First, there’s the pain. Swiftly followed by the rage. And finally, wondering where you can find some brains. Nope, it’s not the zombification process, just what you experience playing this dreadful Resident Evil team shooter spin-off. Despite the series’ course correction we’ve seen from Beginning Hour’s teaser for Resi VII, this inexplicably squirms onto PS4 offering nothing that anyone – let alone fans of the series – wants.
Umbrella Corps is a series of bad design decisions. At a glance, it’s a simple third-person shooter, but the camera’s so close to your shoulder that your character takes up a third of the screen. This obscured perspective means a zombie could dash at you from the left, but you’ll have a hard time seeing it coming. And it’s an issue compounded by a ropey cover system. In a shooter this fast, quick reactions are a must, but latching onto and breaking from tacky cover is a sluggish act that directly leads to deaths.
The decaying meat on Umbrella Corps’ bones is its 3v3 online component. Maps are very rough approximations of old Resi locations, such as Raccoon City or Resi 5’s Kijuju 12, and come with a choice of playing One Life Match – in which you have no respawns – and Multi-Mission, which randomly cycles between gametypes such as the Call Of Duty-esque Domination.
Designed to be fast-paced and frantic on small maps, the action is too clumsy. You fumble around cramped levels while spawn points spit you out right into an enemy’s crosshairs. There’s little fun from blasting opposing players (who take too much ammo to drop) or zombies, which uniformly react to bullets with stilted, canned animations.
Corps, Stymied
To Umbrella Corps’ credit, there are glimmers of interest. A zombie jammer tool makes you effectively invisible to the undead that litter the maps, but it can be disabled with EMP grenades or by shooting it out. It adds a thin layer of strategy; why rely on just firefights when zombie traps work, too? And a quick three-minute time limit means, succeed or fail, it’s never long before the next go.
Whatever small nuggets of enjoyment can be found online don’t exist offline in The Experiment, Umbrella Corps’ you-versus-zombies single-player mode. Dull and initially easy, there’s a harsh difficulty spike once you make it to the Village map from Resident Evil 4 that sees this mode become unbearably tough, all thanks to some aggravating checkpointing.
Each level has a set of missions to complete, but die on the final one and you restart from the very beginning. It’s tedious and maddening, throwing Umbrella Corps’ poor shooting and cheap animations into a harsher light while offering nothing approaching enjoyment. Avoid this like it’s a dinner date with Albert Wesker
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from
http://www.accessibilityforum.org/umbrella-corps-theres-life-month-old-corpse/
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