Es la primera vez que una franquicia como Resident Evil incursiona en una nueva modalidad de juego. The Umbrella Chronicles es el primer Rail Shooter de la saga de los muertos vivientes y nos cuenta los sucesos ocurridos entre el Resident Evil Zero y Nemesis (dejando a un lado la segunda parte) desde otra perspectiva, haciendo énfasis en elementos a los que no se les prestó mucha atención en el pasado. Es un juego que se siente muy bien, con un gameplay clásico de los juegos del género y una historia que ya es bastante conocida. Sus gráficas son buenas teniendo en cuenta la capacidad de la consola nipona y sus escenas cinemáticas harán que los seguidores se sientan complacidos. Es una buena opción para todos aquellos videojugadores que llegaron tarde a la industria y quieran conocer rápidamente la historia de una de sus mejores franquicias. Claro está, que para aquellos que cuenten con más tiempo, se recomienda jugar los originales, que, sin duda alguna, son mejores.

I'm a sucker for light gun shooters and while I still found it to be a moderately enjoyable experience overall, it's clear The Umbrella Chronicles could have been much more. When it's at its best, it manages to be not only enjoyable on its own but also a fun romp through Resident Evil nostalgia. At its worst though, it's padded, tedious, and frankly frustrating. The game doesn't have a continuous narrative, but rather multiple sub-scenarios with contained plots. The best of these is easily the Resident Evil Remake scenario, which is probably the most consistently well-designed of the bunch. Revisiting my favorite RE game in full 3D but being able to gun down every enemy that gave me trouble prior was both fun and exciting. Resident Evil Zero's scenario was no slouch either. While Zero was never exactly the most creative or exciting RE game, it's represented well here with great recreations of its locations and solid design. Umbrella's End, the only scenario with an original story is pretty solid as well, featuring a cool Russian location, increased difficulty, and a story that ties into future RE games (though admittedly not too well). All of this sounds pretty solid, and you'd be right, the game's shooting can be good fun and the variety of locations and playable characters means you won't get too bored easily. However, the game is a bit slower than your average light gun shooter, and I think it could have benefitted from being sped up a bit. The main problem with The Umbrella Chronicles is that at some point, developer Cavia just seemingly got lazy. Resident Evil 3's scenario isn't even an adaptation of the game it's supposedly based on. You never visit any of the locations from RE3 nor fight any of the unique enemies from it. Every enemy is taken from the other scenarios, and every map is ripped straight out of Resident Evil Outbreak borderline unchanged, you can't make that up. Nemesis, an antagonist so iconic and imposing that he was in the title of the original game, doesn't even show up until the last of the RE3 levels and you never see him go one-winged angel as he did in the original. All of the smaller mini-scenarios, while they fill in additional lore details that had previously gone unexplained in the mainline games, just reuse areas from the main scenarios and aren't worth playing.

These mini-scenarios do have a narrative line that does somewhat continue through them, however, featuring a new antagonist, Sergei Vladimir, who rivals Albert Wesker for control of the Umbrella Corporation. Sergei is unfortunately a very boring villain, encapsulating almost every evil Russian general trope that every piece of media since the 1980s has repeated ad nauseam. His motivations are to revive the TALOS project, yet another Tyrant offshoot whom he refers to as "beautiful" as all RE villains tend to do, and of course, mutates into a giant grotesque monster at the end. He's as par for the course as they come for the series and his villainy is constantly upstaged by Wesker's cool swagger, only further proving how uninteresting he is. Nevertheless, although The Umbrella Chronicles' original story isn't very entertaining, I will give props to Cavia for attempting to solve previously unanswered questions about certain events in the mainline series, which it does relatively well. It's nothing exceptional, but I can always appreciate fleshing out a pre-existing world in a matter that is consistent with the original works. The framing of each scenario as Wesker writing a report on past events is also rather cool.

I've always said that one of the parts of light gun shooters that appealed to me is that they tended to be rather flashy fun despite their shallow nature, and visually The Umbrella Chronicles mostly looks the part. The environments from RE0 and RE1R are lovingly recreated in full 3D with great accuracy if my memory serves me well. There is sufficient detail in these environments and I love the degree of destruction that the player can cause with their grenades, which makes it feel like your rather simple actions do affect the world around you, and is also just rather satisfying. Enemy models also look the part well enough, however, I am pretty sure most of them are ripped directly from their respective games. However, this is where the positives mostly end, and the rest of the game looks rather cheap. Character models animate rather stiffly, and while this isn't the biggest deal in the world considering the game is primarily in first-person, it looks rather awkward any time the game attempts any sort of cinematic cutscene. As I stated prior, the RE3 scenario quite directly reuses maps from Outbreak on the PlayStation 2, and while I'd argue Outbreak was one of the best-looking games on the platform, it was primarily played from a rather distant third-person perspective. When these maps are viewed up close, their weaknesses, such as absurdly low-resolution textures are revealed and therefore cannot match the fidelity offered by the rest of the game. The pre-rendered CGI cutscenes aren't very good either. While they may look decent in still frames, they animate rather awkwardly and the lip sync is always at least a little bit off. On the flip side, however, the game's soundtrack is more promising. While it does fall into pretty conventional RE territory, it's a very well-produced score that for the most part effectively underlines the mood and tone the game needs to meet. However, there were some points where I felt the music was simply too calm for the action on screen, such as "Raccoon's Destruction" which sounded more like something from a James Bond porn parody rather than Resident Evil.

Although this review seems predominantly negative, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is still a decent time in the right hands. If you're a fan of the series, the game offers quite a lot for you, such as nostalgic recreations of past locations, additional bits of lore that prior games left blank, and a decent amount of replayability as the game has quite a lot of unlockable memos which help expand upon the universe. However, if you're not a fan of the series, you may be turned off by the slower-paced gameplay, the inconsistent scenario quality, and the amount of padding the game can have at points. There are certainly better light gun games on the Wii, but this certainly isn't a bad one by any stretch of the imagination.

