It took me a while to recover from the first big scare in Resident Evil Requiem. There I was, hunched over with a screen inches from my face and headphones in my ears, when a gigantic woman began chasing me through a dimly lit hallway intent on, well, eating me. It was a heart-racing sequence, and when I finally got to a save room I had to put the game down for a few minutes. It was an early indication that Requiem was a great game, and further evidence that the Switch 2 is becoming a welcome home for third-party titles.
Since Nintendo’s latest console launched last June, there have been few chances to see how it directly stacks up to other platforms. The successful cross-platform launch of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 was a good early sign for the Switch 2, but Requiem might be the best test so far. It’s a blockbuster action-horror game launching simultaneously across the Switch 2, PS5, Xbox, and PC. And while there are certainly some compromises on Nintendo’s platform, Requiem is a surprisingly solid experience on the Switch 2.
Requiem brings together two different types of Resident Evil games: the fast-paced action of Resident Evil 4 and the more visceral first-person terror of Biohazard and Village. Those two sides are represented through two playable characters. RE4 hunk Leon returns as a grizzled action hero, while newcomer Grace is a more hapless FBI agent who does a lot of running and hiding. Impressively, you can seamlessly swap between viewpoints at any point, letting you experience Grace’s scares in first person or help Leon wield a chainsaw in third person (or vice versa).
On a purely functional level, I haven’t had any issues with the game on the Switch 2. There haven’t been any noticeable slowdowns or hitches, aside from one time when the corpse of a zombie butcher disappeared briefly, which gave me a scare thinking he’d come back to life after a tense shootout. But there’s been nothing game-breaking, and that’s been true in both portable and TV modes.
The main compromise, of course, is visual. Requiem on the Switch 2 simply does not look as good as it does on PC or the other consoles. There are a lot of blurry textures, particularly when you get up close to objects or walls, and things overall just don’t look as sharp or clear as they do on, say, a PS5. It’s especially noticeable in first-person mode when you’re up closer to objects and characters. I also spotted some wonky hair physics, with hair occasionally deciding to defy the laws of gravity and float whichever way it wanted. Again, none of these are game-breaking issues, but they do cut into the tension Requiem works so hard to build.
This is a busy week for Resident Evil fans who also own a Switch 2. In addition to Requiem, Capcom has released belated ports of Biohazard and Village. And while these are older games, my experience was much the same. I played through the beginning area of Biohazard again for the first time in nearly a decade — which I regret, because it is so freaking scary — and it similarly performed well but was plagued by fuzzy textures and impossible floating hair.
Honestly, that’s about the best-case scenario for ports like these. We all know the Switch 2 is underpowered compared to its direct competitors, so a game like Requiem is always going to feel hamstrung in some way. A port of Requiem that’s good enough, even if it’s not the best version of the game, goes a long way to helping Nintendo continue to flesh out the Switch 2’s library, which has grown steadily in both size and quality despite a notable lack of major first-party titles from Nintendo. And let’s not forget the fact that what you lose in visual splendor you make up for in portability.
Requiem is a good sign for the Switch 2’s viability as a platform for major third-party games, but an even better sign would be seeing releases like this more frequently. We won’t have to wait too long to see the next big test: Capcom’s sci-fi action game Pragmata launches across most major platforms, Switch 2 included, in April. I can’t wait to see how hair floats in space.
