Umbrella Corps (PS4) Review

Resident Evil is celebrating 20 years of zombie slaying and bad voice work. Umbrella Corps was meant to be some sort of love letter to the survival horror franchise, while also capturing some points in the very lucrative co-op tactical shooter market. What we got is a cheap feeling, underbaked cash-in title that could have used a few more years in development.

Title: Umbrella Corps 
Platform: Playstation 4 & PC (Digital Only)
Developer: Capcom 
Publisher: Capcom 
Release Date: June 21, 2016 
Price: $29.99
Disclosure: Review copy provided by Publisher

The Story

To be honest, there isn’t really much to the “story” of Umbrella Corps. The year is 2015, 2 years after the events of Resident Evil 6 and 12 years after the collapse of the Umbrella Corporation in 2003. Somehow Raccoon City survived a nuclear bomb from the ending of Resident Evil 3 and there is a lot of biohazard material still in the city for some lucky biological weapons maker to get their hands on. You are a member of a mercenary group sent into Raccoon City and other Resident Evil style locations (Like the village from Resident Evil 4) to collect anything you can get your hands on while avoiding becoming the next zombie to call Raccoon City home.

Gameplay

Umbrella Corps is a very generic third person shooter. You glide, not run, around a map shooting at either people or zombies till you win or lose a round. You also have a melee axe weapon that charges up for a nice looking fire attack, and the usual RE staples of grenades, knives, etc for you to use. The big innovation for the game, at least in the online team vs team mode, is the “zombie jammer”, a device that allows you to navigate around the zombies during the fights without being a walking dinner buffet… Till it gets shot up enough to break then it’s dinner time!

There are two modes for Umbrella Corps: Online and The Experiment, a single player offline mode. The Experiment is somewhere around 24 different missions where you are collecting samples of infected DNA over and over again. Sure, you go through some classic Resident Evil areas like the Labs, the outside of the RCPD building, the village from Resident Evil 5, and other locations as you avoid the undead and try to kill them for their DNA samples. There are no boss monsters like Nemesis or Tyrant in this at all; which sucks big time as this collecting mode is boring as hell.

The other thing you can do is go online and try the team vs team free for all mode… But the service either won’t connect half the time or there aren’t enough people online at once to get a good run of games going. I’m guessing that this is where you’re meant to spend most of your time with this game as you can go and customize everything from your weapon to your armor with stickers and even replace your generic helmet with the faces of classic Resident Evil characters (If you shell out for the Deluxe Edition).

I’m sorry, I usually try and find the best that I can out of a game and allow it to succeed or fail on its own merits, but every other review you’ve seen by now are correct. The gameplay in this game sucks! You float, not run. The AI is dumb as hell till it decides to be cheap and kill you suddenly for no reason (hitbox detection is worse than Hanzo’s arrows from Overwatch). The guns feel like they are pop guns instead of real guns with proper impact. The offline mode is the same shit over and over with no real variation at all. Then the online mode, if you can get a game going, is completely unbalanced and just the same thing as the offline mode, just with actual people to share in the boredom.

Audio

You’d figure that with 20 years of Resident Evil music to draw from that there would be something along the lines of classic RE tunes to set some sort of tone. NOPE! You just have silence with some generic muted sounds from a gun being fired or groans from the zombies… If you hit them enough to get that one line of groaning from the AI. I wish there was something positive to say about the sound, but there’s nothing here to talk about. CAPCOM, do you even music!?

Replay Value

None!

Honestly, this is worse than playing a Call of Duty game. It’s near impossible to get an online game going at launch… AT LAUNCH!! At a time where everyone would be playing the game, there was NO ONE ONLINE!! Even fellow reviewers, people I know got a copy of the game from the same source as me, those people were not online. So instead I was left to play the single player experience of collecting DNA samples; where I was killed time and time again by AI zombies which would be able to hit me from over 2 body lengths away!

You think there would be something worth doing in the game and that I would be able to derive some sort of entertainment out of it due to it being a Resident Evil game. I even got enjoyment out of Operation Raccoon City, which held the title of worst Resident Evil cash-in ever. But nope, this game makes Operation Raccoon City look like some sort of masterpiece. At least ORC has Lickers, Nemesis and other Resident Evil monsters in it for variety.

I know this reads like a very short review, but the game itself is just as short. Most players can get bored with the “content” within 10 minutes of playing the game. Even if you try and drag yourself through the extremely repetitive single-player mode, you might clock in 3 hours total. but since that mode is time-based, some speedrunners would be able to do it in under an hour.

Umbrella Corps is the type of game that you would expect to get for free through Steam or PlayStation Plus, it’s not something that you would pay $30 for. I love Resident Evil and I’m usually willing to forgive CAPCOM for making cash-in titles for the most part, but there is no way I can recommend anyone including hardcore Resident Evil collectors give this game a try.

AVOID LIKE THE T-VIRUS!!