Umbrella Corps (PlayStation 4)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): June 21, 2016
- Release Date (EU): June 21, 2016
- Release Date (JP): June 23, 2016
- Publisher: Capcom
- Developer: Capcom
- Genres: Third Person Shooter
- Also For: Computer
Game Features:
Review Approach:
Developed with the Unity Engine, Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps is a third person squad-based versus tactical shooter. Releasing to no hype whatsoever, from both Capcom and fans of the RE series, Umbrella Corps comes across as an early access game or beta, or something that should never have been released in its current state. Created in-house at Capcom's Osaka headquarters, Umbrella Corps feels like it was made by people that have never played a shooter before.
Priced at £25/$30, Umbrella Corps is almost a budget game, only it's still not worth the price of admission. The game only has 2 options from the launch menu (not including the tutorial), Online or The Experiment. Online is where the game is meant to be played via 3 vs 3 matches, and without 6 players in the lobby, a match won't even start. You can play One Life Match which is still 3 vs 3 but it's game over after a single death, or there is Multi-Mission, which is what I played the most as it has varying objectives each round, making it a bit more fun, and usually a round lasts longer than 60 seconds like it does in a One Life Match.
Upon playing a few rounds the first thing that becomes apparent is how small the maps are in Umbrella Corps, they are tiny. You can lay waste to other players in the village from Resi 4, the market from Resi 5, or the Police Station from Resi 2, but there are only a handful of maps altogether. This may sound great to fans of the Resident Evil series or anyone with a bit of nostalgia for certain entries, but once the game starts, it quickly becomes a scrappy mess as these maps from previous titles are just too small to have a 6 man battle on.
Players rank up by completing match objectives and scoring kills, unlocking more weapons and gear as you level up. Your arsenal can consist of assault rifles, shotguns, pistols and machine guns, which all function well and feel acceptable to shoot, however, you also have a Brainer. The Brainer is a crude axe melee weapon which can be charged up before usage to cause a 1 shot insta-kill on any enemy, triggering a brutal death animation. It also has insane range and tracking making it an easy weapon to rack up kills with. A lot of my matches ended up with 6 guys all running around with charged Brainers trying to nail each other, making any kind of shooting almost pointless.
Movement feels floaty and imprecise, and the field of view is terrible. By default the player character's avatar takes up a third of the screen and obscures the view to the left side with no option to switch to the right at will. So many times I got attacked from my blind spot while turning to the left and being greeted by a zombie's rotting gnashers. Bizarrely, when aiming, the game switches to a first person view but doesn't offer the sensitivity needed to control a weapon with precision in this mode. Character animations are also flaky and the cover system is a joke that isn't worth trying to use as intended. Crouch walking and going prone offers almost the same speed as regular walking, so a lot of the time, if not running around trying to score a Brainer axe kill, most players go prone and crawl around the map at an inhuman speed, taking out the enemy as they go.
One unique point to the game is the maps are filled with zombies and dogs from the Resi series, which in theory should cause you problems as you try to take out the other team, but you move so fast and they die so easily (1 hit melee kills practically everything in the game) that they may as well not be there.
Join the corps?
I don't know what Capcom were thinking putting out this game in its current state. Anyone who has played even a handful of shooters from the last 5 years will see that this isn't a quality title and if you are considering picking up the game just for single player, don't bother, as The Experiment is the only offline mode available which is just a series of of the Multi-Mission objectives to play on your own.
Maybe the die hard Resident Evil fans will find something to like here. I couldn't, and the fact that Umbrella Corps is half the price of a usual launch game, is digital only and drops the Resident Evil prefix in the West, should tell you all you need to know before taking the plunge.
Launch Trailer
Verdict
- Weapon customisation and upgrades are good
- You can play dress-up as My Bloody Valentine
- Tiny maps
- Lack of game modes and overall content
- Dull single player mode
- Insulting to the Resident Evil franchise
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