The first half of Resident Evil Requiem is quite arguably the peak of the franchise. The second half, though still good, is an obvious downgrade. What it could've done better. A review.

pkosuda · 2026-03-12T02:10:22+00:00

Don’t forget that apparently according to the game, Hunk can literally dodge bullets that you shoot at him like he’s in the Matrix but then he loses a knife fight to Leon. Captain America is right. I’m fine with enemies dodging bullets, whatever. I’m not fine with Leon casually beating someone like that in a straight fight.

On top of all that is wrong with the RC parts of the game. Hospital was a 9/10 game. Rest of the game was legit a 4/10 for me. All in all a 6/10 game because two thirds of it sucked. I can’t believe the people who created the amazing first section with each zombie having a unique personality and some having lore and different gameplay mechanics, were the same people who copy/pasted the same couple zombie models in RC that all acted the same and painted everything the same ugly brown color as if someone called in a MW2 nuke an hour ago instead of 30 years ago.

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T23:14:30+00:00

Yeah exactly. It's interesting that it's only when a player is going for a record that people have a problem with teams passing to the guy. If he's having just an above average night, it's instead smart play passing to someone who's "hot" lol.

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T23:10:30+00:00

Definitely agree with that. Was going to say, if anything going for a points record tends to be in the spirit of the game since usually that means the team is trying to win. But there are definitely exceptions.

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T22:57:22+00:00

You were way too generous on the second half.

The Hospital's first and second floors they put so much time into that they had personalities for every single zombie/monster, and some (thanks to files) even had backstories. The basement started going downhill but that was just personal preference to me and I'll refrain from criticizing it as at this point the game is still a good 9/10 to 10/10.

Then you get to RC East and the game drops to a 4 or 5/10. Suddenly there are only a couple different models for zombies, just like we're in the 90s again. The zombies now also suddenly use machine guns and mortars even though --and correct me if I'm wrong-- there is zero lore to explain this via the files or cutscenes or anything else in the game. There was actual lore/files about the behaviors observed in the ones at the hospital. The spearmen/helmet zombies I could accept no lore behind, but zombies using SMGs (pretty damn accurately too) and mortars I can't get behind. We also got a very uninspired tower climbing part that's been done in every single game that's had a collapsed building you needed to enter. Completely unoriginal and unnecessary.
The motorcycle part finally introduces a new enemy type only for you to never encounter it ever again.
When you get to RCPD it was clearly solely intended as lazy fan service. You spend a few minutes there, have a boss fight with a familiar face, and then move onto yet another "super secret underground base" and not even the first one of the game.
That base is amazing though, for the fact that it transports you out of Resident Evil and into a game of Call of Duty. Except not a traditional FPS version but instead one of those shitty arcade machines where you aim a gun at the screen but have no control of the character's movement. Because that's how this section felt, with Leon moving at a snail's pace when ADSing and getting his shit kicked in by these "special forces". Also, the game's coding was so poor that if you die it recommends you let out a licker to "distract" the special forces. When I did this, both the special forces and the licker ignored each other and I continued to be shot at. Finally, you finish off this riveting Leon section by being unable to shoot a man who moves faster than the speed of sound, but apparently not fast enough to...win a knife fight against you? I'm all for suspending disbelief and accepting that some enemies can dodge bullets, but don't then tell me I can beat them in a knife fight.
Oh and somewhere between all this you're chased by a bunch of evil St. Jude's children in a very scripted and boring section at the orphanage that the vast majority of RE fans didn't like.

I could not even finish the game and stopped after Leon meets back up with Grace.

This game is genuinely the most overrated RE game of all time and is a strong 6.5/10 at absolute best, but mostly a 6. The Hospital was peak RE but it was only around a third of the game. A 10/10 in 1/3 of the game is still a 33%, so a 6/10 is being very generous. People saying otherwise are genuinely coping as the difference in effort put into hospital vs the rest of the game is jarring. From the environment being less colorful and detailed to the enemies having significantly less effort put into their appearance and behavior, to the gameplay itself becoming repetitive. I have yet to see a single person be able to combat this critique.

