dante. Kojima.

SEEING S.T.A.R.S

If I had to pick the moment Resident Evil Requiem ceases to be scary, it’s the moment when Leon Kennedy picks up a kill counter.

Up to that point, Requiem had been pretty stupid – like, not boulder-punching stupid, though still pretty dumb – but the addition of the counter, which awards points to be spent on upgrades and yet bigger guns, marks the moment in which I gave up all hope on Requiem living up to its prerelease promise.

Some context: prior to 2017’s brilliant Resident Evil 7: biohazard, the series had been trapped in a downward spiral, devolving into a self-parody of what it used to be. Taking all the wrong lessons from the era-defining RE4, Capcom doubled-down on action and braindead gunplay, with RE5 and then RE6 – a game featuring a zombified U.S. president – representing the absolute nadir of the series.

When, in 2017, the series soft rebooted with the first-person biohazard – not to mention its nauseatingly terrifying demo, easily one of the scariest games ever made – Capcom demonstrated it still had the magic (horror) touch.

The subsequent Resident Evil VIIIage (2021) returned to some of the stupidity of RE4 (whose influence it wears on its zombified, Euro-village sleeve), but still managed to deliver the frights, largely courtesy the memeworthy Lady Dimitrescu. When Capcom openly promised that Requiem – that’s Resident Evil 9, for those keeping track at home – would be a return to form, starring an inexperienced everyman protagonist akin to the terrified Claire Redfield or Ethan Winters of prior games, we RE diehards had every reason to be excited.

Then we learned that Grace Ashcroft, featured so heavily in the advance trailers, was only a co-star, alongside a gun-toting Uncle-Bro Leon Kennedy returning from RE2 and RE4.

A WHOLE LOT OF BSAA

Things start worryingly in Requiem (RE9 for short), with a plot hole-laden opening in which the FBI deploys a solo, inexperienced agent to investigate the site of a recent murder. Oh, and the crime scene also happens to be the site of a traumatizing episode from the agent’s childhood. But sure, let’s send Agent Grace Ashcroft on her own with no backup. Nothing could possibly go wrong…

Once things go wrong, Requiem quickly gives you a strong flavour of the competing interests at play in this game.

On the one hand, there’s the fairly scary, albeit haphazardly told, story of a young, frightened woman, ill-equipped to survive the mysterious medical centre to which she has been kidnapped.

On the other hand, there’s a big, explosive, action game featuring a dude with a propensity for roundhouse-kicking zombies to the face. When the game focuses on Grace, it can, at least, be scary. When it turns to Leon, as it increasingly does before effectively handing the game over to him in its latter half, it’s mostly stupid, albeit enjoyable in its own stupid way.

Sticking to Grace for a moment, credit to Capcom for walking back its tendency towards overpowered protagonists, here the young FBI agent mostly limited to a weak handgun, some defensive (and breakable) melee weapons, and a whole lot of patience. The best parts of the game involve Grace cowering in fear in one of the many shadowy corners of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, as she tries (and fails) to avoid being spotted by monstrous foes. Capcom recommends playing as Grace in first-person, and we agree. It’s too bad, however, that Grace herself is so poorly written and poorly acted, with a distractingly fake-sounding nervous stutter which peppers her speech.

Leon, on the other hand, is the designated ass-kicker, an epithet which is not necessarily complimentary in this case. As I’ve noted before, it’s tough to make a scary game when the player carries an overwhelming assortment of explosive weaponry, and the backpack to carry it all in. (Side note: while Grace has to handle some delicate item management, adding some tension à la prior RE games, not once did I ever run out of space in Leon’s oversized equipment bag.)

Moreover, making that character a motorcycle-riding, one-liner-quipping “badass” unfortunately brings this game ever closer to the Re5/RE6 template, albeit without those games’ diversity of ideas. Indeed, another complaint I have about RE9 is how rarely it departs from standard zombie fare: it’s not until quite late in RE9 that you even get a glimpse of the kinds of alternative enemies – plants, rabid dogs, zombie sharks – which were ubiquitous in prior entries.

One tip for making the Leon sections scarier, at least? Play it in first-person, and ignore Capcom’s “recommended” third-person view.

RE9 also marks the Metal Gearification of this beloved series (and I say this as Canada’s biggest Metal Gear fan), beginning with its pair of cartoonish, over-the-top villains who feel completely out of place. And that’s even before RE9 awkwardly tries to retcon them into key aspects of RE lore.

Speaking of which, much like later Metal Gear entries, RE9 is much too in love with its own past, revisiting not only certain environments but even specific enemies, long thought dead. Sadly, however, unlike MGS4‘s triumphant return to Shadow Moses Island (surely a series highlight), RE9‘s return to Raccoon City (a spoiler already given away in the trailers) has little if anything interesting to say, offering a perfunctory revisit to a few familiar locales, now stripped of any fear factor.

Most egregiously, certain sequences in RE9 play like cheap rehashes of things done better before, including a nearly beat-for-beat retread of the nursery portion of the (far superior) Resident Evil 2 remake.

TRICELL HARDER

One day, Capcom will tell the story of the Umbrella Corporation architect and their love for wide-open atriums featuring curved double staircases.

That day, we’ll also learn why everything from metropolitan police stations to rural healthcare centres is locked behind a series of inscrutable, symbol- and gem-based puzzles. Maybe, we’ll also learn why nobody thought these might pose a safety hazard, particularly when, say, a bioweapon has been accidentally unleashed, and people just need to get through a closed door.

Until that day, we’re left with the often ludicrous, undeniably entertaining, and wildly varying Resident Evil games. Although it’s been some time since their peak, even this latest entry, likely destined to go down as a minor entry in the RE canon, is still a great deal of zombie-stomping fun. Don’t forget to pack a Green Herb.

***
Final score: 7/10 Zombified Great White Sharks.

Visit the official website for Resident Evil Requiem here.

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