The most important treasure gained in any retrospective is one of perspective. You get the grasp of how many different ways an IP can be twisted to fit certain molds. Resident Evil has seen spin-offs that are light gun games, Gameboy Color Zelda-style adventures, early experiments in online cooperative play, and now this: an attempt to fit the brand in to an e-sports shooter shaped hole.
Another important aspect of perspective is it allows you to truly see where just how low a franchise’s quality can get. Resident Evil Survivor is bad, but at least the voice acting and plot are hilarious. Operation Raccoon City is bad, but at least I see people that defend it and make fan art of its characters. Resident Evil 5 is bad, but at least Chris Redfield punches a boulder.
Umbrella Corps is bad without qualification. There is no reason to play this unless you’re me. The online component is dead which means you’re left with a bevy of single-player missions. There is no curiosity to be sated by seeking out this forgotten title.
The premise of this game is that, in the wake of RE5, other pharmaceutical companies are sending their own mercenaries into hotzones to collect data on T-virus, las plaga, and ourobouros. The multiplayer matches have the zombies as more of an environmental hazard, as they won’t harass you unless provoked or the enemy team sabotages your zombie stealth gadget. It is blatantly wanting to be a tactical shooter like Rainbow 6, with the level of movement and maps that encourage finding hidey-holes. If it had more than a year’s development time maybe it could have had a niche market like Valve’s Evolve.
The single-player mode drops you into these multiplayer maps and just has you fight the zombies while doing the same objectives from the multiplayer mode. There is a thin thread of narrative of you playing a character who is a clone/son/successor to Hunk being put through combat trials to test new zombie killing weapons. It is vaguely implied that the company you work for is being run by a returned Wesker. Or maybe it's a clone of Wesker. It may also be Krauser, or Saddler, or Spencer. It doesn’t matter, I learned too late that this game is no longer canon.
I won’t mince words. This game sucks. This game really sucks. This game sucks big, floppy, venereal diseased dicks bathed in the river of excrement from the eighth Circle of Hell. I rarely wish true ill on anyone, but I hope that each member of this game’s development team watches at least a single loved one melt before their eyes. Who the fuck decided that you can only take 3 hits before dying in maps that spawn five dogs that can swarm you in seconds? Who THE FUCK decided that wasn’t enough and each map also needed a super zombie that can one shot you with ridiculous hitboxes and requires multiple clips to kill? Why do enemies keep spawning behind me with no tells? Why do I have to keep doing missions with just one clip of ammo?
Countless times I was so near to victory, when suddenly I was ganked by a zombie that went 0 to 60 after spotting me across the map. Countless times I was in a good spot when a crow swooped from the heavens and pecked out half my health bar. I got so mad that I bit into my thumb and drew blood. No game has drawn the iron price from me. I one-hundred percented this game, even the optional objectives, so that it would hold no future power over me.
Much like how Resident Evil 1 Remake was one of the best games I’ve played, Umbrella Corps is one of the worst. It would not improve on an experience of me holding a controller and staring at a blank screen for six hours.

Wow, guys.

I mean really.

So many shitty games that every one hates strike a sort of enthusiasm in me. I love Final Fantasy XIII the way many love VII. I would replay Kane & Lynch 2 any day of the week. I went in expecting a bit of intrigue here, around some shitty arcadey design.

What is here is a mobile game, I guess. The map design isn't....half bad, and the skeletally structured singleplayer is at least playable, but....god some of those maps. The RE4 village specifically- a fucking nightmare to play on, in such a way I legitimately don't know if I will be able to associate the original village with any sort of warm memories again. When I compare this to mobile game design, I mean it. If this had been a simple PvP port of RE6's combat, that would have been fine. Instead, this is a unity engine remake of that same shit, and it lacks any of the visual style and complexity that would have had.

Fuck this.

Seems like every now and then someone tries their hand at throwing AI zombies into the middle of a competitive multiplayer shooter. It’s an enormously intriguing idea, but so far nobody has been able to pull it off successfully due to primarily being the brainchildren of small studios with low budgets and no marketing. As a result, you’ve likely only ever discovered these titles long after the minuscule playerbases they were maybe able to establish dried up while doing some dumpster diving on Steam.

