Resident Evil Requiem Is Still 2026’s Best-Selling Game. Its Split Personality Is the Reason

Resident Evil Requiem has sold eight million copies worldwide, remains 2026’s best-selling game in the U.S. by dollar sales, and still carries an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. Its success is not difficult to understand once you see how Capcom built it: Grace Ashcroft gets a tense survival-horror game where every bullet matters, while Leon S. Kennedy gets something much closer to the violent confidence of Resident Evil 4. Somehow, both belong in the same campaign.

Five months after release, Resident Evil Requiem is still holding onto the top spot in Circana's 2026 U.S. sales ranking, ahead of Crimson Desert, MLB The Show 26, 007 First Light and Forza Horizon 6. Capcom's own updated product data lists 8 million copies sold worldwide as of June 30, making Requiem one of the fastest-growing entries in the company's catalogue.

The player response is arguably even more important. Steam currently lists more than 52,000 English-language reviews as Overwhelmingly Positive, with more than 100,000 reviews across all languages. That does not mean players agree about everything but it does mean the huge launch audience generally liked what it bought.

The reason Requiem works is also the thing that could easily have ruined it: it keeps changing what kind of Resident Evil you are playing.

Official gameplay overview:

Grace makes ordinary zombies frightening again

Grace Ashcroft is an FBI analyst, but Capcom deliberately avoids turning her into another heavily armed Resident Evil veteran. Her sections revolve around evasion, puzzles, limited inventory space and resource management, with fighting often treated as the expensive option rather than the obvious one. Capcom described the contrast directly before release: Grace is designed around survival and vulnerability, while Leon is built around the crowd-control combat fans associate with RE4.

Grace starts as an analyst rather than an action hero, which is important to how her half of the game works.

That difference becomes most effective inside Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. Rather than sending the player through a sequence of disposable rooms, Rhodes Hill gradually opens into the kind of interconnected location Resident Evil is best at: locked doors lead back into familiar corridors, key items create reasons to revisit areas, and the question is rarely just “can I kill this zombie?” but whether spending the ammunition is worth it.

The Washington Post's Gene Park went through Requiem nine times and singled out Rhodes Hill as one of the strongest environments in the series, while PC Gamer similarly praised how efficiently the game combines puzzles, horror and action without stretching itself across an unnecessarily long campaign.

Capcom also made a smart change to the zombies themselves. Many retain fragments of whatever they did while alive. The Verge notes examples including a cook who continues chopping meat, a cleaner repeatedly returning to a dirty mirror and an infected hotel guest obsessed with a light switch. Those behaviours are not just background animation; Grace can sometimes read or manipulate them to move through an area more safely.

Grace can fight, but her sections rarely make combat feel cheap or consequence-free.

Director Kōshi Nakanishi has said the team knew zombies had become familiar after decades of Resident Evil. The goal was to make them unpredictable enough that experienced players could no longer immediately read every encounter. That idea comes through most strongly with Grace, because she lacks the arsenal required to erase a mistake with firepower.

Players picked up on exactly the same thing. One heavily discussed r/Games impression described Grace's sections as extremely tense and praised Capcom for making zombies frightening again; another player said the transition from Grace's horror into Leon's action felt less like a disruption and more like a welcome high-energy break before the tension returned.

That is probably the clearest description of what Requiem does well. Grace is not there simply because Capcom wanted another protagonist. She changes the way the player looks at the enemies.

Then Leon walks into the same nightmare

Leon S. Kennedy does not play like Grace because, narratively, it would make little sense for him to. This is a character who has survived Raccoon City, Las Plagas and decades of bio-terror incidents. Requiem's Leon is older and visibly more worn down, but he is not suddenly frightened of a zombie standing at the end of a corridor.

Requiem's Leon sections push much closer to the action-heavy design of Resident Evil 4.

His sections therefore move toward RE4-style action. Leon gets stronger weapons, melee attacks and a hatchet that can be used defensively, while fights are built around controlling several enemies rather than finding a way around one. The Verge described him as an efficient killing machine, and PC Gamer's pre-release time with the game reached the same conclusion: Grace provides the desperate survival-horror side, while Leon becomes the power fantasy release valve.

The effect is particularly good when Leon encounters the same type of enemy that previously caused trouble for Grace. Capcom spends hours teaching you that these creatures are dangerous, then hands control to somebody capable of smashing through them.

Leon turns many of the same enemies that stalk Grace into close-range combat encounters.

The gore system does a lot of work here. Enemies respond visibly to where they are hit, close-range attacks have real weight, and Leon's finishers are deliberately excessive. The combat could have felt detached from Grace's slower horror, but there is an odd satisfaction in finally being able to deal with enemies that previously forced you to hide.

One player in a broader r/Games discussion summed up the contrast particularly well: Grace's sections made them afraid of the zombies, then Leon arrived and simply smashed through enemies that had previously been major obstacles.

The difference in vulnerability between the protagonists is central to Requiem's pacing.

That is why the two-character idea works better than it sounds on paper. Ten straight hours of Grace-style vulnerability could eventually flatten the tension. Ten straight hours of Leon-style action would make most of the monsters stop being scary. Requiem keeps changing the player's sense of control.