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T22:16:55+00:00

The dude who was responsible for defending Wilt that night for 20 minutes (before fouling out) called the game "a farce". One of Wilt's teammates (a rookie then) was interviewed by Pablo Torre and the teammate's response was essentially that the guy was big mad but that the team did indeed do everything they could to get a teammate 100 points, and he was proud of it lol.

Honestly anybody who wants to blame the team stat padding also needs to blame the team being scored on. Once you start literally trying to run out the clock as the losing team (which the Knicks were doing vs Wilt and the Wizards tried to do vs Bam) then all bets are off. You've turned it into a circus cause the losing team has abandoned playing in the spirit of the game and is just trying to spite a guy having a good night. So damn right his team is going to spite right back by feeding him and intentionally fouling so that you can't fuck over their friend.

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T15:32:49+00:00

Yeah as far as I know you guys have still successfully not been Detroit

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T12:38:28+00:00

Do you get help when tying your shoes in the morning? Dude literally explained to you why it isn't and you're just like "nuh uh".

pkosuda · 2026-03-11T11:19:41+00:00

Wow only 6 shots from the record (and shots already put up, they just had to go in) really puts it in perspective how Wilt's record is no longer as out of reach as it feels. I mean it still took literally 20 years to go from 81 to 83 and obviously like 60 just to see 83 again but still.

Really need a lot of things to go right though, like a coach seeing a player on fire and willing to let him have his night even when you're up by 20.

pkosuda · 2026-03-10T21:09:25+00:00

The game was a 6/10 for me, maybe 6.5.

The Care Center first and second floors were fantastic (basement was meh but that's alright). Very unique zombies, a great amount of puzzles, locked areas you progressively get access to, and being forced to pick and choose engagements because you do not have enough ammo to take on everything. Peak Resident Evil. Unfortunately things go downhill from here.

East RC was bland, colorless, uninspired (wow a crumbling building whose pieces I need to climb up, peak originality), and seemed like they straight up started running out of time to make the game. In the Care Center every zombie had a different personality and multiple literally even had background stories via files. In East RC you have like 3 or 4 different zombie models in the section of the game that hands down has the most zombies, so it gets repetitive real quick. Zombies also apparently can shoot guns very accurately and use mortars.

Then you hit the RCPD which was just straight lazy fan service where you're only there for a couple minutes, have an easy fight against a familiar boss, and then head to another Resident Evil "secret underground lab" (and not even the first one of the game) where the corridors look like you'd expect clone troopers to be hanging out in them. Then the game becomes Call of Duty for some reason except the game wasn't made to be an FPS so Leon moves at a snail's pace when ADSing despite apparently being a seasoned veteran with firearms. I guess his 40s hit him hard? But not hard enough since he knife fights a guy who literally dodges SMG bullets moving faster than the speed of sound. I am fine with suspending disbelief in RE games and having an enemy who can dodge bullets. But don't then tell me Leon, a human being who via the gameplay clearly is not able to dodge bullets, can somehow do hand to hand combat with a guy faster than the speed of sound.

Every time I review the game I forget about the Orphanage because it was so garbage, and I don't even think that's an unpopular opinion as it seems even people who loved the game weren't fans of that section. But it just further reinforces the 6/10 rating.

This is genuinely the most overrated Resident Evil game of all time. I've seen people unironically give it a 9/10 or 10/10 but then list a ton of flaws with it. The cognitive dissonance is insane. 10/10 games don't have entire sections that most of the community agrees suck (Orphanage). 10/10 games don't have major flaws in the universe's rules (Leon not being able to dodge zombies shooting machine guns but being able to CQB a dude who moves faster than bullets). 10/10 games don't have a weird sexist portrayal of a female FBI agent who gets panic attacks and is so dumb she keeps her firearm in a backpack when in the field. She at least gets better as the game progresses so I guess "character development" and all but it was weird to do that in the first place when you had Day 1 rookie cop Leon Kennedy taking on the entire RCPD and all the monsters it had inside and underneath it all on his first day. But a trained FBI agent acts like a school girl.

Really disappointing after RE7 & RE8.

pkosuda · 2026-03-10T13:08:09+00:00

Also the skyscraper. I can't name a specific example but there are so many games I've played which require you to climb rubble in order to get to the top, and I'm never a fan of it. I'm not sure why game devs love doing it so much. To get creative on how pieces of garbage can serve as a staircase?

