Oh, and did I mention that Umbrella Corps has a completely superfluous cover mechanic? That’s right, you can stick to just about any surface and there are intrusive, obnoxious HUD indicators constantly reminding you of this with flashing blue arrows and overlays. Regardless of mode, every round degenerates into six super-fast Umbrella mercenaries sprinting back and forth inside a tiny killbox, stumbling over zombies and killing each other in the cheapest, fastest way possible. Couple that with players’ incredibly fast movement speed-crouched or standing-and you can get from one side of a map to the other in a handful of seconds. Three minutes might not seem like much time but the maps are incredibly cramped and tiny. Each round randomly selects one of the five game modes in Umbrella Corps, which range from team deathmatch to king of the kill, and DNA, which has both teams hunting super zombies. The primary matches consist of three rounds, each one lasting three minutes. These disparate and seemingly conflicting gameplay elements really start to drag down the experience when you take Umbrella Corps online. A shove ability to push back crowds would have been far more useful than a charge attack. You can wade into a crowd of zombies and start swinging but you’re going to get torn to shreds in short order. The problem is that your character takes several seconds to swing the Brainer and recover their balance afterward. For some reason you can charge it up and set it on fire, when it’s essentially an insta-kill whether you charge it or not, so it’s great for killing individual zombies and enemy players that you happen to sneak up on. The Brainer would be a pretty cool melee weapon if, again, it were balanced. The cheap deaths are most annoying when it comes to the game’s strangely over-and-underpowered melee weapon, the Brainer, a giant metal hook that the game persistently encourages you to use. Most of my deaths-by-zombie can be attributed to the game’s bizarrely close over-the-shoulder viewing angle and cramped FOV. Ironically though, the undead seem to have terrible eyesight-unless they have perfect line of sight or you stumble right into them, the zombies are fairly oblivious to your presence. And since you can never completely clear out a map, you’re constantly on the lookout for the next cheap death coming from wandering hordes of zombies. The undead will kill you in just a couple hits, which makes it frustratingly easy to get surrounded, mobbed, or even pecked to death by zombie crows in the outdoor maps. This might seem like a cool way for Resident Evil to show off its heritage in a team multiplayer shooter but the implementation is wildly unbalanced. The zombies are the one novel element in the game in single and multiplayer, every map is crawling with undead ghouls, animals and mutants that respawn constantly. Basically you’ll be killing zombies in every level, collecting DNA samples and trying to stay alive, while testing out various weapons and combat moves.
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In reality it’s a small and highly repetitive series of missions that give you the lay of the game’s seven tiny maps and shows you the ropes of the quirky gameplay. Umbrella Corps has what can graciously be called a single player mode.
The result is a very action-heavy game that tries to integrate elements of the series’ horror roots but falls completely flat under its own incompetence. The problem is that Umbrella Corps embraces the full-on action gameplay that has plagued the series since RE5 and was exacerbated in RE6 to the point of comedy.
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A Resident Evil multiplayer game isn’t necessarily a bad idea of course the Resident Evil Outbreak games back on the PS2 developed a small but dedicated fanbase. Ostensibly, Umbrella Corps is a 3-vs-3 team multiplayer shooter. I’m not going to sugarcoat this festering zombie corpse Umbrella Corps is just plain bad, so bad in fact that I’m left wondering what the heck Capcom even wanted it to be. Hopefully Umbrella Corps, a competitive online shooter and the most recent spinoff in the long and storied series, is the last of the franchise’s growing pains. I have a bit more optimism than I used to after seeing the Resident Evil 7 reveal at E3, and it feels like Capcom finally has a unified direction to put the series back on track. I really hope Capcom know what they’re going with the Resident Evil series.