This review contains spoilers.
I am disappointed that Capcom did not go with my idea of calling the game Resident Evil: SⅨ, but RE9uiem will have to do instead. The next one should be called REⅩ: Dino Crisis.
Before I started playing this game I knew that it was divided into playing as Grace in first person and playing in Leon in third person, but I did not know just different the two experiences are. Leon Scott Kennedy, now pushing 50, is a zombie-killing veteran, but Grace Ashcroft, the world’s most timid and pathetic FBI agent, is having a very bad time of it. In gameplay terms on top of the different perspectives they also have different controls, inventory systems and even save systems. Grace, by and large, is playing by the rules of RE2make: Eight inventory slots with item boxes for extra storage, ink ribbons to save, makeshift knifes only as emergency measures to use when getting grabbed. Leon is playing the rules of RE4make: Parrying chainsaws and roundhouse kicking zombies to his heart’s content when not just blowing them away with an arsenal of guns in his big attaché case inventory.
My only experience with first person Resident Evil prior to this was the teaser demo Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour, so skulking around as Grace was new for me, or rather something that at first feels something more like Penumbra than Resident Evil, and not because of the first person perspective. As the player initially begins exploring the Rhodes Hill care centre Grace has no means of defending herself from the recently zombified staff and patients, and even when weapons are acquired, ammunition is very, very scarce. There is a satisfying power curve as one explores, opens up new areas, new resources and slowly gains the means to fight back. The crafting system is made a bit more interesting in this game by the fact that he primary crafting ingredient is zombie blood, which as well as being gnarly also makes every enemy a resource rather than just a drain. Zombies bleed more if you shoot their limbs off which means going for the head is not always the best option if you are low on blood but have plenty of bullets. I would like to say that this also turns the series-stable bloodstains that leak out from defeated zombies into not just an indicator that they are going to stay dead, but also a resource, but unfortunately the harvestable bloodstains are a second, different type of bloodstain that appear in addition to the normal one, making it feel very arbitrary.
Complicating matters further is that zombies don’t actually stay down. The crimson heads from the original REmake make their return in the form of blister heads; mutated, more dangerous zombies that arise from enemies you have killed but failed to destroy their head. Disposable anti-zombie juice injectors can be made and used to destroy bodies or sneak attack unsuspecting deadites, but they are a drain on limited resources and zombies killed this way never don’t leave usable blood behind.
After thoroughly exploring the care centre as Grace, Leon steps in to clear the place up. Playing as Leon is all about empowerment. Playing as him it is a breeze to mow down a room full of zombies in the time it would take Grace to deal with a single shambler. If he is sneaking around it is not to avoid fighting but to land a easy stealth takedown, decapitating a zombie before it even realises that he’s there, and while Grace might want to avoid killing enemies lest they come back as blisterheads, Leon is rewarded for killing as much as possible. I complained that the RE4make hardcode mode was a little more difficult than I would have preferred, but RE9uiem’s classic difficult, the hardest available before completing the game, often felt a bit too easy. Getting to explore the same space again in this radically different style, clearing up everything Grace left behind, is really interesting at first. It felt like it might be the perfect evolution of RE2’s A-side and B-side campaigns—going through the same space again not just with a new character and story, but going into the aftermath of the previous playthrough exactly as you left it, every zombie exactly where you left them as Grace, recontextualised with a new gameplay style and incentives. Unfortunately it quickly becomes clear that Leon has very little to do in Rhodes Hill other than open a handful of doors that Grace couldn’t and go straight to the next objective. It is not a second playthrough, just a short addendum where you can mop up all the zombies that you left behind as Grace if you want. The game is not divided between playing through the same areas as Grace and Leon, instead the game is divided between playing primarily as Grace in the first half with occasional interludes as Leon and playing primarily as Leon in the second half with occasional interludes as Grace, and their ranges seldom overlap. And, while Grace’s exploration of the suspiciously and obligatorily Spencer Mansion-esque care centre was obviously returning to the style of the old games and particular RE2make, the real nostalgia tour starts once we fully swap over to Leon exploring the ruins of Raccoon City, still infested with zombies and T-virus mutants twenty years later.
There’s a lot of fun choices in how this is handled, in how it tries to honour both RE2 and RE2make. There’s a lot of nice little details that the game doesn’t rub in your face. Leon drives past the petrol station from the intro on his way into town and Leon explores the RE2make police station with a suitably post-apocalyptic makeover while music from the original RE2 provides a perfect, melancholy atmosphere. Plant 43 and a giant spider, cut from the RE2make, make their return, upgraded to full boss fights. I do think that there is a missed opportunity here, though, to reuse more assets from RE2make. In general I think that game developers should be less shy about not reinventing the wheel and just reusing what works, and I was surprised, when scavenging the ruins of Raccoon City, that the game did not switch to the RE2make models for things like boxes of ammunition found scattered around. Sure, maybe first aid sprays have been replaced by med injectors at some point in the last two decades, but why are we still finding modern looking med injectors here instead of the old spray bottles? Asset reuse would actually make more sense. Why does ARK, Umbrella’s second double secret base that was apparently under the city the whole time, look nothing like NEST? Surely they should resemble each other more than they do.
And oh yeah apparently Umbrella had a second even more secret virus research lab under Raccoon City the whole time that has never been mentioned before. Of course they did. And it has an even more awesome ultra secret virus that the bad guys have been trying to unlock for twenty years but they don’t know the password. Also there’s a guy here who looks and sounds exactly like and has the same powers as Wesker. Except don’t worry at the last minute the real final boss calls him a cheap imitation and kills him before he can do anything or have any backstory explained. Like, yeah, having another replacement Wesker was stupid and I’m glad the game backed away from that, but you could have just not had him in the game in the first place. The game becomes over-indulgent in general towards the end. Some of this is, I grant, very gratifying: A rematch with a Mr. X where Leon can now parry what was an instant kill attack in RE2make, Hunk of all characters showing up out of nowhere for a knife axe fight, being able to unleash a licker on Umbrella goons and then do a silent takedown on it, but it also has that Resident Evil brand of over-complicated conspiracy nonsense.
The series has stepped away from the zombies as War on Terror framing of the 2000s and 2010s, but it has not left politics behind. The US, turning more isolationist, has pulled out of international anti-bioweapon treaties and the bombing of Raccoon City was revealed to be collusion between elements of the US state and private interests, but it is still firmly in the conspiracy theory mode. The president was definitively not in on it and it all revolves around some kind of new, boring, even more secret conspiracy behind Umbrella called The Connections that was apparently introduced in RE7 and now has to be retconned into everything else. Can you tell that I don’t care for the plot of this game very much?
This is all part of the biggest frustration I have with RE9uiem despite it being mechanically excellent: RE2make drew from across the series to make a complete whole. RE9uiem wants to be a sendoff to and revisit of the REmake series, similarly drawing from what came before, but fails to cohere in the same way mechanically and also refuses to actually close the door on anything. Leon does not, as one might expect, actually pass the torch to Grace to let her be part of the next generation of heroes; her mechanical climax happens halfway through the game and he final act is to enter a password before sitting on the sidelines and letting Leon fight the final boss by himself, any closure with Umbrella is undermines by the reveal of the real conspiracy behind it all, and also, despite it barely mattering to the plot at all, the idea of memory transference is introduced so now Capcom have a built-in excuse to bring anyone back from the dead if they want. And it also fails as a requiem for the REmake series because they’re still making more of those anyway.
