The Umbrella Chronicles is one of two on-rails light gun shooters for the Wii that sought to revisit the classic narratives of the early Resident Evil games while also filling out some timeline gaps with stories that occurred between games. This entry covers Resident Evil 0, REmake, and Resident Evil 3, each with side stories that add to their underlying stories, culminating in a bonus campaign entitled Umbrella's End which sees Chris and Jill teaming up once more to—finally—go take down Umbrella. The game's side scenarios primarily revolve around Albert Wesker's hand in events, offering new perspective and insight on the story's events and illustrating his part in Umbrella's demise as well as his evolution into the character we see in Code Veronica and Resident Evil 5.
I have a sort of soft spot for these games. There are plenty of things I can and will criticize about them. But I just really enjoy them a lot for what they offer, despite the immense jank. Part of the appeal for me is the ability to see these iconic places and stories through a different lens. Each campaign features a duo of characters teaming up to go through the various levels—which are first-person recreations of the classic environments—chatting and reacting to the horrors before them. Though this obviously detracts from the solitary experience that's core to the early Resident Evil games, it is nice to get a lot more character interaction than the original games allowed and side-steps the narrative necessity of stupidly splitting up all the time. Further, the environments just look pretty, despite the transition from pre-rendered backgrounds. While the Outbreak games I appreciated for their varied perspective on the Raccoon City incident's narrative, these games also offer a very different and refreshing visual perspective. The gameplay is also pretty dumb fun. While the tone is quite different since you're mowing down hordes of enemies using an unlimited handgun and the powerful but limited-ammo stronger weapons, it's simply a joy to just approach the enemies in this way.
Unfortunately, my positivity ends there on the general level. The gameplay is kind of difficult to ever really pull off using the controller, which is how I played the PS3 version. Having to move a 2D cursor around to line up shots is slow and incredibly difficult with the limitations of aiming with a stick rather than just pointing with a lightgun. This significantly interferes with your ability to be accurate, which is essential to the gameplay premise. I actually relied heavily on an exploit to get through the bulk of the game: if you pause the game, the cursor remains on the screen and you can still see the enemies in the background of the pause screen. You can then line up a headshot, unpause, then shoot, which trivializes a lot of encounters. While this is a pretty massive exploit, the kind of thing I generally wouldn't use in basically any other game, I found it necessary to getting any kind of high rank on the missions. Leveling up your weapons does provide significant benefits that make the game more playable without using exploits, but those power-ups are purchased with currency earned through getting high ranks, so it's a vicious cycle to climb out of without the exploit. The above complaints of course bear what should be an obvious caveat: I really don't know how much better and more playable this is with a lightgun or on the Wii. It seems like that would remedy my biggest issues with it, but I can't really speak to how well the game plays without trying it out.
Umbrella Chronicles also features some elements I'm more ambivalent on, but still cause some friction for me. For one, a lot of the power-ups and files you find in the game require destroying parts of the environment. This is fine to an extent, and is a staple of the on-rails shooter genre. But it can also be quite difficult to accomplish at times with the wealth of items there are to shoot at any given time with only some of them yielding anything worthwhile. Further, you're rated by how many objects in the environment you destroy throughout a level. While—as I've probably made clear already—this game isn't that interested in achieving a grounded spooky tone, encouraging you to constantly just shoot around at random things nonstop any time enemies aren't around can be a little exhausting and breaks what immersion the story might otherwise have, though I will admit it's weirdly kind of satisfying. Further, you are thoroughly rewarded for finding files in the levels, though they're just another of the hard-to-find items hiding in destructible objects. Looked at another way though, your rank is thus thoroughly punished for not going around blowing every single thing you see up, which is kind of annoying. While I think it's natural given the gameplay style, I also don't like how you can't really read these hard-earned files unless you're between levels, which is usually at the beginning or end of a play session for me, in which case I'm either itching to start playing, or ready to shut the game down. As a last complaint, while I like the character interactions we get, the fact your partner isn't visible throughout the level is a missed opportunity that causes you instead to feel like the characters are just talking to you over your shoulder rather than communicating with you directly.
I'll briefly go over each of the major scenarios:
Train Derailment
We play as Billy and Rebecca surviving the events of Resident Evil 0. Similar to the game its based on, this scenario is at its best early on and peters out to some extent as it goes. Billy and Rebecca have an amusing chemistry, so getting to hear their chatter is welcome and plays well on the game's strengths of providing more character interaction.
The Mansion Incident
We control Jill and Chris going through the mansion of Resident Evil REmake. Though there are few differences from the 1996 game to REmake that make an appearance, it's clear that REmake was the inspiration as Lisa Trevor makes an appearance in Wesker's scenarios. We also get a bonus scenario of Richard and Rebecca that's fun to play, especially with the background of the Train Derailment campaign behind us.
Raccoon's Destruction
Following the events of Resident Evil 3, we play as Jill and Carlos, primarily traversing the deadly ruined streets of Raccoon City. While I appreciated the revisit to the iconic setting, these levels were noticeably a bit more frustrating on balance, not helped by the fact they're considerably longer than those in previous scenarios.
Umbrella's End
Though this is a scenario designed to deliver on the disappointing lack of a final showdown with Umbrella from the mainline games, this campaign is easily the weakest of the bunch. I suppose in a sense that's unsurprising since the team for this spin-off game didn't have great source material to base it off of. The main appeal here is that there are tons of powerful enemies, so you really get to go wild with all your now-powered up weapons earned from completing the prior parts of the game. The narrative is rather flat and uninteresting, despite being built up by the Wesker chapters throughout the previous campaigns. The final boss is a somewhat cool use of the game's mechanics, but I also find it a little frustratingly difficult.
At the end of the day, I wouldn't particularly recommend Umbrella Chronicles to anyone other than pretty big fans of the Resident Evil series. While I suppose watching a let's play of it may be a good way to catch up on the series narrative if you're new to the series, this one is mostly for fan service and filling out the timeline for series fans rather than a solid entry point. I definitely have significant reservations about it, but the fact I am willing to give a comfortable 3 stars to a game I had to employ massive exploits to finish really speaks to how endearing this game is for me.
My other Resident Evil reviews:
