Since 1996, the name Resident Evil has had a lot of weight in the hearts and minds of gamers looking for a good fright, or at the very least, a Jill sandwich. It also, for the longest time, meant murderous difficulty bolted onto a control scheme that was useless when R.C. Pro-Am tried it in the early 80s. Since the fourth primary game in the series, however, many of these concerns have been alleviated, and players seem to have taken to the changes with a certain degree of zeal. The question must have remained as a burning tick mark on the to-do list of Capcom's top executives: "How can we piss off the people we alienated with the previous Resident Evil games?"
The Umbrella Chronicles sets itself up as the Die Hard Trilogy of Resident Evil, only without the irritating Nakatomi Tower and NYC Cab games; presented as a straight-up rail shooter, the game takes players through the storylines of Resident Evil Zero, One, and Three, as well as optional missions and an original finale that takes players to the final days of Umbrella. As either of the protagonists of those games, the player must blast his way through hordes of T-Virus zombies of all shapes and sizes, enduring mediocre graphics and forgettable sound alongside the hilariously awful dialogue we've all come to know and expect from Resident Evil. There's some replay in that players are ranked according to their kill counts and item collection during the scenarios, with a handful of them being unlocked only by doing well on previous stages.
It's very difficult to call any graphics these days mediocre, but in all honesty the game delivers on its promise of intense depictions of zombie gore by coloring everything else an impossibly neutral shade of brown, gray, or some mottled combination thereof. Now, granted that a destroyed facility or an aging mansion is not going to have had much in the way of an interior decorator's touch floating around, but for pity's sake, do the paintings hanging in the mansion have to all be blurry, nondescript splotches of the lower end of the luminous spectrum? Even the enemies themselves are all very dark; while this works well for making them sufficiently gruesome, it does sort of make them not quite stand out against the backgrounds. Which would be fine if the point of the game weren't to, you know, hit them with bullets. The boss enemies seem to be the only targets that have had any real amount of care put into them; the remainder are either identical animals of varying species or one of maybe half a dozen humanoid zombie models per area. To the game's credit, zombies recoil from damage fairly realistically; nail the undead in the shoulder and that side goes flying backwards, obscuring what you just hit but possibly lining you up for a headshot. However, Umbrella Chronicles does not do a good enough job of calling out weak points on an enemy, nor are the weak points large enough to be of any real use.
The sound is also a mixed bag. Sound effects are well-presented and clear, and the dialogue is usually perfectly audible over the mayhem. The music, by default, is keyed far lower than the sound effects, which would be a shame if it were worth turning up. By and large the music is nothing special - just ambient low strings, punctuated during action sequences with power-metal interludes that seem like they were ripped straight from Milla Jovovitch's scenes in the flicks. What few themes there are in the music get quickly repetitive and disregarded as boss fights drag on and the characters spout the same inane comments on how to defeat the unbelievably cheap boss before you. During the levels, of course, the characters eagerly and earnestly deliver some of the worst dialogue ever penned. Which is about the only thing that makes hearing that dialogue even remotely bearable. And while the most infamous line regarding Jill Valentine is not actually spoken in the game, her profile - hidden in the Mansion stages - indicates that she remains the Master of Unlocking.
Now, while the old-school Resident Evil games re-presented in this package have a tight bullet economy as their bread-and-butter gameplay staple (seriously, miss a shot in those games and you might as well start over), Umbrella Chronicles gives you a pistol with unlimited ammunition as your primary weapon. This might sound good until you realize that the pistol is completely inaccurate. Oh, sure, the reticule's nice and big, but there's a single pixel inside it which is where your bullets actually go, and unfortunately the game doesn't fudge this in the slightest. The problem's only slightly alleviated by the secondary weapons; the shotgun's good at close range (read: zombie six millimeters from your chest), and the submachine gun has a good spread but chews through its ammunition like water in Las Vegas. Of the secondary weapons, the grenade launcher seemed to be the best at doing exactly what I wanted it to do, but it too suffers from woefully inadequate supplies of ammunition. Players also have a knife for slicing off leeches, activated through wild flailing while holding down a button, and hand grenades for blowing up pools of leeches.
It is hard to mess up the control scheme of a gun game. After all, what could be simpler? Point and shoot, right? Well, I hope you're happy, Capcom, because you have managed to do exactly that. The game offers you your choice of control schemes, with the Wiimote alone, Wiimote plus Nunchuck, and Wii Zapper as options. Only the Wiimote alone is really a viable option, however; the rest map silly actions to the shaking of the Nunchuk, which makes reloading on the Zapper a chore at best and impossible at worst. The expected standard of "point off the screen and pull the trigger to reload" is not an option, and it damn well should have been. What's worse, the game occasionally includes reflex events a la Shenmue or Dragon's Lair; a button or action appears on-screen and must be obeyed, or you will lose health or get an instant game over.
I would feel much better about this game if the difficulty were not cranked up to far beyond an arcade shooter, or if the game were a little more forgiving with regards to accuracy. Still, it wouldn't be a Resident Evil game if there weren't some ridiculously obvious flaws that make the game excessively frustrating to newcomers. For everything that Umbrella Chronicles borrows from the more recent games in the series, it takes a heaping helping from the old in the sarcastic name of "balance". Honestly, there are good ways to do a rail shooter on the Wii; this is a poor start, but at least it, like Umbrella itself, will serve as a shining example of what not to do.
