Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles takes players on a nostalgia-fueled ride through the early Resident Evil games, revisiting iconic locations and characters from the series. This on-rails shooter swaps the survival horror elements for fast-paced action, rewarding sharp aim and quick reflexes. While the story retellings can feel abridged, the game offers unlockable content and cooperative play, making it a fun diversion for Resident Evil fans. However, the lack of exploration and repetitive level design may hinder enjoyment for newcomers to the franchise.

This game is definitely no masterpiece. That said, it's about as good as it could be for a home lightgun shooter. Its representation of different memorable moments from the core games is aesthetically faithful; this is particularly impressive since it is mostly translating lovingly crafted 2d backgrounds into fully 3d environments. Gameplay-wise, it has some consistency problems when it comes to difficulty. Some enemies are just way, way too spongey. Most of the boss fights, however, are a treat, though it'd be nice if more of them felt more puzzley and less like rote endurance tests.

Last note - The reused score pieces from the original games are obviously top-notch, but almost all of the new music is awful. There is this one funky track in particular that just feels wildly out of place -- I get that it's a fun co-op shooter but even Carn-Evil felt spookier than this does most of the time.

I don’t have a ton to say about this game. It’s a relatively fun light gun shooter with Resident Evil theming. Game contains 4 different scenarios: abridged versions of RE1 (2002) and RE0, a very strange faux retelling of RE3 and an original story “Umbrella’s End” that involves Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine giving the killing blow to Umbrella by leading a raid on one of their last facilities. These scenarios are narratively linked in a fun way. They’re all set up as Albert Wesker studying and recounting reports that Umbrella compiled on all of these events. The game also contains bonus missions related to these scenarios that show events not featured in the original games like how Wesker escaped the Arklay facility, what Rebecca was doing in the Arklay mansion before everyone else arrived, how Ada Wong escaped Raccoon City after the events of RE2. None of these added scenarios contribute a ton of new information (probably a good thing) but they’re generally fun levels to play through and can feature some nice character moments like with Rebecca’s added RE1 scenarios.

Don’t have any big complaints about the light gun gameplay. It can be a fun challenge and was entertaining throughout my play through. I even enjoyed going back through a few of the levels to get better scores.

My favorite thing about this game as a fan of the RE series was definitely getting to revisit the nicely recreated locations from RE1 and RE0 from a first person perspective. I would add RE3 to this but this game’s RE3 scenario doesn’t feature any iconic locations from that game except the police station and doesn’t follow the plot of RE3 like the other games do with RE1 and RE0. Unsure why this happened but feels like this scenario got rushed for whatever reason and is definitely kind of disappointing given how much I like RE3.

The retelling of the stories of the games featured is also a little bit disappointing due to how little time gets spent on each game. There are only 3 main levels per game featured so there’s just not enough time to go through all the memorable moments and plot points from those games. For comparison the Darkside Chronicles - the other RE light gun game for the Wii features retellings of RE2 and Code Veronica and dedicates 8 surprisingly long levels to each of them which allows for the space to have a condensed but complete retelling of these stories.

Despite its flaws and the things I wish it did differently this is still a fun light gun game, which is all it really needs to be, and I overall enjoyed my time with it.

Not a horrible game, but not one I'd jump to play again anytime soon, since the game has quite a few glaring flaws, such as: the music being incredibly forgettable - shocking for RE, extremely jarring and poor voice acting for the most part (they butchered my girl Rebecca), unbalanced enemy attack damage and health, and being weak and extremely short retellings of RE0, RE[make] and RE3 to work for 2-player, two of which being beloved entries into the franchise and RE0 being the newest "fixed camera" styled entry. Some mechanics, like the herbs are used weirdly, only healing you up when on screen instead of being stashed like any other RE game and ammo drops being for a specific gun rather than the one you equipped, negating the purpose of the weapon select screen.
What the game does well on however is its new stories like the Fall of Umbrella and the various "backstory" levels and missions, obviously being the main selling point of this game, giving extra content for the games mentioned before (and RE2) which is worth it in my opinion. The backstory missions aren't multiplayer on a first playthrough, so this game isn't too friendly to 2-players, despite making accomodations in the stories to fit them.
Overall, I'd recommend and rather play Darkside Chronicles over Umbrella, since that has better voice acting, story retellings and less infuriating and problematic areas.

