Resident Evil Requiem is the first mainline entry in this series built around a genuine either/or: play it in first-person and get something closer to the crawling dread of Resident Evil 7, or play it in third-person and get the readable, over-the-shoulder action Resident Evil 4 and its remake perfected. That's not a graphics-options toggle bolted on for marketing copy — it's the game's actual structural spine, split across two playable leads who default to opposite cameras for opposite reasons. Seven months after its February 27, 2026 launch on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and a same-day Switch 2 port, Requiem has settled into an 88 Metascore across 116 critic reviews and a Steam approval rating sitting at 96% of nearly 48,000 user reviews — numbers that put it above every other major release this year and, by Capcom's own framing, mark the series' best critical reception since Resident Evil 4. The question worth asking this far out isn't whether critics liked it. It's whether the thing they liked holds up once the launch-week noise settles, and mostly, it does.
Grace Ashcroft and the Two Cameras
Grace Ashcroft is an FBI technical analyst sent to investigate a string of unexplained deaths at the Wrenwood Hotel — the same hotel where she watched her mother, Alyssa Ashcroft (a returning face from Resident Evil Outbreak), get murdered in 2018. She's introverted, visibly frightened by what she's walking into, and by default plays in first-person, which Capcom's team has said was a deliberate choice to put players inside a character who experiences horror the way the player does, rather than watching a trained soldier shrug it off. It works. Corridors in Grace's sections are tighter than anything the series has done since the original Resident Evil 7 house, and not knowing exactly where a threat is standing relative to your own body — because you can't see your own body — does something GTA-adjacent action games can't fake.
Leon S. Kennedy, confirmed as playable at The Game Awards 2025 after months of Capcom insisting Grace was the true lead, defaults to third-person and plays like the veteran he is: faster reflexes, more forgiving spacing, an action register that leans on the muscle memory anyone who's played the RE4 remake already has. The trick is that you can manually override either character's default camera at any time, and the game genuinely holds up in both directions — this isn't a case of one perspective being the "real" way to play and the other existing to check a marketing box. The one seam critics have flagged, and it's a fair one, is that Leon's melee prompts, gun finishers, and hatchet parries snap to third-person even if you've forced first-person for his sections, which breaks the immersion the whole system is built to sell in the moments that matter most.
Thirty Years Later, and the Ghosts Have a Body Count
Requiem is set roughly three decades after the original Raccoon City incident, and the plot eventually walks Grace into the city's actual ruins — a location this series has referenced constantly and rarely let players physically stand in since Resident Evil 3. The mystery ties back to Dr. Victor Gideon, a former Umbrella t-Virus researcher who bought a decommissioned Spencer Foundation care facility after Umbrella's collapse and kept experimenting quietly for twenty years, and Zeno, a Connections operative chasing Oswell Spencer's unfinished final project: a pathogen called Elpis that everyone assumes is a weapon and turns out, in the story's better late-game swerve, to be something closer to a cure. Grace's own immunity to every Progenitor-derived strain makes her the key both men are after, which is a fairly standard "chosen one" engine for a Resident Evil plot, but the writing earns more of it than that logline suggests — Grace's trauma from Wrenwood isn't decoration on top of the bioweapon plot, it's load-bearing for why she reacts to horror the way she does mechanically, not just narratively.
Where the story stumbles is in exactly the place series veterans will recognize: it still can't fully let go of Raccoon City, Umbrella, and Spencer as its default well to draw from, thirty years and nine mainline games later. It's a well-executed visit to old ground rather than genuinely new ground, and that's a fair thing to hold against a franchise this deep into its own mythology, even while acknowledging Requiem does more with the return than most fans expected.
Ten Hours, No Padding — and That's the Actual Argument
Most reviewers clocked a first playthrough at somewhere between 8.5 and 11 hours depending on how much side exploration they did, and that number has become the single most contested detail in the game's reception. The pro-Requiem read, which PC Gamer and several others landed on, is that a tightly paced ten hours where nearly every room, item, and encounter is doing deliberate work beats a bloated twenty-five-hour open map padded with backtracking fetch quests — and having played through it twice, I mostly agree. Resource scarcity in the survival-horror sections feels tuned to a specific runtime rather than stretched to justify one, and there's very little of the "walk back across three rooms you've already cleared" busywork that dragged down Village's midgame.
