Platforms: PS4 (reviewed) and PC
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Introduction:
When I saw the first trailer for Umbrella Corps in 2015, I kind of just sat there and thought to myself “This is really where we are going with Resident Evil..?”. As launch grew closer, I had this small feeling of excitement for the game that I couldn’t shake. What if it was actually a good shooter? What if it is a buggy piece of trash that Capcom should quickly act like they never released? These were the thoughts flowing through my mind until I got my copy of the game on Tuesday, June 21st. Umbrella Corps continues to give me weird feelings even after playing it for two whole days. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible.
With the announcement of Resident Evil VII going back to the series’ horror roots, it feels so bizarre to release this game. Umbrella Corps is a clunky, action centric game set in the Resident Evil universe that crosses mechanics from both third and first-person shooters. It’s like the weirdest mix of Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and Resident Evil. I can’t even imagine what the pitch for this game was when someone brought up in a meeting at Capcom. “Let’s make the most budget online shooter we can make. Oh, and let’s set in the Resident Evil universe!” Honestly, there’s barely any content in this game. There’s an incredibly mediocre offline mode and a painfully average online mode with two game modes that have rotating objectives.
A mindless solo mode:
Let’s get this out of the way, the single-player component in this game is pretty awful. I spent the first 5 levels completing the same objective over and over again on the same incredibly small map. I did this for what felt like an hour until I basically realized virtually no progress was being made. All I did was run through the same small science lab killing zombies who never posed a threat over and over again.The reason I love Resident Evil is because there’s so much tension and stress when fighting zombies. Zombies are slowly overcoming you, you’re unloading as many bullets as you can until you have nothing left and you have to make the call of running away or charging straight through the undead horde and hope that they drop just a few spare bullets. Then, later you may find yourself in a boss fight and you realize you have little to no resources to kill this boss because you wasted it all on regular zombies and you must quickly devise a plan to kill the giant menacing boss towering in front of you. That intensity is nowhere to be found in this mode. They all stand there and wait for you to kill them. Hell, after the first level I realized all zombies die in one hit from melee attacks so why would I waste time lining up head shots when I can pull out my melee weapon and slice them all up?
Now, I knew this game was primarily focused on multiplayer so I wasn’t expecting a story or anything but the fact that they try to deliver me a story through text on loading screens feels downright insulting as a Resident Evil fan. No voice over, no cut scene, just boring text. Truthfully, I didn’t even read any of it because it felt beyond lazy. Why would I put any time or care into their story if they didn’t put any time or care into crafting it?
A stripped down shooter and Resident Evil game:
Now that we have that taken care, let’s get to the “meat and potatoes” of the game. I use that term pretty loosely. For a game that is focused on delivering a multiplayer experience, there isn’t a lot here to keep players coming back. This barely even comes close to Call of Duty’s multiplayer. Not even one of the original Call of Duty’s. This is about as barebones as it gets. There’s two game modes, both of which are pretty much the same the only thing that separates them is that one is a round based mode with no respawns and the other is a round based mode with unlimited respawns. Within these modes, the objective alternates between rounds. The objectives are selected at random and vary between a hold the point type objective to kill an assigned target. As someone who gets pretty upset when no one plays the objective in a game like Battlefield or Call of Duty, I rarely went for the objective when playing Umbrella Corps. Most of the time I just went around killing people because the objectives were so bland and boring. The only time I played the objective was when the hold the point objective was active, and that was just because all the enemies were coming there and I wanted to rack up kills.
The maps in Umbrella Corps are iconic Resident Evil locations ranging from Racoon City to an African village from Resident Evil 5. These maps are built for 3 v 3 battles with zombies filling the map as an added danger. Unlike the single player, zombies pose a pretty large threat. Each player is equipped with a jammer that basically makes you completely invisible to zombies unless you shoot at them. Enemy players can shoot your jammer and expose you to pretty much every zombie, it’s a cool addition to the game that adds strategy to an otherwise mindless shooter. The tight spaces and zombies in the map do make it feel pretty claustrophobic similar to the core Resident Evil titles. While it doesn’t have the same level of intensity as other entries in the Resident Evil franchise, the tension is still present in the multiplayer albeit to a much smaller degree.
Clunkier than Resident Evil 6:
The gameplay in Umbrella Corps is really clunky and even confusing at times. While it’s not terrible, it feels like maybe they could’ve tweaked it a bit more. The game is more of a cover shooter than a run and gun type of game, so you would think that the cover mechanics would be pretty much perfect. You would be very wrong for thinking that. The first time I went into cover I was behind a pillar and I stuck my head out to kill an enemy on my right side. When I killed my target I realized there was an enemy approaching me on the left side, so I obviously tried to slide my character over to the left side of the pillar similar to how you would in Gears of War or Uncharted. This was impossible, I was glued to the right side of the pillar and the only way for me to switch to the left side was to take myself out of cover, adjust myself to an angle, and go to the left side. By the time I got out of cover, I was already dead. It felt so clunky and bizarre for such a simple mechanic to be missing.
The game is also a bizarre mix of a third and first-person shooter. When running around you have a third-person view, which is terrible because the camera is so absurdly close to the character that if your character turned around and faced the camera the camera would probably fog up from the character breathing. When you aim down your sights and shoot, the game goes into first person. It’s incredibly disorienting and makes me wonder why they didn’t make the game entirely first-person or entirely third-person.
Verdict:
Umbrella Corps is one of the most bizarre things to come out of the Resident Evil series since Resident Evil 6. It’s not terrible, I enjoy just walking around killing other players, but there are many other shooters that do that and much more loads better. It made itself into a guilty pleasure, the game isn't good, but there were moments where I enjoyed myself despite it lacking so much.
It’s essentially the most bare bones shooter and stripped down version of Resident Evil. It’s clunky, painfully average, and at times straight up dull. I wouldn’t recommend this to even the most hardcore Resident Evil fan. Well, at least Resident Evil VII looks to be a good game. Hopefully.
