Requiem is an absolutely fantastic game. I don't know that I'd call it the best of the RE Engine games, and I'm not certain that it's my personal favorite, but what I do know is that the split between Leon and Grace is a stroke of genius, and the feeling of playing both of them and experiencing both sides of what I'd call ideal Resident Evil gameplay is just incredible. This is not a game without flaws - no Resident Evil ever is or will be - but the flaws are massively outweighed by the triumphs, and that's all I ever need in a Resident Evil game.
I found a really satisfying amount of tension in Grace's segments. She's not totally helpless, but I think her parts of the game are very carefully tuned to encourage stealth and resource management over brute force, really making you think through when to burn ammo and when to simply sneak around. The zombie movement patterns are learnable without being overly predictable or simplified, and it was really fun to figure out the best times to ambush and take out some of the larger enemies to get them out of the way for good. The final area for Grace, by contrast, stumbles a little bit on the balance point, but stumbling at the end doesn't really invalidate the fun of the previous segments for me, and overall she's very fun to play.
Leon's gameplay...I think it's great, too. He does not quite feel like RE4 Leon - his lateral movement in particular feels rather like pushing a heavy cart into motion rather than, you know, walking around like a human being - but the quirks of his gameplay really fall away in the face of just how fun he is to play. Early on, his segments are sprinkled over Grace's, like rewards for getting through the tension of her gameplay, but when you're given a good, long Leon super-segment late in the game, I found myself really enjoying getting to sink my teeth into his gameplay. The guns feel awesome, Leon's melee combat was enormously useful as a set of supplementary tools, and I think his level design was interesting and engaging. For all the ways in which his movement feels a little off, everything he does has real impact, and I enjoyed every second of tearing through zombie after zombie with him.
Story-wise, well, it's a Resident Evil story, lol. It's campy, and Leon certainly has a deep bag of one liners to keep things from getting too serious, but I think the narrative balances the dour tone of Grace's segments with the relative brevity of Leon's fairly well. It never feels jarring, tonally, to switch between them, and they mesh well together in the segments where they're both involved, particularly at the end of the game. Requiem has a lot of interesting lore nuggets in it for people who care about that sort of thing, and though there are plenty of holes to peep through when it comes to certain plot elements, they're not so jarring that they took me out of the game. Really, that's all you can ask for from an RE game, and Requiem delivers quite well in that regard.
Look, it's simple - Requiem is a fantastic game. I loved nearly every moment of playing it, and it does a great job of justifying its dual protagonist, dual gameplay style setup. Both Grace and Leon feel adequately fleshed out, and though the time split probably isn't quite 50/50 between them, I felt like I got plenty of time on both sides over the course of the game. Maybe it's not the ultimate 30th anniversary game that people may have wanted it to be, but for the game that it actually is, Requiem delivers.