As a big RE fan, I had fun with Umbrella Chronicles since it provides a different view of story parts across other RE games and adds new segments and certain tie-ins that I personally didn't take them too seriously but had fun experiencing them.

For being an on-rail shooter type of game, it can be quite challenging with certain enemy having limited hitboxes. Trying to find collectibles within the levels can be fun since it makes you pay attention to objects in the background and the game can be fairly detailed.

This definitely gets my vote for other RE fans to give it a shot and experience different parts of other RE games in a new perspective and gameplay type.

Honestly I play so many light gun games on my PS3, at some point I should invest in that PS Move case that makes it into a little handgun (my birthday is next week if anyone is interested).

Honestly this is fun but this is the first time ever I've been actively distracted by a story in a LGG, why do they rewrite huge sections of the RE plot? Why did they do that to Nemesis? Is this canon? what's going on?? Nevertheless I'll be playing the sequel next, very curious to see what the story is as this kinda covers most of it.

Resident Evil is less known for their light-gun arcade games as these are held in public places that are niche hang out spots. The Wii with its remote and Zapper attachment is just begging to be used as a light-gun and many of these games followed and Capcom jumped on the bandwagon. Umbrella Chronicles is one of the more solid light-gun games on Wii, but it must be played co-op or you’re not going to have a good time.

The game has four chapters with each one following bits and pieces from Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3: Nemesis respectively with the final chapter being an exclusively unique section just for this game. Each chapter has three or four sub-chapters and a few side chapters that are shorter and feature an alternate perspective featuring Ada Wong, Albert Wesker, and one Umbrella operative Hunk. Story-wise, don’t expect to get a comprehensive telling of the Resident Evil series as pre-rendered cut-scenes are chopped up and it’s not very cohesive or easy to understand. This is more for people who played the older games before.

Outside of that the shooting itself is rather solid. There are over a dozen weapons in the game with your side pistol having unlimited ammo and various other guns like sub-machine, shotgun, rocket launchers, and hand-cannons making up the majority of the arsenal, but the ammo for these guns is extremely limited, and that’s the first downfall of this game. Why make an action game from survival horror and keep the ammo count low? The pistol does very little damage and just forget about beating a boss with it. Ammo is incredibly scarce and requires you to have a partner as some scenarios and waves just can’t be defeated with only the pistol. Hordes of enemies sometimes over a dozen will spawn in front of you and popping them with 8-10 shots each with a pistol is just not feasible. With a second player, it’s possible, but solo is not. After chapter 3 I had to resort to a partner because it just gets too hard and too demanding for one player.

There are a good variety of enemies in the game with some not appearing until the final chapter, and the bosses are all unique and incredibly challenging and require great reflexes and aim and actual skill. Bosses are recycled from previous games, but fighting them in a 3D environment is pretty awesome. Some bosses have multiple stages, but these repeat in a cycle and can even include quick time events that require button presses or a quick waggle. Quick time events are peppered throughout the game, and thankfully not abused, but they don’t appear on-screen long enough and the waggle ones won’t trigger unless you start waggling the second it appears on the screen. This can lead to frustrating deaths.

Speaking of deaths, if you find a health spray this acts as an extra life and can resurrect you on the spot, but without one, you start at the last checkpoint. There are herbs lying around for health, ammo, grenades, and barrels just begging to be blown up to take out large groups. This is one of the most difficult light-gun games I have ever played, and sadly it’s impossible to finish solo without having unlocked the infinite ammo. The first two chapters have a nice difficulty scale and it just ramps up way too hard on chapter 3 and 4. There’s also an issue with the game feeling too repetitive and not having enough variety like vehicle scenes similar to other light-gun games. It relies too much on just shooting the same enemies ad nauseum.

Let’s talk about production values. Capcom is never one to skimp on a Resident Evil game, usually, and while Umbrella Chronicles looks fine it shows it doesn’t push the Wii in the right direction. It looks like a GameCube game at best with muddy low-resolution textures, but somehow there’s still slowdown when too much is going on. It really could have looked better, even on the Wii as there are better-looking games on the system, but what’s here is fine. The menus are pretty ugly with not much going on and everything looks so blurry and low-res. I need to redact my GameCube comparison from earlier, it’s more like a Dreamcast port, to be honest.

Overall, Umbrella Chronicles is a decent light-gun game that requires a second player or you won’t get very far. The boss fights are bombastic and fun and each is unique, but the same enemies repeat over and over and the scenarios don’t change. You’re just running down hallways or open areas blasting enemies. The game goes on way longer than it needs to with each chapter taking about 30-45 minutes to complete if you include the bonus missions. There is a lack in variety when it comes to other stuff to do to make this game just more exciting to play. The extras aren’t worth unlocking as they require S ranks in each chapter, most of the time, and after finishing this game once there’s no real reason to go back.

Dull as dishwater and no fun to play.

The shooting sucks, and … that’s basically the whole game! It just feels bad. Your shots have no impact and there's next to no gore or dismemberment, despite, uh, the subject matter.

I guess there's some good stuff in here for big fans of RE lore (yikes) and it's fun to see some of the classic locales presented this way, but it was legitimately hard for me to stay awake through even an hour of this. (Doesn't help that it starts with a retelling of everyone's favorite thrill ride, RESIDENT EVIL 0.)

As a big fan of stone cold classic THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD 2, I know what a good zombie rail shooter looks like and have since the late '90s. Given the series' pedigree, this is a big and marginally tragic whiff.