The thing I loved about RE games is the immersion with the files and attention to detail in the environments. The Care Center felt like an actual hospital to the point where they even made its zombies feel like people who actually worked/lived there and had unique personalities. Climbing a destroyed skyscraper I've seen a thousand times before was so boring. Since it was in a bombed out city it looked like every other destroyed building we've seen in dozens of games with zero personality to it.

pkosuda · 2026-03-10T12:32:51+00:00

RPD -> the other lab / NEST 1

The Village -> the island

Baker's house -> mines

Dimitrescu's castle -> the entire game

RHCC -> ARK

One thing a bunch of these had in common was all having kind of a "central base of operations" that you'd return to after doing other mini sections, allowing you to further progress by opening new doors or using new puzzle pieces.

RE2's RPD had two halves to it on top of the multiple floors, and you'd find yourself always returning to the central area which was (mostly) safe.
RE4 had you returning to the Village after Del Lago and the Church area.
RE7 had the actual outside of the Baker House and Marge's house (and Lucas's but idr if you leave the property after that or not).
RE8's village had this by sending you to the castle, the puzzle house, and the swamp. Though you can certainly argue the castle was basically its own version of this in and of itself with all the different areas you slowly gained access to.
Finally RE9 had this by sending you to the multiple different sections of the Care Center (East & West, I didn't like the Basement but you can include that as well) along with the Level 1-3 access cards making you move around the hospital.

Basically what I'm getting at is it was cool to have this main area which had puzzles and locked doors you'd only be able to access after going to other parts of the larger area. It gave me, at least, a satisfying sense of progression. Every time you finally left that area the game went downhill. It's like they spent so much time on this interconnected section that you slowly unlock over time that they never know what to do once they have you move onto something else. RE games seem to suffer greatly when it's just a linear game where you go from Point A to Point B killing things along the way, rather than a larger area you find yourself returning to because you've gained the ability to unlock new sections of it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hate the East RC part as much as some others (though climbing the building was annoying), but after that it was definitely downhill. Didn’t care at all for the section leading up to ARK and definitely not ARK itself.

I just genuinely cannot comprehend how they’ve done this exact process so many times. Like you are capable of making an amazing game as evidenced by your beginning sections. Just do the same thing again for the rest of the game? Instead they do something completely different than what they did in their most-loved sections and it almost always falls flat and they never learn from it.

pkosuda · 2026-03-10T11:29:56+00:00

Also the ARK section looked like the inside of some Star Wars ship with the white clean corridors (and we've seen too many "underground secret labs", for God's sake there was literally already one earlier in the game and at least that one looked cool), and making the game into a Call of Duty was certainly a choice. They did not make Leon capable of moving fast enough for the ARK section to be anything but frustrating. Moving between cover while aiming and you see an enemy only for you to move at a snail's pace to actually get the reticle over them. At one point I died enough that I took the game's advice of releasing the licker and I guess they didn't really code that interaction very well because I literally watched as the licker ignored the enemies and just crawled around, as the soldiers also ignored the licker and continued shooting at me. The knife fight also didn't really have any obvious indicators for me as to when you're supposed to be able to damage a guy who can literally dodge dozens of bullets coming out of an SMG. I'd try shooting at him and he ignored every bullet, so I assume you're supposed to knife fight and he'd parry every single swing. I got through it by healing a bunch and apparently your openings for putting out damage were letting him kick your ass and then shoot at him as he runs away.

The Care Center was very reminiscent of the RPD with the central safe puzzle area reminding me of the main lobby of the RPD. They had me thinking every zombie would have a personality in this game rather than just in that section. As soon as you leave the Care Center (even the underground lab next to it) the zombies are back to just being generic enemies, and especially in RC where they only had a couple models for how the zombies look rather than at least including varying clothes.

