Finally: an on rails shooter for the Wii. It took them long enough but its worth the wait. I just hate Simon Says.
I Hate: Playing Simon Says: pressing random buttons to view an "action" cut-scene which cuts the suspense and defaces an otherwise wonderfully intuitive control scheme.
Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles is the kind of game that should've come out with the launch of the Wii. While up there in difficulty, your friends will be requesting this one at all your Wiiparties. The controls work perfectly (well... almost perfectly: the programmers got lazy here and there) for this kind of game and you'll find that anyone can play it, and have fun.
When I first saw the control scheme for Nintendo's latest miracle machine, the first thing I thought was that this system is going to be the greatest gift to shooter fans. And while Red Steel was fun, I'm certainly glad I waited to see it on sale. I only ever really complained that the environments were too vast for me to hunt down the one other player. I knew that an (on) rail(s) shooter would be the best party game for the guys, and a few of the girls. I don't know why we had to wait a year but finally getting this game gives me that feeling that my Wii is closer to being complete. Like all it needs is a Burnout, a Katamri, a GTA, and a trapper keeper, then it will rule the world.
If you plan on getting this game, let me first give you one piece of advice: before you even insert the disc, google umbrella chronicles game saves and download a file of the game at 100% completion. After you transfer this file from your computer (hey! you finally have a use for that SD card) to your Wii, insert the disc and start a new game on one of the other empty save slots. Why? Well you may very well be as against cheating as I am but you might also never finish every level of this game with a perfect score on the hardest difficulty (I need my wife's help to get through some of the later chapters in easy mode) unless you're the kind of person who spends hours at the multiplex making people miss the opening credits to look at you blasting aliens.
Completing the game with highest awards and at highest difficulty is the only way to get unlimited ammo. This may sound paltry but it will be more fun for your friends when they can come over and play with any gun in the game on any chapter and not have to worry about ammo. This is a Resident Evil game after all and you know how scarce ammo can be in that world. Just remember to arm your friends with the relatively weak guns. This game gets real boring real quick if one player has unlimited bazooka ammo.
Even with the game save, I still recommend playing through from the beginning to have the fun of collecting "new" weapons, files, and items in the strained environment the game is meant to be played in. While fun, unlimited ammo on all guns dampens the suspense, takes away some of the challenge, and washes out the experience of trying to plunk regular pistol shots into the zombies' weak points. It may seem like little more than point and click but the shooting controls make this game a joy.
I may just be easily amused. You may think that it shouldn't be too complicated to make a good rail shooter for the Wii but the programmers threw in a few elements we've never had while wielding the arcade light guns. Most of them add a lot to the experience but some are travesties of programming that should've been forgotten after the first try.
One of the improvements afforded by the nunchuck connection is the ability to move the camera around slightly which can help with collecting items, killing extra enemies, or just destroying the environment. The chuck can also be set to reload your gun with a shake, letting you keep your gunbarrel trained on the enemy. The default controls have you shaking the wiimote which will mess you up in a tight spot but if you set the game as if you had a zapper the reload gets mapped to the chuck. Sounds perfect doesn't it? It would be if it weren't for one stupid control scheme that just wont die.
Rather than create an intuitive control scheme, it seems that lately, every programmer who is too impatient or lazy to lay out something interesting and fun will just have the game flash random buttons on the screen. If these buttons are pressed correctly, you deal damage and/or dodge and get a cut scene of success. If they aren't, you take damage and get a cutscene of failure. On some games I can ignore it but in Umbrella Chronicles, this bush league method does nothing more than put road bumps in the action and/or break the suspense of what would otherwise be a very scary moment.
This one tedious control function which was carried over from Resident Evil 4, which got it from God of War, which borrowed it from Shenmue seems to have risen from the 80s arcade graveyard and is now haunting almost every new game I play. I am getting sick and tired of lazy programmers who make gamers stop and play Simon Says especially since it always seems to happen at the most exciting and/or cinematic moments. It becomes the biggest nuisance when you're playing 2 player and you both have to press different button configurations at the same time. Is there an industry name for this travesty? I would like to call it lazy imbecile programmers should be shot or L.I.P.S.B.S.
Really this has been going on since the arcade classic Dragon's Lair and it's about time it stopped. We were forgiving with that one because it was the first time we played a video game that looked like a cartoon (most other games back then had about 12 colors and looked like the kind of thing you'd pay $5 for on the Virtual Console; actually some of them are the games you can pay $5 for on the VC) and the controls consisted of one stick and one button. But now (over 20 years of progress later) that every game looks like a cartoon and your average controller has about 12 buttons & a couple of sticks, I think we should expect more out of these programmers. They should also think we deserve better controls than "press A quickly or DIE" considering we're putting their kids through college. On a system with motion controls, this sort of contrived gimmick is absurdly unforgivable. You may think I'm overreacting but these games aren't cheap you know and things like this make me wonder sometimes if we put more thought into playing these games than they put into making them..
Really Umbrella Chronicles isn't filled with these moments (but the boss battles are) and as irritating as they are to me, you may not even notice them. Don't let it be the one thing that pushes you away from the experience. You'd be gypping yourself out of a fun game. So you probably want to know if it's worth it. It's a definite buy if you dig the rail shooters. It's a definite buy if your friends want to play something a little more action packed than Warioware or Wii Sports. And it's a definite buy if you dig the Resident Evil series but want to try something a little different from the usual. I would only recommend skipping this game if you're lonely and don't have anyone to play games with (in which case: you need to go out and make some friends, then buy this game) or you detest that random button cut scene control scheme even more than I do. I can understand that, in which case, avoid this game like a plague of zombies.