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.
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.