What better way then to make this compelling concept finally take off than by having a big, well-established property like Resident Evil take a stab at it? Capcom has been weirdly determined to wring a PvP experience out of the property as of late, after all. Showing yet again the studio’s baffling ignorance in regards to what type of outings the fanbase is actually interested in. Unfortunately, their take is just as cheap and fundamentally flawed as the janky, schlock shovelware it takes inspiration from. Which is why its servers are just as empty. 

I was able to find a grand total of 1 single match in time with this disaster, and on top of the lobby not being full, an embarrassing fact for a game that’s a mere 3v3, my word was it no fun. The shockingly subpar graphics, blisteringly fast movement (the speed at which you can travel while prone is unintentional comedic gold), horrendous UI that doesn’t even effectively convey your health, and maps cluttered with crap can make it difficult to decipher what’s going on in the heat of the moment leading to frustrating deaths followed by irritatingly lengthy respawn times. Consequently, the aiming feels loose and unwieldy, and the features that should have helped with this such as iron sights and cover prove detrimental by turning you into a more stationary target.

The zombies aren’t even put to good use. Each player is sporting some kind of transmitter backpack that basically turns all the creatures into window dressing by causing them to ignore everyone unless their device is destroyed. Now, this no doubt sounds as if it would create an interesting way to potentially kill members of the other team, but the TTK is so quick you’ll usually end up killing opponents by yourself anyways while trying to target that specific point on their backs. Mix that in with the incredibly limited number of modes that simply boil down to whether you want respawns in a round and rotating objectives or not, and you’re left with a particularly dreadful multiplayer offering. Easily among the worst I’ve personally ever had the displeasure of playing, however briefly that was.

Nobody is online anyhow though, so should you inexplicably decide to pick this up the single-player portion will be where you’ll be spending the majority of your time. Believe it or not, it might legitimately be worse. You essentially get a string of 24 or so missions not connected by any story that basically act as bot battles with no bots to simulate human opposition. It’s strictly you, the zombies, and not an undead repellent piece of technology in sight. It starts off pretty boring as the basic rotting adversaries present little resistance, but rapidly grows frustrating as new monster types are introduced that absorb more damage. The whole thing devolves into a mess of getting swarmed and attacked from all sides in the cramped environments by bullet sponges. I ultimately couldn’t bring myself to finish it. The reward of a handful of lame cosmetic patches for my avatar and a silver completion trophy weren’t enough motivation for me to continue suffering through to the final stages.

I hope that one day a developer will be able to deliver on the massive potential the prospect of engaging in multiplayer matches while AI versions of the reanimated dead roam the maps has. Sadly, what on paper looked to be the most promising attempt to date may instead crushingly be the poorest. At least with the other efforts out there their failures can be attributed to modest origins. Umbrella Corps however, comes from one of the biggest companies and has ties to arguably the most popular survival-horror series in the entire industry. For it to be this haphazard, slapdash, and altogether inept is nowhere near as forgivable. The most egregious, offensive part of all? Capcom still has the audacity to charge the morbidly curious $19.99 for entry. Nah, screw that.

3/10

I don't usually give games ratings this low - a half-star always feels exaggerated in my opinion and very few games deserve to be rated with so much scorn. Umbrella Corps might not be the most frustrating game I've ever played, nor the most broken game I've ever played, nor the most buggy game I've ever played (though it certainly features strongly in each category) but it certainly might be among the laziest, especially in the AAA sphere. While Capcom's recent push for Resident Evil to enter the online multiplayer sphere might seem strange, they've done it before and to great success, with their Resident Evil Outbreak games on the PlayStation 2 both being shining examples of what an RE multiplayer experience can be in the right hands.

