Many gamers have a love-hate relationship when it comes to Capcom's Resident Evil series. For every good game in the series, it's easy to mention another one that's bad; for example, Resident Evil 4 vs. Resident Evil 6.
One Resident Evil that many can't help but bring up when referencing low points in the series is the 2012 disaster known as Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. On paper, the game seemed amazing: players would control one of the four members of the Umbrella Security Service Delta during the events of Resident Evil 2 in order to remove any and all evidence of Umbrella's involvement in the Raccoon City incident.
In practice, the game was a nightmare. The single-player mode was a wash across the board with poor mission design, narrative design and awful AI. The multiplayer was somewhat better, but wasn't good enough to justify the game as a whole.
As a whole, the game did well commercially, with Capcom announcing in May 2012 that the game shipped two million units worldwide. These results hardly surprised anyone, however; so long as Resident Evil is slapped on the title, people will buy it without knowing what they're getting themselves into.
Fast-forward to TGS 2015, and out came Capcom with a new game that appeared quite similar to Operation Raccoon City, called Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps. Many were critical of Capcom's latest game as soon it was revealed, immediately calling upon the similarities it shares with Operation Raccoon City. Also, of course, these concerns weren't without merit: it features squad-based multiplayer just like the other game and seemingly offers little to the main series, once again, like the other game.
In the end, however, the best way to discover whether Capcom's attempt at this genre would be to get your hands on the game, and to no one's surprise, the game looks just as bad as its predecessor.
In a video, we get to see 15 minutes of Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps in action, and it doesn't impress. Graphically, the game doesn't appear too bad, but the movement looks extremely stiff, and the narrator complains about that as well.
"What you might not really get a feel for in this hands-on footage is how clunky the movement can be, how often you can get stuck in your surroundings, how limited your field of vision is, and how uncomfortably small the maps are," she says.
In Capcom's defense, it did describe the maps as "compact battle zones," but these maps look like it takes the meaning of compact to a whole new level.
There is some good in all this, though. Capcom confirmed late last year that it would be remaking Resident Evil 2 from the ground-up, and coincidentally, this game features Raccoon City and its Police Department as two locales in which players will fight zombies. Even if Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps turns out to be utter garbage, at least this game may provide us with a potential glimpse of how Resident Evil 2 will look on modern hardware.
Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps will release digitally for PC and PS4 on June 21.
