Umbrella Corp Review

Competitive shooters are not exactly hard to make when you compare them to vast, open world and deep story driven games that now dominate the marketplace, however, competitive shooters have been on the rise recently with fantastic games like Overwatch and CS:GO being met with high demand. Whilst competitive shooters are not hard to make, they are notoriously hard to balance and perfect. Hours of coding is needed to simply make everything seem sensible in terms of damage, or at least affects the game in positive and creative way. They must also ensure that the map design produces decent competitive gameplay that allows for a variety of tactics and plans.

Umbrella Corp fails at every single hurdle.

This is a game that was designed to be the competitive shooter of the Resident Evil series, a side project more than a true Resident Evil game. A fact, I am sure, we are all very, very thankful for. With third person camera, cover mechanics and a “Zombie jammer” which provides a second valuable target other than the head. By destroying someone’s zombie jammer, the infected become very aware of said person and will attempt to pursue and kill them, a rather cool mechanic and very funny. You can’t help but smile as you watch someone run across the small map with however many zombies chasing after them.

Poor map design results in very simple gameplay, where the only real strategy is to go towards the enemy. It is near impossible to flank or pull off impressive feats of sneaky behaviour due to the fact due to the fact that each path seems to lead directly towards the enemy spawn. One such map, Village, is literally two small houses on either side of the street to each other. The street itself is empty and contains no reasonable cover, so every ranked single life match results in nothing more than hiding in cover and using the third person camera to spot your opponents, then and only then, do you peak from the cover to engage the enemy. Of course, the best example of how poor the map design is. is that rounds can last literally only two seconds. Let's count together, shall we?

One Mississippi
Two Mississippi

Oh look, you and your team are all dead. Game over, gg, so on and so forth.

Weapon balancing is also absolute trash, leveling up allows you to obtain weapons that are a direct upgrade of each other. So a level 50 will always, without a shadow of a doubt, have an obscene advantage over say, a level two. Atop of that, SMGs and Shotguns are the only real logical choice, barrel pressing with the shotgun is a viable strategy, as you move from cover to cover before blind firing over the top and getting an instant kill, thank you third person camera by the way, and those submachine guns feel like they have no recoil. As I said, feel, I am sure some people will disagree with me but to me they feel like laser cannons. Point, click, hold and win.

Matchmaking? One of the key and most important parts of a competitive shooter? Absolute half-arsed garbage. My first hour or so of the game, with those delightful few second rounds, consisted of nothing but “ranked” gameplay, wherein I was against the same team for at least half an hour, and my team? Between level 10 and 2, which is fair enough. Their team? Their lowest level was level 38. So I am sure, given everything I have previously stated, that the algorithm behind this matchmaking was fair and balanced, right? Right? No. As any competitive shooter will tell you, anyone who knows the map finds it easier to play than someone who has never seen the map before in their life. So despite the linear map gameplay, they were able to predict which of the few routes we would take. Almost as soon as we stepped out of spawn it was bullets galore and a few brief seconds before we perished.

I did try out the other game modes, however all were just as bad. With limited playability, objectives and maps it soon felt like a budget and more rage inducing version of Rainbow Six Siege.

Customisation? Way too much effort was put into the Umbrella Corps customisation, yet it is still limited as all hell until you level up, meaning that most cosmetic items were all locked for me. The customisation is very similar to War Thunder’s, where half the time you literally just stick a fancy sticker on your character and feel like you’ve done a good job! Your character is a special snowflake now because he has a sticker on his lense! Congratulations.

Regardless, the game does what it says on the tin. It’s a competitive third person, cover based shooter, just a poor one.

Whilst not unplayable the game itself is just a huge disappointment, with limited enjoyability and playability and each and every map feeling very similar. Please, don’t buy this, for the sake of your own sanity, hold off and spend your money on something worthwhile.