Umbrella Corp is not that experience. It's lazy, under-budgeted, lacking in content, poorly designed, and artistically devoid, and for these reasons, its initial player base (which was relatively small for a AAA game, even at launch) has long since abandoned it in favor of better tactical third-person shooters. Every aspect of the game design feels fundamentally poorly thought out, and nothing stands out to me as even acceptable. Movement feels awful, as the player always feels like they're essentially gliding around on ice (without slipping) because there's zero bounce or momentum to player movement. There's zero delay, the player just immediately begins moving and immediately stops and this makes Umbrella Corps feel like a mobile game that I hooked a keyboard and mouse to. The shotgun is unbelievably overpowered in smaller maps (which is most of what Umbrella Corps' maps are) and the game can't even make use of its most conceptually interesting mechanics. Team-neutral zombies within a PvP shooter sounds incredibly cool but this mechanic doesn't even matter because each player comes equipped with a zombie jammer, which makes you practically invisible to them and them nothing more than environmental decoration, almost. The idea is to destroy your opponent's jammer so they'll be attacked and killed by zombies, but the time-to-kill in this game is so unbelievably high that if you destroy the jammer, you typically end up killing your opponent as well, rendering the entire concept that made Umbrella Corps stand out entirely superfluous. Even disregarding all of this, combat just feels terrible, with poorly-placed hitboxes and some of the most busted melee combat I've seen in a long time. The brainer might seem cool in concept, but when engaging another player also wielding a brainer it feels almost like random chance which one gets to lodge the pick into the other's skull. The game features so little in the way of game modes, with only three game modes, two of which are busted beyond belief and were so easy for my friends and I to cheese. The game's FOV is so uncomfortably close with no options to adjust (and no one cares enough about the game to mod it) We were even somehow able to get the game to load us into a PvP round with all of us on the same team...with zero objectives since there were no enemies. It's a true testament to Umbrella Corps' quality as a multiplayer experience.

Umbrella Corps might stink royally as a multiplayer TPS, but even if you're interested in the game, you'd most likely struggle to find players unless you got some of your friends on board like I did. Lucky, or perhaps unlucky for you, the game does have a singleplayer campaign to some extent, though one that consists of doing the same basic tasks over and over again in the multiplayer maps, lacking any meaningful narrative or gameplay progression. Whether it be collecting the data samples, or securing the briefcases, Umbrella Corps's campaign is as short as it is repetitive. After about 12 levels, I tapped out realizing that if it hadn't changed at all by this point, it most likely would not be changing anytime soon. Naturally, this mode is PvE and is simultaneously too easy and too frustrating. While for the most part, gunning down zombies and ganados is fairly simple, things get frustrating very quickly when enemies swarm you all at once with no regard for intelligent AI design, and the crows have to be among Resident Evil's most annoying enemies, as they run right up to you and mercilessly peck you to death while dodging right out of your range of fire. Most of the design faults with the multiplayer carry over here, as the only real difference are the objectives and which enemies you're facing. The only somewhat interesting thing is that the game implies that Albert Wesker, or at least a clone of him, is still alive. Why Capcom decided to shove such an important tease in Umbrella Corps of all things is very bizarre.

Umbrella Corps was made on a shoestring budget and this is most easily reflected in its presentation. While there are some relatively appealing aspects of the art direction on occasion (for example I enjoyed some of the set design in the Tricell HQ), the game could easily pass for a mobile game. The game's asset quality is never up to par, with low-resolution textures pitifully attempting to overcome their lack of quality with overaggressive normalmaps, making patches of hay in RE4's village map look rough and plastic. The game also features god-awful lighting, with RE2's Raccoon City and RE6's China being bathed in this bright red light with the most excessive bloom I've seen in a long time, making these maps look exceptionally flat. The game's lack of anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering also makes the game look cheap, turning moving scenes into a shimmering mess and far-off textures into blurry pixels. While I'm aware both can easily be forced with your video card's control panel, this is not something anyone should have to do in 2016. Graphical fidelity is all over the place, with RE4's village map having been remade from scratch in Unity, but RE5's village using assets and textures ripped right out of MT Framework means that the game can look like it's from two entirely different console generations at times. Umbrella Corps also has some of the worst skyboxes I've ever seen in a game, being so close to the player that you can easily observe the houses made from four polygons each.

