Featuring classic environments from earlier releases in the series, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles allows gamers to the explore mansions, underground testing facilities, and hospitals of games past on a next-generation console. Players lead Jill Valentine, Billy Coen, Rebecca Chambers, or Chris Redfield through each viral landscape, using the Wii Remote or Zapper against a never-ending barrage of zombies and other unsavory enemies. While out in the infected zone, gamers move on a path, and can adjust their field of vision to view unseen areas with the D-pad. Looking closely is essential, as key information is often within each interactive scene. This chapter in the Resident Evil franchise is playable alone or with a friend, and gamers may replay any mission to earn higher rankings and more effective weaponry.
Pros
+ You get to play through RE 0, 1, 3, ...and see the end of Umbrella.
+ Lots of shooting zombies and B.O.W.'s
+ Much funner when you add a second person.
+ Wesker gets pretty awesome towards the end, like an evil Neo or something.
Cons
- You don't actually control much of your characters movement, so you can miss a lot of stuff along the way.
- It's easy to run out of ammo because there is not a lot in the levels.
- It's really hard to unlock all of the special things the game has to offer.
- Visuals could have used a bit more polish.
- Actually, quite a short game here.
- Bosses are not as epic as they usually are.
Comments
This is more about Wesker and seeing how he brought down Umbrella just so he could build it himself. It's a lot of fun going through the game with a friend and all of the single player missions can be unlocked for co-op if you beat certain levels with certain rankings. I don't like how you really aren't aiming and shooting like a light gun though. It's more just move your cursor around and shoot.
Verdict
Must own for any Resident Evil fan. Best light gun game on the Wii thus far. Probably will be for awhile. Rental for most probably though.
A fun alternative to dropping quarters at the arcade
I haven't played any of... the other arcade-style shooters on the Wii, but from what I've noticed, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles appears to be one of the best offerings so far, as it was tailor-made for the system and not simply a port. If you love playing games such as Time Crisis, House of the Dead, or Area 51 at the arcade, then you'll probably love Umbrella Chronicles.
To get the technical aspects out of the way, the graphics are generally clean and crisp for a Wii game, and it looks great on an HDTV. The visuals aren't spectacular in some aspects (the occasional slowdown), and there are a few odd flaws here and there (such as the blurry typed introduction to each level), but they are essentially unobtrusive since the focus tends to be on shooting all the undead creatures. A great amount of interactivity is also provided in the form of destructible environments, and it's put to good use as rewards are often hid in miscellaneous objects (providing a welcome excuse to shoot everything in sight just to see what happens).
Controls are simple enough for anyone to play the game immediately, since pointing, shooting, and reloading are very intuitive. Occasionally, the added responsibility of swapping weapons, throwing grenades, picking up items, moving the screen, and mashing buttons to dodge enemies can be overwhelming for new players in the middle of a firefight, but a quick leaner or anybody with video game experience will quickly become accustomed to the more nuanced controls.
Each level needs to be completed before the next is unlocked, but easy mode is simple enough (although the difficulty increases as you progress, especially towards the end of the game), and the difficulty mode can be ramped up for those who want to test their marksmanship. The inclusion of weapon upgrades, item collection, and ratings on your skill at the end of each level also provides a significant amount of challenges for the perfectionist gamer to tackle.
Naturally, Umbrella Chronicles follows the various Resident Evil plots, which are conveyed through cutscenes and dialogue interspersed with the gameplay. The stories told aren't that compelling, per se, as they follow the typical B-movie characters stumbling through the typical B-movie horror-film world, but they are interesting arcade-shooter filler nonetheless. Actually, the campy nature of the early Resident Evil games is part of what makes them endearing to so many people, and Umbrella Chronicles delivers in that aspect. The dialogue is often laugh-out-loud awful, and the deadpan delivery by the voice actors just adds to the ridiculousness. What would possess people to say things like "Don't call me princess!" and "I don't think this is just someone's summer home..." in the middle of a zombie onslaught? A classic bomb my friends and I like to recite is dropped by Chris, who, after shooting his buddy-turned-zombie, salutes his death with an oh-so-reminiscent "I'll miss our target practice sessions." Oh, the irony.