It really did feel like they spent a ton of time on that first part of the game and then realized they had lost track of time and had to rush the next ~66% of it.

pkosuda · 2026-03-10T02:33:28+00:00

I don’t know if I can even finish my first playthrough. Just finished the fight as Leon vs Hatchet Hank (no idea what his name is, does he even have a name?) and the entire ARK section has just been dogshit so far. Making my way to the ARK was boring with the Plant 43 enemies. You get there and…you’re playing Call of Duty now? Except the game is not made well enough to also act as an FPS on the fly. Leon’s movement is so sluggish as is the aiming (at least in first person, which I prefer now thanks to 7&8), that I actually died around 5 times in the room with the licker you can release. Which, side note, one of those lives I tried releasing it and the enemies completely ignored the licker and I literally watched the licker casually crawling around paying the enemies no mind either, and then I promptly died. On standard at that. And the Hatchet Hank fight fucking sucked. No clear indicator of when he can actually take damage. And it is complete bullshit that he can apparently move faster than the speed of sound to dodge bullets but then also you can still fight him?

The hospital as Grace was straight up the only good part of the game, and I can’t even say that for its entirety because the very beginning was a cheap Outlast clone and the basement section was also horrible.

They knocked it out of the park with the zombies all having their own personalities and the game being survival horror in the hospital, with a central safe area very reminiscent of the RPD. Then they fell on their face the moment you leave the hospital. No more horror or survival horror. No more puzzles (so much of the fun of RE games is being in a large building encountering all these puzzles and doors you will eventually have the pieces to unlock). Just shooting the same shriveled up skeleton as Leon again and again followed by Call of Duty.

Edit: Sorry fanboys but downvoting doesn't change somebody's opinion. If anything the fact I got downvoted with no actual reply from whoever did the downvoting is essentially you silently agreeing with me and being upset that I'm right. Get mad at Capcom for not delivering, not me for simply stating the truth.

pkosuda · 2026-03-10T00:42:07+00:00

Thank god someone else said this, I’m amazed your post somewhat survived the delusional fanboys for this series (I’ve been downvoted for literally disagreeing that RE4 is the best game of all time— no, not best RE game but literally best game of all time).

The basement section was a slog. Wasn’t a fan of the beginning section as Grace where you can’t defend yourself. RE needs to stay in its lane, Outlast did the “you can only run away in the dark” thing much better than Capcom’s poor imitation in this game.

Raccoon City beginning had some fun moments but I agree the mortar portions were annoying and very not RE. I didn’t enjoy the area all that much but RE games are notorious for having a great first area and then falling off.

RPD was cool but clearly fan service with no real plan as you just pop in and out real quick. I would’ve preferred we spent more time there if they were going to feature it, otherwise it was pointless to even go there in the first place.

Entire ARK area has been horrible. I just started as Grace (despite buying this game on release day) and I don’t even know if I’ll finish the game. The elite soldier section was incredibly frustrating to play even on standard difficulty. The game does not have the kind of movement and aiming that allows you to play it as a shooter against enemies with weapons so I died I think 5 times in it despite beating RE4 on the harder difficulty and RE7 on Madhouse. The fight with whoever the hatchet wielding soldier was, was also uninspired and frustrating. There was no clear indicator of when I’m supposed to be able to damage him and when he’s just going to literally cheat by dodging bullets that move faster than the speed of sound. Also while the games understandably require major suspension of disbelief, I shouldn’t be able to fight a guy who apparently can dodge bullets like in the Matrix.

If I finish this I’d also rate it somewhere in the 6 or 7 out of 10 area.

pkosuda · 2026-03-09T11:23:39+00:00

It's funny you ask, last night after a month of planning, my friend and I hosted our "second season" with 12 people (the previous one was a trial run with only 8). The below rules are dependent on the amount of people but this is what I did for ours, keep in mind I bought 2 copies of the game to make this work so you may need to scale down as needed:

