Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

I've spent most of the past week playing a lot of The Umbrella Chronicles and I'm still not sure if I like it. 

I played this on my PS3 with a Move controller.

The game is divided into distinct sections with each closely corresponding to an existing game in the series. You have the "Train Derailment" which follows Rebecca and Billy as they go through the events of Resident Evil Zero, the "Mansion Incident" which follows Jill and Chris as they undergo the events of Resident Evil 1, and "Raccoon's Destruction" which follows Jill and Carlos as they escape Raccoon City during the events of Resident Evil 3. Curiously, Leon and Claire's story from RE2 is absent, as is Code Veronica.

Additionally, there are some new stories featured. "Umbrella's End" is set five years after RE3 and features Jill and Chris reuniting to destroy a new Umbrella B.O.W., but the more interesting additions are the ones that flesh out existing elements of the series. We get to see Ada escape Raccoon City after her injuries sustained in RE2, we see Rebecca explore some of the Spencer estate after joining up with Richard before the events of RE1, and we get some clarification on what exactly went on with Wesker to turn him into a supersoldier after his (apparent?) death in RE1 (as well as his whereabouts during the other games). Also there's a mission with Hunk I guess.

In case it wasn't clear, this game relies heavily on assets and elements from the existing games. The RE0 and RE1 missions appear to be using environments ripped out of RE0 and the REmake, respectively, while the RE3 missions use locations from the Outbreak games (as those already had a fair amount of overlap with RE2/3 and were rendered in higher fidelity than the PS1 games). Each mission uses enemies from its respective game  (Crimson Heads for RE1, leeches and monkeys for RE0, lickers and Nemesis for RE3, etc.) and your path through the level roughly follows the arc of that game as well, albeit without any real backtracking.

As for my complaints, to start with this game is difficult. Even on the easiest, well, "Easy", difficulty. Maybe that's not a fair criticism but I was routinely running into trouble on my first go through each level. Once I'd learned the rhythm of each mission I was generally able to handle it well enough but when each mission is close to fifteen minutes, that sort of repetition, when you're not necessarily enjoying it, can get tedious. 

Additionally, this game has QTEs that would frequently fail to register correctly. Losing a QTE because I'm not fast enough would be annoying enough, but failing a mission because a button I pressed wasn't detected by the game is sort of infuriating. On a somewhat related note due to all the waggle, because it's been quite some time since I've played a game like this the motion controls started to hurt my wrist after a while. Maybe that's a "me" problem but I'd forgotten completely about how this generation of gaming could get physically uncomfortable.

As the game was divided up into discrete blocks there isn't a single clear screen I can post so, um, here's a bunch of them. These weren't my first completes, but rather the best times/scores I accomplished after my just-under-20 hours of playtime.

 

So, what do I think of this game? It's good but maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it right now, I suppose. The difficulty takes some getting used to but it's an enjoyable enough time and the new lore it adds is appreciated. It feels like it'd be a good value for what it was given how much content it has, even if that meant that it took me longer to get through than I'd expected and I sort of resented it for that fact. All in all though a surprisingly decent game.