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Review: Umbrella Corps Is A Clunky Unnecessary Spinoff

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Resident Evil… I recall a time when that name was synonymous with survival horror and all the things that the genre entailed. They were games that forced you to conserve ammo and rely on sparsely available green and red herbs to survive. Instead of focusing on the next big title, (and getting Resident Evil back to its roots) Capcom decided they would venture far off the path. They decided that an online shooter was the way to go. Who could blame them? That is what holds the shelf life of a game these days. So, Umbrella Corps was born.

The story and the options are pretty barebones from the get-go. A training option allows you to suit up as an Umbrella Corp mercenary and learn the ropes of the game. Training is as you would expect, boring for an experienced or even half experienced gamer. It goes through the vanilla motions of showing you how to move around the map, switch and use weapons. The highlight of the weapons comes in the forms of a nasty little hatchet that you are able to charge up in order to unleash vicious melee attacks.

Once you are all trained and ready to go. An almost empty title screen, offers you the options of a multiplayer mode that places your merc in a 3 V 3 game, where you are unable to spawn after you are killed. Loading times between these games are long and annoying. Oddly enough these multiplayer matches are 3 mercs V 3 mercs. Even more odd is the fact that zombies are peppered in on the maps. They are easily dealt with and feel like more of a nuisance than an adversary. Would it have been cool to include Hunters and Lickers and have 3 mercs V those creatures? Well, it definitely would not have hurt and may have added a little variety to gameplay.

“Leveling up 

feels like a chore…”

The matches are unbalanced at best. That is partly due to clunky controls and and weapon damage that makes no sense in any given situation. Once the round is over you are awarded experience points in order to upgrade weapons and customize your mercenary.

Leveling up feels like a chore as opposed to something you are excited to do. Weapon customization is one of the few good things here. Merc armor customization is generic for the most part and will make you recall playing through better Resident Evil games where you were decimating these mercs.

Multi-Mission mode supplies you with a variety of game modes where you are able to re-spawn. This is a little more fast paced and a little more enjoyable but even at my most hopeful, clunky controls would hinder total immersion. The cover system is something that really leaves the game a long way from where it needs to be. The fact that an opponent can run up to you while in cover as easily as they are able to makes it completely useless, outside of hiding.

Umbrella Corps also offers a single-player mode. While I was playing through the multiplayer matches, I kept telling myself that maybe they saved the best stuff for single-player. Again, I was wrong. This mode consists of you mind-numbingly blasting your way through zombies and collecting DNA viles that are dropped. After a few of these types of missions, additional generic objectives are added to later missions that include, collecting briefcases, clearing areas, etc.

“clunky controls  

hinder total immersion”

I’m a huge Resident Evil fan and I had a very hard time finding anything worthwhile contained in this misguided spinoff. The fascination with being a merc for Umbrella, dissolves quickly. The weapon upgrade system and the chargeable hatchet are the only shining lights that remain when all is said and done. Any fun that is had is short-lived and doesn’t give any reason to revisit. Let’s all look forward to Resident Evil 7 and try to forget this departure ever existed.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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