The Video Games You Should Play This Weekend – February 27

I am having a blast with Resident Evil Requiem and I understand why Wesley gave it such a positive review. The pitch is simple, but effective: what if Capcom merged the two personalities of Resident Evil – action and survival horror – into one experience. And it works!

My fear going into the game was that the two parts would feel so distinct that neither would feel as good as the games that inspired them. That Leon’s sections and Grace’s sections would be held back by one trying to please the other. Ultimately, the two parts of the game do feel quite different, but the way it affects the pace is excellent. Grace’s sections (so far) are intense and slow-paced, and when the pressure becomes too much, Leon sprints in to relieve all the stress that has been building up to that point. The two parts just work incredibly well together.

I also really like the fonts.

My first Pokémon game was LeafGreen. I still have the cartridge, given to me by a friend in second grade who didn’t really understand the gameplay – when her Pokémon took poison damage out of combat and the screen shook, she would immediately pop the cartridge out (without saving!) and blow on it, assuming it was a visual glitch. She was 8, so cut her some slack.

That said, it’s maybe my most nostalgic game of all time, since it formed my relationship with a series I’ve been a fan of for decades now. It’s also a fitting game to do so – older generations were introduced to the game with the Kanto region, and so was I, albeit in a more modern interpretation. The remakes span all of Kanto, plus the added Sevii Islands. If you’ve never played before, I’m not sure how friendly it will feel compared to modern games, as quality of life improvements have made a massive difference in recent years. That said, it’s key gaming history, and if you feel like shelling out the $20 per edition, it’ll be an interesting trip into the franchise’s past.

Despite playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours, I’ve only actually beat it once. I just have too much fun starting a fresh save, picking a new starter, and battling through the first few gyms. Now that it’s on Switch 2, I’m excited to do it all over again.

After playing Resident Evil 7 and 8 over the holidays, I was very excited for Requiem, with one caveat; I don’t really know who this Leon guy is! Luckily, the game’s first half mostly focuses on Grace, so it doesn’t matter all that much. After hitting a certain point in the game, however, Leon has a brief flashback to something that happens in Resident Evil 2, and I felt like I needed more context to really appreciate what was going on.

The next morning, a copy of Resident Evil 2 Remake on PS5 was delivered to my doorstep.

It turned out to be a surprisingly awesome way to experience Requiem’s story. Leon is a relatively mysterious figure in RE9, swooping in to help Grace with little explanation. By the time I got to this certain point in the game, Leon’s backstory is basically begging to be retold, and it ended up making perfect narrative sense. I had a great time with RE2 , knocking it out in six and a half hours (I appreciate its brevity) and spending some time with a younger, more nervous Leon. It makes his gruff one-liners carry a surprising amount of weight in Requiem, and I really appreciated how far he’s come in the grand scheme of things. After rolling credits on RE2 last night, I’m excited to come back to Requiem this weekend and finish it off.

There is a new Bungie game upon us, and if its previously released Halo and Destiny games are any indication, it’d be quite silly to outright ignore it. I mention that because, unlike Halo and Destiny, understanding what Marathon is attempting to do in the shooter genre is tougher to parse (and easy to ignore as a result). It’s an extraction live-service shooter, a niche variant in a genre that a lot of people turn their noses up to by default. That’s all well and good (and understandable if you already know this isn’t for you), but if you’re interested in seeing what one of the industry’s best shooter-makers is doing in the extraction genre, which itself is on the rise thanks to games like Arc Raiders, I recommend checking out Marathon – for free! – via this weekend’s Server Slam.

Download the Marathon Server Slam Client and hop in. That’s what I did last night, and I’ll be honest, I really struggled to parse through its UI, menus, and in-game action, but the visual-audio experience of Marathon is worth checking out alone. It is a gorgeously mixed soundscape of alien sci-fi rumbles, instruments, and tech-based beeps and boops that sounds great in a headset. And visually, it’s one of the most distinct games I’ve played in some time. As for the gameplay itself, you drop into a map, collect as much valuable loot as possible, and exfil from the map to secure said loot and reap the rewards for doing so. Moment to moment, that means you’re going to be searching around cyberpunk-esque environments for things to scavenge while avoiding (or seeking out) enemy AI and other players for firefights that play out via Bungie’s best-in-class first-person shooting.

I’m not so sure that Marathon is shaping up to be Bungie’s next Halo or Destiny, but it is, at the very least, something unique, and I’m excited to see if this extraction shooter clicks into place as I play more over the weekend. If it doesn’t, well, at least the Server Slam is free.