You know the old saying: “There are two types of people in this world: Resident Evil people and Dead Space people.”

Well, I’m a Dead Space person.

For whatever reason, I respect and am endlessly fascinated by the Resident Evil games (I even used to read the novels by S. D. Perry) but I cannot get into the games, even a little bit. I thought Resident Evil 2 was decent fun to watch a friend play through, I lost interest in Resident Evil 4 half an hour in and Resident Evil 5 seemed like more of the same so the demo was plenty enough to satiate my appetite. It’s probably not a surprise, then, to hear that Umbrella Corps, a third-person shooter set in the Resident Evil universe, wasn’t right there at the top of my list of games to check out at PAX East this year.

What was a surprise, though, was how much I enjoyed playing it.

Let’s get it out of the way now: Umbrella Corps isn’t going to knock your socks off with how fresh and innovative it is. It’s not. It feels pretty standard as far as online shooters go: a little left trigger action here, some right trigger there, give that left stick a click and do it all again. There’s a reason controls like that have permeated every game with a gun: they work. Even though I’m not a Resident Evil guy, I felt instantly familiar with the controls and was able to start popping off headshots left and right before the Capcom representative was able to finish explaining what each button does. I feel pretty confident in declaring right here and now that Umbrella Corps has the best controls of any game in the series. There’s no “stop to aim” here, and that already puts Umbrella Corps on a higher plane for me.

Some hardcore Resident Evil fans are probably going to pick up this game and feel like Capcom gutted the Resident Evil “soul” out of it by making the controls feel so standard, and that’s an argument I sympathize with — but at the same time, I also super wouldn’t want to play an online third-person shooter where you can’t move and shoot at the same time.

Where you do feel a light Resident Evil influence though is through the stray zombies hanging around the multiplayer map. The one map I played was clearly modeled after Resident Evil 5, so you probably know the aesthetic to expect here: shanty towns, African zombies, bright sun. The loitering zombies were unfazed as we mercenaries sprinted around the map at full tilt murdering each other; there’s something pretty odd about turning a corner and suddenly bumping into a person before realizing, “Oh, thank god, it’s just a zombie.” You’re wearing a “Zombie Jammer” in Umbrella Corps to make you as invisible to zombies. Other players can get a “Jammer Buster” to get the zombies to attack you, which would add a potentially interesting layer to the multiplayer, but unfortunately that never happened during my demo.

While I only played the self-explanatory “One Life” mode, Capcom’s representative explained that some modes will play with that Zombie Jammer mechanic a little more. “SP DNA Hunter” mode, for instance, will spawn a special, much more aggressive zombie in the map that doesn’t care about your little Jammer, and both teams compete to see who can take down that zombie first. The other modes described didn’t sound like they’ll go too far outside the box, though, with some variations on Call of Duty’s “Kill Confirmed” modes that see you picking up “experiment collars” from either zombies or other players. There’s a “multi-mission” mode that will cycle through each unique mode in turn, so you’ll at least be able to get a good amount of variety if you just want to sit down, hit the button and go.

Honestly, though, I had a good enough time with Umbrella Corps’s modern brand of shooting that I don’t know that it necessarily needs to be the most innovative, out-there shooter on the market. I don’t need some mode about “what if you were the zombie?” or anything crazy like that. Not every shooter needs to push the envelope. It was surprisingly enjoyable to dash around a Resident Evil 5-style map, brushing by zombies and shotgunning fools in the face. It was fun to pull out the giant “Brainer” melee weapon to rush down an unaware opponent and jam it into his dumb head. It’s a casual shooter for hardcore players and that’s all right by me. It’s not a shooter you’re going to spend dozens and dozens of hours with, but it’s a shooter you’ll load up on the weekends when you have nothing else to play and you’ll probably have a good time.

If Umbrella Corps was going to be a sixty-dollar game, I don’t think I’d be so positive about it. But it’s going to be $29.99 and that seems like a totally fair price based on what I played. Of course, we won’t know for sure until the game drops on June 21 for PlayStation 4 and PC, but still, I went in not expecting much from Umbrella Corps and left pleasantly surprised.