Warning: this opinion piece contains spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem.

For three decades, players have been going toe-to-toe with zombies and other monsters in the Resident Evil series. This year’s latest mainline entry, Resident Evil Requiem, marks the beloved franchise’s 30th anniversary by being a love letter to the series’ entire past, from its early days of creepy, puzzle-filled survival horror to its adrenaline-fuelled action horror era. But while this approach has been praised almost unanimously across the board – we awarded Requiem 9/10 and its Metacritic score stands at 89, the highest of any modern, non-remake Resident Evil – I feel that its attempt to mix both of the series’ historic styles together creates a clash, rather than cohesion. Rather than a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, it feels to me like Resident Evil Requiem has a bit of an identity crisis.

Over the past decade, Resident Evil has reformulated itself as a slow-paced survival horror game, returning its mainline entries to the style of the 1996 original where every shot counts and everything around you is a threat. You're not a larger-than-life hero, instead you're an everyday person thrown into a nightmare scenario and you have to somehow find a way out alive. Seemingly inspired by indie hits like Amnesia and Outlast, Capcom opted for a first-person POV for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and its sequel, Village, which anchored you in the terrifying experience of their everyman protagonist, Ethan Winters. This new formula worked well, garnering critical acclaim and reigniting many people’s interest in the franchise, myself included. This was an especially important victory for Capcom because of how poorly 2012’s Resident Evil 6 was received, which almost entirely abandoned the series’ survival horror roots in favor of horror-themed action.

But with the release of Resident Evil Requiem, it feels as if some of the work that Capcom has been doing over the last few years with Biohazard and Village has been thrown out the window. It is, for sure, a great game that’s engaging from start to finish, but its big swings from terrifying survival horror to relentless action set pieces makes it feel as if Capcom couldn't pick a lane for Requiem’s overall tone. While playing through the campaign, I couldn’t help but feel that it was suffering from an identity crisis. And because of that, I found that many key plot points missed the mark for me. A prime example of this occurs towards the campaign’s midpoint, when Grace’s child ward, Emily, transforms into a giant monster. It’s a moment that’s supposed to create a cocktail of emotions – shock and upset over what’s become of your friend, fear for what will happen next – but before any of that really comes into play, Leon rushes in, guns blazing, to save the day.

While playing as Grace, Requiem is a slow-burning survival horror – the exact style of game I've come to expect from the series. Similar to when playing as Ethan Winters, I was forced to think carefully about how I wanted to approach each situation, and I often would ask myself, "Is this fight worth the ammo?" Every time I ran into a creature that would tower over me, I'd often scream out in real life, then proceed to run for my life in-game. The fear was only amplified by the fact that Grace’s sections employ the series’ traditional labyrinthine level design, and so I was often forced to revisit locations I’d previously barely made it out of alive in search of hidden treasure pieces needed to move the plot forward. The puzzles those treasures are used to solve aren’t exactly the hardest, but their presence is appreciated, and it made playing as Grace even more enjoyable.

Ultimately, a lot of Grace's gameplay is grounded in reality – yes, a reality where zombies tear off faces and doors are unlocked by gemstones – but the oppressive atmosphere, overwhelming odds, and vision-limiting first-person perspective makes playing as her truly scary. Even though she is employed by the FBI, she's essentially a pencil pusher who has next to no combat experience in the field. It makes you feel truly vulnerable, and so this was the strongest part of the game for me.

Leon’s sections, meanwhile, feel like a complete 180 from everything you experience as Grace. Replicating the approach of 2005’s Resident Evil 4, Leon’s most famous mission, most, if not all of the horror elements are removed from his sequences and story beats, which undermines much of what you played through as Grace – once again, Leon’s brutal gunning down of the monster Emily transforms into feels like it’s from a completely different story than the one Grace was experiencing. This is where the identity crisis really kicks in. Ammo is not as scarce anymore, and you're encouraged to run headfirst into battle. Rather than search for helpful scraps, Leon has access to a shopping and weapons upgrade system that rewards you with currency based on how many zombies you've killed. The only way to get better gear is by racking up a high kill count, a system that goes against everything the game’s Grace-centric first half was building towards. As Grace, I’d learned to be fearful of pretty much everything coming my way, especially the larger monsters that stalked the corridors of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. Leon, on the other hand, could solve such issues with a few shotgun shells and a grenade.

Unfortunately, the same can also be said about the puzzles (or lack thereof) Leon has to solve in his portion of the game. A lot of them mostly involve running to site X just to open location Y, which feels a notable step down compared to the more sophisticated problems facing Grace. This huge shift in approach between the two characters means it almost feels like playing an entirely different game during Requiem’s second half. Leon and Grace's parts feel like two sides of a strong coin, but they are underdeveloped because they're so split. Rather than complimentary halves, they feel like mandatory reflections of the series past to honor the series’ 30-year milestone. As I played, I began to wonder if Capcom was trying to directly appease its many generations of fans – those who loved Resident Evil 7 and 8's old school-influenced gameplay and those who liked the more action-packed style of RE 3-6 – rather than finding a new formula that combined elements of both.

