3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.

The Umbrella Chronicles is a really cool concept. The idea of taking older games from the series and recreating them through bite sized portions of an on rails arcade shooter is awesome. I’ve always been a sucker for on rail shooter games as it was a small genre that went crazy for a window of time when the Wii came out. Unfortunately this sub genre has been fairly dormant ever since, but Umbrella Chronicles was still a very nice nostalgia trip. Unfortunately, through a modern lens this game doesn’t really hold under the test of time. For starters, the gameplay is really fun. I appreciated how lovingly they recreated Resident Evil 0 and 1 in this format as there’s tons of small interactions in the environment that really pay homage to these older games. The large variety of weapons and enemies are all great too, you get plenty of different guns each with their own upgrade paths and distinctions between them. The variety of characters and sub missions this game lets you go through is very welcome as well. Just when you think you’ve completed everything for a certain chapter you unlock all of these Wesker missions that really add an extra layer to not only this game, but to the older game’s stories. Unfortunately that’s about where the positives end. This game has a huge balancing issue, I don’t know if I’m just terrible at these types of games but I felt like sometimes I would be absolutely on point and able to clear the way fairly quickly, and other times zombies just decided to become bullet sponges on the fly. I had originally started this on Normal difficulty, but quickly realized that I’m not good enough to continue at that difficulty and lowered it to easy, even then I still felt like I had the same issue, albeit not as consistently. I played this game through a PS3 emulator with a PS5 controller and realized very quickly that the controls were almost exclusively made for motion support as they are awful with a PlayStation controller. Some enemies in this game require pin point precision and when the camera and enemies move so often it can be incredibly frustrating to deal with sometimes. If I still had my wii motion tracker I would have totally loved to experience it that way, but I had to work with what I had and I wasn’t a fan of its PlayStation counterpart. As someone that loves Resident Evil 3 and loves trashing on the remake for butchering the source material, Umbrella Chronicles manages to go about recreating it in a far lazier way than I ever imagined. Now I understand that the levels for the Resident Evil 0 and 1 sections were ripped directly from 0 and 1’s remake as they look almost identical to each other visually. But this chapter is so different from Resident Evil 3 that if you removed Jill and Carlos you would have no idea it was even supposed to be recreating it. At this point in time Resident Evil 3 never got a remake and the only assets they had for it were on the old engine that existed before Resident Evil 1 and 0. So in order for them to be faithful to the source material they would have had to recreate the levels from scratch, which I get is a lot of work, but this was a full priced game at one point in time. Instead they opted to use assets from the multiplayer spin-off Resident Evil Outbreak, which I’m in the middle of playing, and while these sections are about as fun to play as the others, I just wish it was faithful to Resident Evil 3’s legacy. It’s especially frustrating after somewhat starting Darkside Chronicles and seeing how faithful they were to Resident Evil 2, it just makes me upset that Resident Evil 3 didn’t receive the same love. In all honestly, before writing down which Resident Evil games I’d be playing late last year, I had never heard of this game, and I imagine a lot of other people probably haven’t either. I really hope at some point both this and Darkside chronicles get a genuine remake or at least a remaster as I really miss this sub genre, and with some quality of life features and a few tweaks, this game could be great. Check it out if you haven’t already