I'm also not a fan of the soundtrack, it's primarily electronic, dubstep, and techno which while not inherently bad never stood out to me. It blended into the background but not in the way you'd want ambient music to, but in the way that boring, uninteresting music would. It never makes the game feel atmospheric, it never gets my pulse pounding and ready for action, and it isn't even all that fun to listen to on its own.

Umbrella Corps will go down in history as one of Capcom's greatest failures. While they've made some of the most highly regarded, influential games of all time, they've also made some extremely high-profile flops and I'm sad to say that Umbrella Corps is among the worst. With its lack of content, broken gameplay, pitiful campaign, unflattering visuals, boring soundtrack, and most importantly dead player base, this should be of interest to absolutely no one.

This is a RE game that should have never happened. Yes, it's a spinoff so it technically doesn't have to please or wow every RE fan out there but the game fails to deliver any sort of fun and fan service.

The tactical shooter idea is never developed throughout the different levels. Level design is below average and the camera is way too close to the player and makes gameplay confusing.

If you're a hardcore RE fan, this is still worth checking out for the 'laughably bad' factor.

The multiplayer is completely dead, which is really sad considering this game had a ton of potential. There are so many mechanics in this game that nobody ever got to discover. The singleplayer is the only thing left nowadays, and it is pretty terrible. Its kind of a mercenaries mode with really unbalanced difficulty and it becomes frustrating quickly.

Just imagine this game had been released as a f2p and in a less buggy state? We will never get anything close to that though, since capcom has completely given up on multiplayer RE games.

The Re game no one asked for and didn’t need but we got…

You know when you have a video game fever dream that you are playing resident evil 4 and your character or YOU are running around the village being chased by genados but everything looks weird and off. Instead of doing the general thing as Leon you are running around at a slow but also fast speed and all the environments look familiar but not quite the same, maybe your objective is some weird fetish quest where you are looking for samples. No matter what guns you use they all seem ineffective against common enemies and when you try to hit enemies with a weird melee weapon that doesn’t make sense to even have in this scenario, it swings slow and feels hard to move but as soon as it touches an enemy they turn into a pile of meat. All you can really do is keep moving because if you stop the enemies will get you and you’ll instantly wake up (Die)? Well, that’s what it’s like playing Umbrella Corps. You move at unnatural speeds through similar but off-putting environments similar to ones you’ve played in resident evil games, but your objective is to collect infected DNA samples. The guns are useless and the only weapon that seems to work is this weird pickaxe weapon that has a terrible animation but instant kills enemies and turns them into meat. YES, this is an example of a company abusing one of its most popular Ips for the sake of money.

Gameplay: Umbrella Turds ahh I mean Corps gameplay is a 3rd person cover based shooter where you have a huge arsenal of cool guns that don’t really work at all on enemies, and you hold guns like the pistol with one hand right up next to the side of your head, behind your head in an uncomfortable and awkward position to shoot from (serious like what the hell is up with the way you hold some of the guns in this game). Your best weapon is this goofy oversized ice pic axe that swings super slow in the regular animation attack, but the quick melee is overpowered, and one hits almost all enemies. When an enemy dies, they turn into a pile of meat on the floor and drop a sample. There are also samples scattered around the map and your only object is to COLLECT THE INFACTED DNA SAMPLES as you get swarmed by overpowered and fast enemies that can easily kill you in a couple hits. All of the maps you go to are maps from previous resident evil games and all the enemies are stupid versions of real ones. Like the Dummy plagas you fight in the RE4 village. I guess this is capcoms excuse for why the AI in this game is so dumb. Like the AI is crazy dumb and enemies will go from stupid and crazy slow to inconsistently crazy fast and aggressive. Speaking of movement speed your movement is also crazy fast even laying down you move like almost the same speed as you do stand up, it all comes off as crazy unfinished and uncomfortably unnatural. The whole story mode has no cutscenes and is just notes in-between missions that look like they were written by an 8-year-old and between that and going from location to location collecting the same samples fighting either bad zombie enemies with 1 super zombie, zombie dogs and birds or Dummy plaga enemies from 4 and 5 that’s about all we get for story mode. The multiplayer was dead on launch, so I was only able to play a few games but basically, it’s the same thing except you have other umbrella mercs running around trying to kill you and the best way to kill anything or anyone is with the pic axe. There is a tactical cover system in this game that doesn’t work great with zombie enemies but is alright in multiplayer for some reason they also included that feature in the main story even though it doesn’t help at all in single player.

