Umbrella Corps (Deluxe Edition)

I went into Umbrella Corps genuinely curious whether it had been misunderstood, the way some niche competitive shooters get kneecapped by first impressions. It had not been misunderstood. What you get is a 3v3 close-quarters shooter built around seven cramped maps pulled from classic Resident Evil locations, three player classes (assault, short range, and tactical), and a handful of modes including team deathmatch, a DNA-collection hunt against super zombies, and a king-of-the-hill variant. On paper, that skeleton is workable. In practice, it collapses under the weight of decisions that contradict each other at every turn. The most glaring example is the cover mechanic. The game signals cover opportunities constantly with flashing HUD overlays, but locking yourself to a surface in a match where everyone moves at absurd speed is essentially a suicide request. The maps are so small that you can cross them in seconds, which means hiding behind anything just gives opponents and the AI zombies a free kill window. Then there is the Brainer, the equippable melee weapon that functions as a one-hit kill and is available to every player from the start, making the entire firearms progression feel pointless. Guns already feel weak relative to movement speed, so matches tend to devolve into a blur of sprinting mercenaries swinging ice picks at each other rather than anything resembling tactics. The single-player mode, called The Experiment, puts you in the boots of operative 3A-7 running a series of solo challenges across those same multiplayer maps. The lore threading it together is thin but present, with file entries nodding at post-RE6 canon and hints that your mysterious commander might be a Wesker clone. That is actually a reasonably interesting setup. Unfortunately the missions amount to killing zombies, collecting DNA samples, and repeating that loop across maps that were not designed with solo play in mind. Enemy spawns are erratic, the birds in particular can delete you before you register they exist, and there is no real escalation of challenge that feels designed rather than random. Post-launch patches did introduce some weapon rebalancing and additional content, but the consensus across critics and the Steam review base was that none of it addressed the foundational problems. The one area that earns partial credit is map presentation. The environments recreate recognizable Resident Evil locations, including the RE4 village, Raccoon City streets, and the RPD station, with enough visual fidelity to read as those places. Long-time fans will clock the references immediately. The zombie jammer mechanic, which theoretically lets you ignore the undead until an enemy shoots it off your back, is also a genuinely interesting idea stuck inside a game that never figures out how to use it. The peer-to-peer netcode made online play unreliable at launch, and by 2025 concurrent player counts on Steam had collapsed to near zero, which means the multiplayer the whole game was built around is functionally inaccessible now. The Deluxe Edition bundles in extra weapons, emotes, cosmetic skins, additional patches, and character costumes based on beloved Resident Evil figures. None of those additions fix what is broken underneath. If you are a series completionist who wants every piece of RE-adjacent media in the library, you already know you are buying this regardless of what any review says. Everyone else should treat the Mostly Negative Steam rating and the near-dead servers as the honest warning they are.

Alex · Scout Team

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