It's quaint.

Dead multiplayer games are always fascinating, because so few of them ever make preparations for the end. There isn't much in the way of other media that exists on a timer the way that most multiplayer games do. Books will go out of print, movies will leave theaters, pay-per-view events wrap up at the end of the night — but there are usually still ways to experience them how the creators more-or-less intended long after they've concluded. This is not the case when you're the only person on Steam playing a game that relies on signing up for a service that technically still exists but hasn't seen any official updates in two years, and has been abandoned on this game for eight. When I played Umbrella Corps, there was nobody else online. Not a soul. Zero other players, with no open matches, and no signs of life anywhere the day before or the day after. It was more-or-less dead on arrival, but there were at least some people playing this back in 2016. Maybe they're all on console. Who knows. Who cares, is the more important question.

Slop like this doesn't really get made anymore. Not in this style, at least. A $29.99 (at launch) release of what's clearly a B-team of developers being tasked with shipping any product to get their feet wet with an established IP doesn't happen in a world where worse mobile games are raking in the billions. Umbrella Corps, made today, would be a free-to-play gacha made primarily for your cellphone. The core mechanics of the single player would be broadly the same, they'd strip out the PvP multiplayer mode, and they'd make it so that you have to spend premium currency to roll for a six-star Jill Valentine from Resident Evil 5. You'd get a battle pass, too. I'm not saying this as a "games these days suck" spiel, because this also sucks ass, but it's more a general observation of where shovelware trends have gone. I doubt anyone at Capcom had any serious faith in this, and it ought to be examined as the internal-asset-flip, first-time developer project that it is, rather than any serious attempt at making something that people would enjoy.

Since the multiplayer no longer exists, the only thing really left to review is the tacked-on single player. Each mission is comprised of a combination of one of three game types; you kill a set number of zombies and pick up an item they drop, you hold a specific point on the map for about ten seconds, or you collect five briefcases. They get old fast. They're not particularly interesting, and they're not particularly fun.

The specter of the multiplayer still haunts Umbrella Corps. Being based off a core of getting into a gunfight, dying, respawning, and doing it all again, the single-player game mode features a ton of redundant mechanics (such as peeking through doors or taking zombie shields) and kills the player quickly. A zombie smacking you twice is really all it takes to make you restart a mission, and getting one of them to drop a green herb on death seems to be entirely luck-based. Crows will swarm you, dogs will rush you down far faster than you can run, and most of your player verbs are designed around using them against other humans and not against the horde. It's clearly cobbled together and pushed out the door in the hopes that there would be something for players to come back to long after the game's demise. It isn't much, but it does manage to be something.

The most interesting thing about this is how ephemeral it feels. It's like playing through a memory that someone had. I think if you consumed a lot of Resident Evil media before you died, this is what would flash before your eyes just before the lights went out for good. It's a hodge-podge of all the different games mashed together into a vague blob and dumped on the market, because leaving this practice project to rot on a hard drive somewhere would be leaving money on the table. Hey, at least it got the creators some credits. Not any prestigious credits, by any means, but we've all got to start somewhere. Having Capcom's brand on your resume is a decent place to start a career from.

Aiming down sights brings up an overlay of another character pointing a gun in first-person. If you toggle it quickly enough, you can see your character both in third-person and first-person at the same time.