Finally one of these Resident Evil lightgun games is an on-rails arcade shooter. I really wish I could have played this as intended on the Wii, but I think I made do with an emulator + mouse & keyboard. What you get here is a retelling of RE Zero, RE1, and RE3, each with additional scenarios showing untold stories of those games. Wesker escaping the mansion before it explodes, Ada escaping Raccoon City before it explodes, Rebecca's actions bridging Zero and RE1. It's some nice bonus stories because the retellings are pretty paired down.
The most egregious is RE3's levels which don't actually recreate any environments from 3 and instead reuse areas wholly from the Outbreak games, and not even the levels in Outbreak that are sourced from RE3. It's a version of RE3 where the game ends at the Police Department and Nemesis only shows up at the very end and sounds like a robot. Booooo.
There's a secret bonus campaign showing Umbrella's final days as Chris and Jill assault their final fortress in Russia. It's at this point that the game throws every non-zombie enemy in fat waves at you. I am no longer scared of hunter or lickers because this game had me slay 20 each just to walk down a hallway. They even reuse the bat boss from RE0.
There's a new Umbrella executive, Colonel Vladimir, who likes to lick knives. He's allegedly Wesker's nemesis in the company and works alongside the Red Queen AI, which I've been told is a character from the movies?
It was at this point that I was glad this was the end of Umbrella because they're no longer compelling villains. They were so much more threatening when they were a cold corporation looking to make a buck with dark experiments, but so much backstory has been laid upon them, with so many insane researchers and soldiers, that they're now a weird hybrid of eugenicists, PMC, intelligence agency, cult, and leech wizards.
As a lightgun game Umbrella Chronicles is fun. Your pistol has unlimited ammo, but you can scour the surroundings for additional weapons and heals, usually by destroying furniture. All the environments are destructible and it's oddly satisfying to blow up these familiar locations. Weapons are upgradable with the points you earn from ranks and eventually you can get every weapons with unlimited ammo.
Boss fights are annoying because they're based around targeting weakpoints and the camera just won't stay still on them for you to do any meaningful damage. The Plant 42 fight is especially awful.
If there's a standout mission it's the Umbrella Chronicles take on the 4th Survivor mission from RE2. Here Hunk's bloody escape from the RPD is overlayed with radio broadcasts from the desperate and dying citizens of Raccoon City.
If I wasn't so nostalgic for lightgun shooters I'd probably be harsher on it.

Despite the developers clearly being on a tight budget, I had a lot of fun with this game. As someone who enjoys playing these types of games in co-op, I was disappointed by the single-player campaigns. However, the game does a commendable job of adapting the events from the original games, which impressed me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the RE Zero scenario presented here is the best way to experience Rebecca and Billy's story, considering that the original game itself isn't very good.

Fun game! But not really a true resident evil experience

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is a first person, on the rail’s shooter, light shooter arcade game for the Wii that tells a non-canon recap of the original Resident Evil 0, The Resident Evil 1 GameCube Remake and the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. It also lets us play side stories and mission that took place in between these games and a full extra story mode about the downfall of umbrella at the end, which all of those extra stories are considered canon, so before the new “RE2 Remake style REmake” universe started that currently as of the time of writing this includes RE2, RE3, RE4, RE7 and RE8. So, playing these before those came out was a great way to experience the full story in a cinematic way and get extra stories that happen in the universe on the side and although the missions that remake the events of 1,0 and 3 aren’t considered canon they still are a great way to see the old games story without having to buy an old console, of course now you can just download the originals on pc or like I said these don’t really retell the story well anymore considering these games have been getting remakes that seem to fit into their own universe anyways its still great fun to play these if you are into arcade on the rail shooters or just simply want to see these bonus side stories. As on the rails shooter there is no puzzle solving or anything like that, as the player you go along for the ride and see everything from your characters perspectives as they rush though the retold levels of the classic games and shoot at whatever comes on screen. The monsters are mostly all classic versions of creatures from the older games with some new characters and enemies in the bonus missions and the Umbrellas End story is an entirely original story about umbrellas downfall. You have an infinite ammo basic pistol and a weapon wheel of regular guns from the series that require ammo that you can get by aiming over items on screen and collecting them as they come up. The environments are also breakable and allow for you to find hidden objects and healing items. This game can be a bit frustrating towards the end especially if you are playing it alone, so I suggest playing it with a friend, it’s a lot more fun. The way they retell the stories of the original games is pretty spot on most of the time but also has moments where they go off the rails so to speak and do their own thing, but the general story is pretty accurate. One minor thing that irked me was the RE1 remake story in this game just ignores Barry for some dumb reason and doesn’t mention or show him ever even though he’s supposed to be there, and I couldn’t tell you why. I also wasn’t a huge fan of how they told RE3s old story and that’s more of what I’m talking about when I say it goes “off the rails” but again as a shooter game whatever its fun, I’m pretty sure the new universe they are making in the Remakes are what’s canon now anyways. The bonus stories were really cool, and I wish Umbrellas End was its own game but that will probably never happen and as fun as it is obviously the real resident evil games especially a lot of the remakes are much more fun and worth the time but I do wish this game would get a remastered port or a remake or something because I did enjoy it and if you are a new comer and want to experience it unless you have a Wii or a PS3 you probably won’t be able to experience this, though I’m sure it’s probably playable on a PC with the right emulators but I’d much rather get a remastered port for the switch or something. This game did get a sequel called “The Dark Side Chronicles” and I will go over that one next. Overall if you like Resident Evil, on the rail arcade shooters or just have a Wii and wanna experience something new I do highly recommend this game its just not a true survival horror game it’s a fun action shooter like something you’d see at a Dave n Buster or round 1 machine but on a disc.
7.5/10