It seems strange that Capcom has tried to do this multi-style catering, as such an approach was widely unpopular when the studio first tried it in 2012 with Resident Evil 6. Much like Requiem, that game was split into distinct sections that delivered different gameplay styles. Leon’s storyline, while admittedly still action heavy, was focused on more traditional horror goals, while Chris and Jake’s campaigns were almost Call of Duty-like in their approach to action. Granted, this time around, Capcom has done a much better job of both sides of the coin – Grace’s side of things is genuine survival horror, while Leon’s is a good tribute to the style of RE4 – but it’s nonetheless odd to see it take such a massive swing towards a campaign structure that had already done a lot of damage to the franchise. Towards the end of the game, it almost feels like you're playing a more polished version of Resident Evil 6 rather than the successor to Resident Evil 7 and 8.

What really makes all this frustrating is that Capcom has shown with Resident Evil Village that you can still have these over-the-top action moments without undermining the horror and tension built up throughout the game. A key example can be found at the tail end of the campaign, when the perspective switches from Ethan to Chris Redfield – the classic Resident Evil hero who’s a proficient soldier at this point in the timeline. You play his sequence as an FPS, killing everything that stands in your way. But because this is a single sequence, rather than half of the game, it feels like a refreshing vignette rather than a case of split personality.

With it being the 30th anniversary of Resident Evil, it's clear that Capcom's goal for Requiem was to pay respect to and celebrate the many different things this series has been. And when it’s exploring those things in isolation, it’s undeniably compelling. I loved creeping around Rhodes Hill as Grace, and I loved ripping through the streets of Raccoon City as Leon. Together, though, these elements make for a campaign that feels fractured. Its lack of commitment to one style really hurts Requiem’s overall big picture, and in its worst moments the clash between horror and action undermines much of the tension built up as Grace and inflicts tonal whiplash. There’s a lot I like about Resident Evil Requiem, but I wish the game belonged to either Grace or Leon, not both of them.

Luis Joshua Gutierrez is a freelance writer who loves games. You can reach him at @ImLuisGutierrez on Twitter.

Some might have thought Bungie’s Marathon was going to be the big launch on Steam this week, but it turns out Slay the Spire 2 has quadrupled Bungie's extraction shooter in terms of concurrent player numbers on Valve's PC gaming platform.

Casey Yano, game developer and co-founder of Slay the Spire maker MegaCrit, took to social media to say he never thought Slay the Spire 2 would pass Marathon in terms of concurrent users. Well, it certainly has. At the time of this article’s publication, Slay the Spire 2 has over 350,000 concurrent players on Valve’s platform — an incredible number that makes it one of the most-played games on Steam, behind only the eternally popular PUBG, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2.

Marathon, meanwhile, hit a peak concurrent player count of 88,337 on the day of launch, a number Bungie will be hoping improves as the game heads into its first weekend.

Why did Yano mention this on social media in the first place? It was as part of an acknowledgement that a tweet from the official MegaCrit account about the launch of Marathon — viewed over half a million times — came off a little meaner than intended.

“Congratulations to the Marathon team on their launch!” MegaCrit tweeted Thursday, March 5. “Don't let small indie passion projects like this pass you by just because Slay the Spire 2 is out.”

Some thought that was throwing shade at Marathon, which is under significant pressure to deliver for Bungie following the torrid time the Sony-owned studio has faced in recent years. So, both the MegaCrit account and Yano himself issued follow-up messages.

“This seems a bit meaner than it was intended,” Yano said. “To be fair I didn't think we'd actually pass Marathon in concurrent users.”

And, in response to one user who called it “A SHADE FOR THE CENTURIES,” MegaCrit said: “it wasn’t supposed to be shade, we were being sarcastic 😭 did not know we’d blow up quite to the degree that we did…” All’s well that ends well. Bungie community manager Cozmo then replied to offer a congratulations of his own.

Slay the Spire 2 isn’t just outpacing Marathon on Steam, it’s rewriting the roguelike record books. It’s shot past Mewgenics to secure the highest ever concurrent player count on Steam for a roguelike, which itself inched ahead of Hades 2 last month.

That's an astonishing and clearly unexpected debut for this long-awaited sequel to the popular deckbuilder roguelike Slay the Spire, which returned a 9/10 review back in 2019. We said: "Slay the Spire takes some of the best parts of deckbuilding games, roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers, and mixes them into a wholly new and extremely satisfying package."

Slay the Spire 2 is currently only available on PC for its early access period, but it seems likely to get console versions once it's fully released.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.