Graphics, Music & voice acting: The graphics for this game are alright, not the worst I’ve seen but not the best either. The merc Characters you play as look great, but some enemies and areas look like absolute sht, as for the music I don’t really remember any so I’m sure what’s there was just bare minimum background noise for the game and nothing memorable. The voice acting… well there hardly is any at all in this game. The character you play as just repeats the same 3 lines over and over again. “Sample obtained” “This one’s mine” and “There it is” and in multiplayer you hear random people say shit like yeah mission complete over the radio or whatever. I guess a highlight of this game is the fact that you sometimes hear Wesker over the radio say stuff like “that was satisfactory” to you but that’s about it.

Story/ Spoilers, I guess? There isn’t much to spoil and if anything, I’m doing you a favor: Basically you play as some random Merc named like A-7 or some sht and work for a guy named Abraham Jackson (and your character “hates his stupid nose”) and he tells a story in notes how he is sent to these walled off and abandoned locations from resident evils past to kill whatever infected remains there and obtain samples. You visit what’s left of the arctic lab from Code Veronica, The Village from RE4 and Kjuju from RE5 after that high command wants to dispose of you so they throw you into training scenarios of Raccoon city and The RPD to try to kill you, I guess. (Yeah, this dumb corporation which I guess is supposed to be blue umbrella from RE7 made fake million dollar destroy raccoon city bio dome simulations with real zombies for the Mercs to train in and want to kill you with them for whatever reason.) lol yeah its like dumb Paul W Anderson sht. That’s pretty much the whole story, a lot of the original story elements were apparently cut from the game. The only cool thing about this game is the fact that it tries to imply Wesker’s return with his voice in multiplayer commanding you and the notes mentioning a blonde dude with sunglasses runs the company. This game takes place between 6 -7 so this would mean either Wesker has returned from the dead or was cloned and is running this company which appears to be Blue Umbrella since in re7 they were collecting samples, wore the same uniforms and have the same emblem. Capcom also said this game was canon to the mainline ones back when it launched but I’m sure its probably not canon anymore since it’s considered the absolute worse RE game and sold the worst. Wesker’s Voice actor has also said Capcom told him Wesker isn’t back but who knows because DC Douglass has since then been fired from the roll for spoiling Wesker’s look in the re4 remake. ANYWAYS, this game also had dumb DLCs that cost wayyyy more than they should have, like 15 US Dollars to play as main RE character skins (yes you have to play to play as people like Leon) and there is an overpriced color pallet for guns and armor that has colors like plastic blue and glossy red… I can’t imagine actually burning money on these. This game is absolute dogsht and there isn’t much more to say about it. It has bad unbalanced gameplay, a bad story, bad design, a dead multiplayer and minimal effort put into it.
Capcom Stop making dumb multiplayer games like this! None of these spin off Operation Raccoon City, Umbrella Corps, Resistance and now RE Verse games work. They all are unbalanced and pretty much die at launch. If you really want to cash in on the whole live service multiplayer thing that exists, these days just listen to the core fan base. People love traditional mercenaries’ mode, just make a dedicated mercenaries Co-op game like the one on the 3Ds but better with all the places and characters (INCLUDING LEON AND ADA, seriously that game had everyone except them for some ridiculous reason.) or Remake Resident Evil: Outbreak that’s the stuff people like and want.

Anyways 2/10 from me.