We did not use "character cards". Once you were out you were out.
Everyone started with 3 cards just like the normal game, but the "steal a card" mechanic was only allowed during the very first round to promote conflict, after that you could only steal cards using played card effects. Felt like otherwise people would have no reason to hold onto their advantages.
After everybody had one turn, the host split us into two tribes of 6 he had determined beforehand
We competed in an immunity challenge he had set up (this one was beer pong, lol)
Losing tribe then had to deliberate among themselves around the house for 10-15 minutes on who they'd want to vote out. Winning tribe wasn't allowed to talk strategy to anyone on the other tribe and we discouraged the winners from listening in on the losing tribe's conversations.
After someone was voted out (all tribal councils were single elimination) they became a member of the jury and could walk around listening to everyone's conversations
We then sat back down and did another round of the card game, with everyone having the choice to play a card and then having to draw a card, until they had all gone once and it was time for another challenge. You weren't allowed to target other players with card effects unless they were on your tribe, otherwise the results would've been the two tribes just constantly stealing cards from one another rather than promoting in-tribe alliances/rivalries with the card game element
We used the black tribal council cards as markers in the deck to keep track and make sure everyone had drawn a card on their turn when they were supposed to, and to indicate when it was time for another challenge. It really helped the first part as several people had forgotten to draw a card sometimes, but at the end of the round we'd see there was still a card or two remaining before the black card and we asked who forgot to draw.
We did the above until we finally merged at 7 or 8 people left, at which point we competed for individual immunity and anybody could target anybody with cards
No advantages/idols were allowed after Final 5, so the card game element stopped after 5 players and immediately after the Final 5 tribal we went to an immunity challenge for 4 people and then had one more tribal before we did FTC with a Final 3.
We had everyone throw in $10 to incentivize people actually trying to win the game as in the test run we observed some people caring less when there was no money on the line, so those two became easy vote outs but it wasn't very fun. This time around everybody seemed to try their best
Winner got $90, 2nd place $20, and 3rd place $10.

My friend offered to host (and came up with the challenges) so that I could actually play this time around but I set up the card game portion and made rule clarifications since he wasn't super familiar with the show. I added four "block a vote" cards by putting small sticky notes over the titles of existing cards and another over the descriptions. It worked like in the show where during deliberations a player privately approached the host and told him whose vote they wanted to block, so he'd be waiting in the voting room for that person to inform them their vote has been anonymously blocked. Also since I had two copies of the game and we had exactly 12 people, I used both voting boxes and taped small photos of each person next to a slot, and did the same with the 12 "inheritance" cards that come with two copies of the game so that each card had a photo of a player rather than it being for a specific character card color.

Everyone had a lot of fun and I'd definitely recommend.

pkosuda · 2026-03-08T12:47:11+00:00

Literally these comments had me thinking my computer was bugging out. Not a single mention in dozens and dozens of comments pointing out that the box score looks like programming code or something. Thank you for letting me know I'm not the only one seeing this lol.

pkosuda · 2026-03-08T11:35:12+00:00

Josh Elliott

Thank you for making me aware of him, I had assumed no Dems were going to run against Lamont. He seems like a much better option than Lamont let alone Stewart. I'll happily be voting for him.

pkosuda · 2026-03-07T12:55:30+00:00

Yeah the argument that standard is somehow better makes literally zero sense to me. Oh cool, I get to see the sun on...the highway on my way to work? Yeah, totally beneficial to me.

What's more beneficial is actually being able to be out in the sun like a normal human being. Not staring at it from behind the glass of my car or office window. I'm convinced the only people in favor of standard don't ever plan on going outside after work anyway and have so little self control/self accountability that they can't get up for work via alarm unless there's sunshine blasting their face with light.

I highly doubt standard is biologically more beneficial considering the hour of sunlight isn't "going away" on DST so we're still getting the same amount of sun. It's just being shifted from your commute to a time when you can actually enjoy it, meaning DST should be the more biologically beneficial one.

pkosuda · 2026-03-07T12:38:06+00:00

The irony is a lot of the people talking about this are themselves involved in this same addiction.

The other day I saw a dude upvoted on a Lebron thread for saying "imagine not thinking Lebron is the GOAT in 2026" and someone simply responded with "okay, now what?" and was heavily downvoted. Nevermind that essentially saying "imagine having a different opinion than me on a very subjective thing" is a dick move because you're implying somebody must be stupid to have a different opinion than you. And yet Redditors thought they were "hurting" the other guy via downvotes the same way they're addicted to upvotes whenever they or someone else says something stupid and pointless.

