Seeing Resident Evil 4’s wee village of cultists again pleases me. I’ve missed that place. Seeing two teams of heavily-armed mercenaries scampering up its houses with climbing axes and stealthily crawling around on the floor is interesting too, as something familiar becomes so very alien. Weird! A new trailer for the multiplayer shooter spin-off Umbrella Corps [official site] visits that muddy village, see. It also brings news that the game will release in May, see:



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It’s a strange one, Umbrella Corps. Its core multiplayer sees two teams facing off with third-person shooting antics in zombie-filled violence zones. Players are kitted out in gear which make the zombies ignore them but this can be damaged and disrupted, leaving mercs to fight both the other team and the NPC zombies. From what I’ve seen of the game (a few rounds recorded by Capcom) the zombies are always a secondary threat to bullets fired at faces, more a punishment to hasten the demise of wounded players than a core focus. Which is maybe a shame? As is, it looks like a so-so multiplayer shooter ‘with a twist’.

Let’s dream big, baby. How about a multiplayer stealth-shooter game where you drape yourself in the guts of the dead and amble along, trying to behave like a zombie and not alert the horde while still completing objectives and trying to off your mercenary rivals. Low-speed chases trying to jab a knife in someone’s guts, silent projectile weapons with awful range, and cheekily smashing the fire alarm to draw attention and wash the guts off everyone. This clearly is nothing like the game Capcom and K2 want to make. These are not suggestions for Umbrella Corps. But the idea interests me more than a multiplayer shooter trying to pump my nostalgia glands.

(Little known fact: nostalgia glands are the sebaceous glands in the ear canal. The surest way to spot someone hopelessly lost to nostalgia, at least in winter when they’ll be wearing a coat over their retro t-shirt, is watching for flowing ear discharge.)

Umbrella Corps will cost £24.99/$29.99/€29.99 when it arrives in May. Oh, and it will also have a single-player challenge mode where you take on hordes of zombies. Maybe that will do more with the shambling fools.