The counterargument is just as real and shouldn't be waved off: for a $69.99 full-price release, ten hours with genuinely low replay incentive outside of the unlockable Leon Must Die Forever minigame mode is a hard sell against a market where plenty of games at the same price point run three or four times as long. Critics have also noted, fairly, that Grace's puzzle-and-scavenging loop doesn't meaningfully evolve the formula Capcom already perfected in Resident Evil 7 and the RE2/RE3 remakes — it's excellent at a thing this studio has done before, not a reinvention of it.
The Numbers Deserve One Honest Caveat
Requiem's Metacritic user score briefly tied Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for the highest ever recorded on the platform, and it's worth being straightforward about that stat rather than repeating it uncritically: Metacritic has had to pull AI-generated reviews attributed to real outlets off Requiem's page and issue a public warning about it, which is a reminder that a headline user score this far into a hype cycle is never purely organic. That doesn't undo the critic consensus — an 88 across 116 outlets, with CGMagazine at a flat 10/10 and Game Informer at 9.75, is a real and broad signal, not an outlier propped up by review-bombing in reverse. It just means the "highest-rated game ever" framing some outlets ran with deserves a raised eyebrow rather than a straight repeat.
On the technical side, the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions run clean at launch settings, and the Switch 2 port — arriving day-and-date rather than the "later in 2026" window Capcom originally floated — is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering, holding a fairly steady 60fps in handheld mode at roughly 1080p with upscaling, even if docked play is the noticeably weaker of the two and Leon's more chaotic sections show the clearest frame-rate dips. Capcom has publicly said this is the studio's biggest production budget to date, and it shows in the RE Engine's lighting and the Wrenwood Hotel's set design specifically — it's some of the most confidently art-directed environment work the series has produced.
Editions, Price, and One Notable Absence
Standard Edition runs $69.99, Deluxe is $89.99 with a handful of cosmetic and bonus-content extras, and a Collector's Edition has been selling for up to $250 depending on retailer. There's no PSVR2 support, which stings given how well Resident Evil 7 and Village translated to VR — reporting has pointed to the cost of adapting a game this scale and this scripted around its dual-camera system to VR as the likely reason, rather than any stated lack of interest, but Capcom hasn't given a firm answer either way. The free post-launch Leon Must Die Forever mode, unlocked after finishing the story, is a genuinely well-built value-add rather than a token gesture — a run-based gauntlet with its own unlockable ability system — and it's the strongest answer Capcom has given so far to the length complaints, even if it doesn't fully resolve them.
Verdict
Resident Evil Requiem earns its acclaim more often than it coasts on it. The first/third-person split is a real mechanical idea rather than a marketing bullet point, Grace Ashcroft is the most vulnerable, best-realized new protagonist the series has built in years, and the return to Raccoon City's ruins is handled with more restraint and craft than the premise had any right to expect from a franchise this deep into revisiting its own history. Set against that: it is a short, full-price game with limited replay value outside one bonus mode, its scavenging loop doesn't push the formula forward so much as execute it well again, and the "highest user score ever" narrative circulating around it deserves more skepticism than most outlets have given it. None of that erases what's actually here — a tense, confidently directed horror game that's the best entry this series has produced since the Resident Evil 4 remake, and one that's held up its critical reputation for seven months rather than cooling off once the launch window passed.
Pros:
- The first/third-person switch is a genuine structural mechanic tied to Grace and Leon's opposite tones, not a gimmick option
- Grace Ashcroft is a well-written, vulnerable new lead whose trauma is mechanically load-bearing, not just narrative dressing
- Raccoon City's ruins and the Wrenwood Hotel are among the best-art-directed environments the RE Engine has produced
- A tightly paced ~10-hour campaign with genuinely low padding, backed by a strong free post-launch mode in Leon Must Die Forever
- Broad critical consensus (88 Metascore across 116 reviews) backed by a strong day-one-and-beyond Switch 2 port
Cons:
- Ten hours for a $69.99 full-price release with limited replay incentive is a legitimate value complaint, not just fan noise
- Leon's melee prompts and finishers break first-person immersion even when you've manually selected that camera for his sections
- Grace's puzzle-and-scavenging loop refines the RE7/RE2 remake formula rather than evolving it
- No PSVR2 support, despite the series' recent VR track record
- The "highest user score ever" narrative around the game has been complicated by Metacritic pulling AI-generated reviews from its page
Jack reviews games for Gamingonix, judging every release on its own terms and telling you plainly whether it earns your time.