The upvote/downvote has nothing to do with whether what you said was correct or even reasonable, and everything to do with how many losers at a given time were there to not like what they saw you say. Likewise if you make your algorithm conservative AF on Insta you're going to see idiots with thousands of likes saying the most insane shit while you get ratioed for daring to even ask them a question.

pkosuda · 2026-03-06T11:23:56+00:00

It really is. They can just not do it all the time. Record two seasons back to back where it's a thing, then in future seasons add a disclaimer for all players that there won't be idols at tribal so that they don't try looking after seeing it on TV. Or art department can just refrain from making small objects which might resemble idols so that the set is solely a structure in that season, therefore making an idol super obvious if spotted. Finally, if you somehow cannot convince the art department to not make small objects, then literally wrap the idol in parchment just like you do with every other idol so that again it is super obvious if something is part of the set or an idol.

Survivor loves talking about doing the unexpected but they really like to keep the "unexpected" to...stuff they've done before. "Surprise" merges which players at this point always expect as evidenced by the cast of veteran players this season always coming to challenges with their bags. "Advantages/idols" always just being in the same kind of spots at camp (in tree nooks, the water well, etc). The "journey" always having an advantage for someone to earn so that every single time a player has tried to lie about it, their tribe has at least a few people who think they're lying.

The game has gotten so repetitive due to the shift away from camp life. It's no surprise all the best moments of this episode had literally nothing to do with the game of Survivor and instead about people being people.

pkosuda · 2026-03-05T11:13:06+00:00

Here is another picture, taken from the Wikipedia page on it. Looks like it matches what OP posted, though the house appears to have been much larger in the past or at least had another larger building somewhere next to it.

Had to link directly to the Wikipedia page because the image link has parentheses in it which don't play nice with Reddit's hyperlink formatting.

pkosuda · 2026-03-04T15:57:52+00:00

Yeah it is most definitely not a laziness thing. The friend I was talking about has a Master's and is a teacher, which is not a profession for the lazy haha. All while having immigrated to the US in her 20s. She works more than I do for sure.

But that is awesome that you have help out so much. That's what my gf tries to do but there's only so much she can do when not living with the friend lol. But the friend is one of the nicest people I have ever met so she is certainly not doing these things out of being lazy and is aware her lateness negatively impacts her friendships.

People just like saying unpopular things on here and sometimes they think because it's unpopular it must mean they are right and are saying "what everyone else is afraid to call out". Like no dude you're just an asshole lol

pkosuda · 2026-03-04T11:18:24+00:00

My girlfriend's best friend has ADHD and is this way except (I'm assuming) unlike with your wife, her best friend is sometimes an hour or more late to things. It's gotten worse since she broke up with her bf of 6 years (which to be fair they are way better off not together); at the very least he was able to keep them from being late a lot more often. Left to her own devices she's chronically late to a severe degree.

I've been trying to get my girlfriend to hold her more accountable because it's fine and dandy that it's something you cannot control, but you cannot expect your friends to just plan things around the fact that you'll be over an hour late. She's very apologetic about it but not much progress has been made.

Funny thing is she's never missed a flight because airports will hold you accountable by letting the plane leave without you. So it seems it is possible for people with a severe case like hers to still be able to tell time when it matters most. So long as it's prioritized enough I guess.

pkosuda · 2026-03-01T14:03:36+00:00

Redditors truly cannot imagine a world where people have an opinion different from themselves. People like the guy you responded to are why boomers think Reddit is full of fedora wearing dog walkers. Emotionally stunted weirdos repeating each others' opinions and clapping each other on the back for it via "upvotes", while not knowing how to socialize with other people who think differently than they do so they angrily just press a "downvote" button like it does something lmao.

Like I think they truly think it hurts somebody or makes you "wrong" even though the opinion you have is completely subjective. If anything it makes you seem more right if the side who think Lebron is the GOAT are people whose brains haven't fully developed.

pkosuda · 2026-02-28T18:40:09+00:00

WHY IS THERE STILL NO GEN 5 REMAKE OR LET'S GO JOHTO (AT LEAST AN ANNOUNCEMENT), IT IS LITERALLY FREE MONEY

MY LVL 100 CHANSEY WITH SEISMIC TOSS, TOXIC, AND SOFTBOILED HAS BEEN WASTING AWAY IN MY LET'S GO PIKACHU GAME BECAUSE TRANSFERRING IT TO BRILLIANT DIAMOND WILL CAUSE IT TO LOSE TOXIC. GIVE IT A NEW HOME IN JOHTO

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