GameSpot's review arrived at a similar verdict. It found the two halves very different but still compelling, arguing that Capcom largely succeeds by recognizing what Resident Evil already does well and committing to those strengths rather than trying to reinvent every system.

Resident Evil Requiem 4th Trailer:

Where players disagree

The high Steam rating hides a much more interesting debate. Players broadly like Requiem, but they do not necessarily like the same Requiem.

Some players think Grace is the game's real achievement and that Leon eventually takes too much space away from her. In one r/Games sales discussion, a player said Grace's sections were among their favorite gameplay experiences in years but found Leon's side much less interesting. Another argued that the split feels more like two shorter campaigns bolted together than one character progression that lasts through the entire game.

Other players feel almost exactly the opposite. Negative user reviews sometimes complain that Grace is too nervous, that her sections are too slow, or that the game becomes more enjoyable once Leon arrives.

That disagreement is actually evidence that Capcom achieved what it was trying to do. Resident Evil has spent years moving between two audiences: players who want the claustrophobic survival horror of RE2, RE7 and parts of Village, and players who prefer the responsive combat and replayability of RE4. Requiem does not choose between them.

There is, however, one criticism that appears across both professional reviews and player feedback: the first half is stronger than the second.

Requiem works best when the two styles remain in conversation rather than letting one completely take over.

The Verge praised the early push-and-pull between Grace and Leon but felt the later return to Raccoon City leaned too heavily on franchise nostalgia. Once Grace spends less time in control, the game loses some of the contrast that made Rhodes Hill so effective. The site's follow-up analysis specifically argued that Requiem's reverence for Resident Evil history becomes a weakness in the back half.

Top negative Steam reviews make a similar complaint in less polished language: beautiful presentation and strong gameplay, but weaker pacing, thin villains and a second half that sometimes feels safer and more nostalgic than the opening.

That feels like the fairest criticism of the game. Requiem is more convincing mechanically than it is narratively. Its best ideas are not a shocking plot twist or a new villain; they are the simple systems that change how the player feels when control switches from Grace to Leon.

Even the camera became part of the argument

Requiem allows both protagonists to be played in first or third person, but players clearly use the feature differently. Capcom's post-launch data showed roughly 90% of Leon players preferred third person, while Grace was much closer: around 60% first person and 40% third person.

That split makes sense. Leon's melee animations, crowd control and RE4-style combat are easier to appreciate with the camera pulled behind him. Grace benefits far more from having the camera inside the character's head, where narrow rooms and approaching enemies feel larger.

The game does not simply zoom the camera in and call it first person either. The Verge specifically praised how much work Capcom put into making animations and object interactions function properly from both viewpoints.

For players starting the game now, I would follow the design rather than forcing one perspective across the entire campaign: first person for Grace, third person for Leon. It exaggerates the difference between them, which is exactly where Requiem is strongest.

Capcom already gave the action side another life

Requiem's post-launch support also addressed one obvious problem: Leon's combat is fun enough that many players want more of it without replaying the entire campaign.

Capcom's free Leon Must Die Forever update unlocks after completing the story and turns Leon's mechanics into a separate replay-focused minigame. The mode sends players through multiple stages while unlocking enhancer abilities and increasing the emphasis on aggressive combat. Capcom describes it as distinct from the story mode and built specifically around replayability.

Official Leon Must Die Forever trailer:

That is a sensible addition. Grace's material relies on uncertainty, which becomes naturally weaker once you know where everything is. Leon's combat does the opposite: familiarity makes it easier to experiment and play faster.

It gives Requiem a better post-game without stretching the story itself.

Why Requiem is still selling

There is a temptation to explain an eight-million-copy Resident Evil launch with the obvious answers: famous franchise, Leon Kennedy, large marketing campaign. Those things obviously matter, but they do not explain why user sentiment has stayed this strong after launch.

The better explanation is that Requiem gives several parts of the Resident Evil audience a reason to show up.

If Resident Evil 7 is your favorite modern entry, Grace has something for you. If you replay Resident Evil 4 Remake for its combat, Leon has something for you. If you prefer classic locked-door exploration, Rhodes Hill has it. If you want grotesque enemies, detailed gore and ridiculous one-liners, that side of Resident Evil is here too.

PC Gamer called the game something close to a highlight reel of Resident Evil's strongest ideas, and that is probably the simplest description of why it landed. It does a surprising amount in roughly ten hours rather than trying to become a 40-hour blockbuster.

The result is not flawless. The back half loses some of the opening's discipline, the nostalgia occasionally becomes too obvious, and whether you enjoy Grace or Leon more will probably depend on what you already want Resident Evil to be.

But the numbers are difficult to argue with: 8 million copies sold, #1 in U.S. year-to-date dollar sales, and an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam rating from tens of thousands of players.

Capcom did not finally decide whether Resident Evil should be a survival-horror series or an action series.

It found a way to make players argue about that question inside the same game. And Requiem is better because of it.

Which side did you prefer : Grace's survival horror or Leon's action?