Brief review of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

I finally finished the Wii game on normal difficulty today (except the ridiculous gallery minigame you unlock), and I have to say, on the whole, I found it very enjoyable. Addictive, even.

A few observations:

--I took about 20 hours. Each stage you beat earns you stars (even if you re-play stages you've already finished), which you can use to upgrade your weapons. The 20 hours includes re-plays of beaten stages, as well as multiple tries at first-time finishes.

--The graphics are OK, but nothing spectacular like those on RE4.

--In the early stages especially, the music is pretty terrible. Techno is not scary. In fact, one the whole, the game is more arcade shooting than horror -- there are some scenes that can creep you out a bit, but nothing makes the heart beat fast like much of RE4 (and the other RE titles) did.

--There's a surprising amount of strategy for a point-and-shoot light-gun-style game. You have to conserve ammo, decide when to pick up health when you have multiple chances to, make split-second decisions for dealing with enemies getting ready to hit you, etc. (Shooting them in the legs works well.) The bosses, while frustrating -- I should tally the swear words it takes to beat each game I play -- force you to develop strategies for dealing with each attack. Once you figure it out, you can beat them without taking very much damage at all.

--Many reviewers have decried the difficulty of getting "critical" or one-shot-kill hits; you have to shoot the zombie at the top of its head. It's true enough, and this makes it hard to get a good ranking on some stages (you're awarded stars based on whether you got an S, A, B or C), but it's very possible to beat any stage without a single critical hit. Once you get a knack for them (maybe 30-50 percent success?), they work well for conserving ammo -- the pistol has unlimited bullets, so if it can instantly pop zombies' skulls, you can use your heavy-duty stuff on a boss instead.

--It's kind of stupid that the boss of the game is in a hidden stage (get an A or S ranking on Raccoon's Destruction 3, then beat the stage that unlocks to get to Dark Legacy 2). It's also weird that beating him unlocks yet another stage.

--There are some frustrating glitches that really should have been fixed. For one, when you "retry" a stage, you can't pick a different weapon, so once you decide on a gun, you're stuck beating the whole stage with it, even if it turns out to be a bad match. Similarly, once you start a stage, you can't abort and try a different one instead, at least without going through a screen that implies it will delete your entire game. Maybe I'm misreading, but I didn't want to risk it.

--The health system is too primitive. You get a health bar, and when it's depleted, you're dead. You can pick up herbs that replenish more than half of it, and you can get first aid sprays that refill the whole thing when it runs out. The two don't interact well -- essentially, the game creates a needless dichotomy around whether you get to an herb before you need your first aid spray. Say a health bar is equivalent to 50 damage (the game assigns no numbers) and an herb refills 35. I have a first aid spray and a full bar (100 total health), and I have to go through a bunch of enemies to get to an herb. If I take 51 damage from those enemies, the first aid spray gets used and I'm down to 49 total health. When I get the herb it hardly does anything, because you can't fill your bar beyond 50. However, if I take 49 damage, the herb will increase my health from 1 to 36, and I'll still have the first aid spray for 86 total health. Taking 2 extra damage costs me 36.

All told, I'd give it 4/5 stars.

UPDATE: I've been getting some Google hits asking how to use the first aid spray. You don't use it; it automatically re-fills your bar when you run out of life.