I would highly suggest this purchase to those who are big fans of the Resident Evil series, as it contains a huge collection of information from the many games leading up through the third installment (minus the second).
Umbrella Chronicles is also a fantastic choice for those who like to have a thrilling, challenging, and easy-to-learn game to play in short bursts with friends. There is two-player co-operative play, and it's fun to watch if people are waiting to take turns.
This is one of the first t...itles I purchased for my Wii. As a Resident Evil fan, I was excited to play through some key moments of the series' history through a rail-shooter perspective.
It has a mild degree of difficulty, and I would have easily given it a 5 star rating if not for some infuriating moments of game play. There are some "hazzard" moments, let's say for instance you are walking down a hall and a gas leak is about to kill you instantly. By the time you're aware of this danger, the screen will give you a prompt--either to shake the Wii remote, or press "A" or "B", and you have all of about 1 second to make sure you execute this maneuver precisely. If you do not shake the remote hard enough, or accidentally press the wrong button, you will die and head back to your last check point and repeat the process again and again and again.
To be fair though, that's one of the more challenging problems of the game, and it should be known that it's a highly accessible game to "new" gamers. My girlfriend doesn't play many videogames outside of racers and puzzle games, yet she picked this title up right away and started outperforming me after some missions. Not to say that it's easy, but the majority of the game has intuitive controls that become second nature very quickly. In no time, my girlfriend was lining up head shots and blowing away zombie brains--making it very fun not just for me but as a team experience also.
Much of the game's authenticity comes from the fact that... rather than tell an entirely original story, Umbrella Chronicles puts you through the events of the first few Resident Evil games, which the game presents as a report on the final hours of the now-felled Umbrella Corporation, the conglomerate responsible for all these gee-darned zombies. Over the course of the game, you'll revisit the events of Resident Evil 0, the original Resident Evil, and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. The narrative is understandably truncated, and the game focuses more on establishing a grimy atmosphere and re-creating specific, memorable moments than consistent storytelling.
Topping it all off is an all-new scenario that takes place in 2003 and sees the reunion of the original Resident Evil tag team of Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as they hunt down the last vestiges of Umbrella in a frozen industrial complex, which doesn't quite live up to its exciting potential. There are also a number of side missions that often revisit environments from the main missions, showing you what characters like Rebecca Chambers and fan-favorite Albert Wesker were up to at various points in the series. Considering that most games of this nature tend to last a scant hour or two, it's a little impressive that it can take more than four hours to complete a single run-through of all the missions.
I was Expecting this to Top "House of the Dead..."
I appreciate that Capcom ...put a great effort for mimicking House of the Dead, but it wasn't that good nor bad, but average. The controls were pretty easy to manipulate, but there are times when you have to press a combination of buttons in certain situations that can get tediously annoying; Many scenes of the game will force you to press these random buttons in a split second, not giving you much time to react - so it can be a nuisance at times to die by not pressing these buttons in time. Graphically, it was Gamecube quality and it was decent enough. The Sound is alright, but the most that irritated me, was the music in some parts of the games; some of the music did not fit in the situation(Imagine going through this zombie infested city with techno music, I mean what the hell?) The voices aren't accurate either... I know many wouldn't care, but since I'm a hardcore fan, I know what sounds right and not and this doesn't sound right much or at all (LOL to Carlo's accent being American). Alright here's the big thing: The level for which you play as Jill and Carlos were staged from the Outbreak series and not from RE3 - a bit odd... so why not just have a Kevin and Alyssa pair-up for that section, eh? Claire and Leon were also missing and they didn't do RE2 - I am angry with this. A Claire and Steve partnership was also missing and I HOPE that Capcom make a sequel to this game, along with Leon and Ada too. Lastly, the transitioning cutscenes aren't even exciting at all; they were simple cut and paste pictures with a text of words - without even a narrator! The only thing I really liked are the extra missions they've had, especially Wesker's missions, since you undergo what he does that was unknown to us before. But Resident Evil fans as we are, we can learn to love this game because we can delve into the past and present of Resident Evil. Oh, and there is an addition where you play again as Chris and Jill in a secret Umbrella Facility in the Arctic and you go underground to the laboratory based on the Movie, Resident Evil Extinction to fight off Wesker's new creation, T-Elos. Experience the laser dodging like Alice did!
