My favorite Game Awards reveal was its worst-kept secret: Resident Evil’s Leon is freakin’ back, baby, and he’s got a car sponsorship now

It’s been widely known or assumed for quite a while that Leon Kennedy was going to be a part of Resident Evil Requiem, but that didn’t make last night’s Game Awards reveal any less awesome.

Leakers have been reporting Leon’s involvement for many months (and PlayStation Network spilled the beans officially earlier this week), but his appearance in RE9’s third trailer at The Game Awards was still met with an audible pop in the audience, and maybe even from my own room all the way across the country, too.

The inexperienced FBI agent Grace Ashcroft won’t be alone in her terrifying adventure, because everyone’s favorite rookie-cop-turned-government-agent-badass pulled up in a new whip towards the end of the new trailer, and he’s likely being paid handsomely to do it, too. Well, Capcom is.

After the reveal, Capcom announced that Leon’s ride is a custom Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT in partnership with the luxury car company. And if the leakers are accurate (and they have been so far), this may be a drivable vehicle in the game that Leon uses to navigate between areas.

RE9 both looks and sounds like it’s aiming to combine the best part of both of the franchise’s dueling identities, and jump back and forth between both. Survival horror and action. First-person and third-person. Action hero and out-of-their-depth survivor. And according to the director, that’s exactly how it will play out.

“Requiem has just one, unified story,” director Akifumi Nakanishi said in an interview with Automaton. “As the plot advances, you switch between Leon’s sections and Grace’s sections. There are even some scenes where they meet. Grace is ‘the biggest scaredy-cat in Resident Evil history,’ while Leon is a seasoned veteran, so seeing how those personalities interact is part of the fun.”

Being able to swap between first- or third-person at any given time also excites me. How do I feel that day? Do I want to be scared and see the horrors up close, or do I want to pull it back and go guns blazing like Leon’s been doing for almost 30 years? That freedom, and also the unpredictability, is by design as well, according to the director.

“If the whole game were Grace, it would be extremely scary,” Nakanishi said. “In this sense, Leon’s sections work to release the tension. You feel safe during Leon’s chapters, and then scared again during Grace’s. It’s a consciously designed horror structure.”

Leon is at least in his late 40s in RE9, and he’s showing his age a bit, kind of like me. I feel you, buddy. He has visible wrinkles and he’s got some graying stubble, but that has not stopped him from sporting the same haircut he brought into Raccoon City in 1998, or from kicking all kinds of ass as usual.

“Grace’s gameplay is based on Resident Evil 2, whereas Leon’s gameplay includes martial arts and melee moves, based on Resident Evil 4,” Nakanishi said.

All of these words and notions combine to create a level of hype for a video game that I haven’t felt in some time. Like many aging gamers, Resident Evil has been with me since my childhood, and all throughout my life in the years that followed. And I’m still excited for whatever comes next.

I have vivid memories of watching my uncle play the original game when I was seven or eight years old, and darting out of the room when the zombie dogs burst through the windows. I had a similar experience on my own in Resident Evil 2, playing as Leon, when the zombies broke down the windows of Kendo’s Gun Shop. It took me years to find the bravery to play the game to completion (I got a PS1 and RE2 for my ninth birthday), and it’s since become one of my all-time favorites.

For many, Resident Evil 6 was one of the low-points of the series when it launched back in 2012, and that’s the last time we saw Leon in one of the games. Bringing him back for RE9, and likely his very own requiem, feels right. And heading back to Raccoon City one more time, as an old veteran of zombie-killing (or gaming, in my case), is a thrilling prospect that I can’t wait for.

Welcome back, Leon, and I’ll be seeing you on Feb. 27. Please bring Jill Valentine and/or Claire Redfield with you.

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Last night’s The Game Awards show wasn’t the greatest of all time, but it sure did give us a glimpse of some potentially awesome games. One title in particular, however, stood out for a wrong reason: being similar—too similar—to CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077.

And that would be No Law, developed by Neon Giant of The Ascent fame, and published by the self-proclaimed AI-first pioneers, Krafton. Neon Giant’s track record is genuinely great, with The Ascent being one of the most visually striking games I’ve ever seen and played. It’s also set in a cyberpunk environment, one that delves deep into the realm of science fiction, making its cyberpunk vibes more of an artistic choice than an actual setting.

Even so, the studio has established itself as a proper sci-fi and cyberpunk-oriented team of creatives, which naturally led into a more ambitious, larger-scale game such as No Law is supposed to be. And that’d be all fine if the game didn’t bear so much similarity, eerie similarity, to CDPR’s 2020 title, Cyberpunk 2077.

While watching the TGA show last night, seeing No Law made me think it was something Cyberpunk 2077-related. The first-person perspective, the animations, the way the combat unfolds, all reminded me of CDPR’s game, not to mention the segment that showcases a certain location that is exceptionally difficult to tell apart from Cyberpunk 2077‘s Afterlife.

Now I get a first-person cyberpunk title is bound to bear some semblance to what was already made, but I for the life of me couldn’t tell you this wasn’t Cyberpunk 2077 if you didn’t tell me. That brings me to my biggest fear regarding Neon Giant’s upcoming title: it could fall into the same situation that Tencent has caught itself in with Lights of Motiram.

Sony sued the company for ripping off its assets, ideas, and style, and is currently embroiled in a massive legal battle that saw Light of Motiram grind development to a halt. If No Law doesn’t showcase more unique elements in the near future, I have a feeling CDPR might not like what the studio has done here, and could pursue legal action much in the same way as Sony.

This could eventually result in a potentially good game being bogged down by a lawsuit because it decided to pursue established styles instead of developing a new one, even if derivative of the one CDPR itself had made.

No Law posits an interesting setting and story, such as its Port Desire city that is an anarcho-corporatist hellscape, but how it executes things brings it way too close to an existing game, so much that telling them apart becomes a real headache.

We’ll have to wait and see how the game develops further and how its style evolves and translates into actual gameplay. But so far, its future seems to be hanging by a thread, one that CDPR could decide to slash at any moment.

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