Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles Review (WII)

Shoot the brains! Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains!

I’m going to admit, before 4 I had never followed the Resident Evil series of games, but knew the gist of it. City gets infested with zombies, American mercenaries realise they need to bugger off before they become a bunch of rotting undead and form a huge vendetta against the monstrous Umbrella corporation who thought that they could make more profit resurrecting the dead than putting their business ventures into something more civil for the community.

Not a lot to take in really, so it’s a surprise that Capcom chose to return to the events of Racoon City and relive the terrorism of the Umbrella Corporation.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is by no means a terrible game, just average.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles takes a retrospective look on Resi 0,1 and 3 (Yes, 2 is missing for some bizarre reason) and allows you to fight off zombies in the same places that you may have already fought zombies…but this deja vu has a twist to it. You now get to do it from a first person perspective!

I don’t know if Resi fans cheered and whooped at that point or just shrugged there shoulders.

The prospect of a on-rails shooter based around Resident Evil does sound like a great idea, and one that can easily rival House Of The Dead. Whereas House Of The Dead focused more on the arcade style of play, RE: Umbrella Chronicles focuses more on what would bring the player back into the game.

Through progression of the game, you are able to earn more and more different weapons that you can use in the game. These add a bit more enjoyment to replaying levels, but not a lot of depth. Another incentive is the chance to uncover hidden items throughout the levels. Not particularly useful items, simply files which add to the understanding of the RE saga, along with files regarding the use of items…such as books and key cards. Again, a nice idea, but one which will probably only appeal to die-hard RE fans who want to fully understand the dynamics of a Green Herb.

Game play is pretty basic, acting like an extremely deadly point and click adventure. Most enemies harbour weak points which, when shot, instantly kill, allowing more experienced players to simply walk straight through levels without a care in the world. At least, that would be the case if it were not for the extremely jumpy difficulty settings. At some moments, decaying undead will struggle to reach you without tripping over their own feet, freely allowing you to make a nice cuppa before blowing their brains out. At other moments you’ll simply walk through a door and find a dog’s jaw clenched around your face before you can say “Damn! Spilt my tea!”

Graphics do their job, but are nothing to write home about, yet cut scenes do display an impressive amount of work and polish. Sound also works well with the atmosphere of the game, yet is ruined by some poor B-Movie voiceovers from the characters.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is by no means a terrible game, just average. Compared to arcade FPS’s it lacks tension and overall fun, perhaps because arcade games are primarily built to steal our pounds/quarters/gil. House Of The Dead thrives off of replay value just for pure fun, whereas RE:UC forces you to replay levels in order to learn stuff that some already know, and some really don’t want to know. Despite a small scenario which doesn’t repeat events in previous games, this is a game for the die-hard RE obsessive, anyone else should probably just give it a rent if they really want to give it a go. Either that or just search Wikipedia for the whole RE story, it’ll be a lot cheaper.