Resists the Temptation to be Excellent and Settles for Above Average (Resistance 2 (PS3))

Member Name: dj981

Product:	Resistance 2 (PS3)
Date:	20/01/09 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Big Guns. Shiny Guns.

Disadvantages: Which the game then turns on its own feet and fires

It's an unwritten gaming rule that whenever aliens get all sassy and decide to attack the human race its going to be down to an assortment of absurdly macho special ops types to put their hats on straight again. You know, the kind of men who are one ill-fitting leotard and some ridiculous facepaint away from being capable deputies for your typical WWE wrestling line-up. It's another unwritten rule that at some stage an enormous explosive device must be hauled into the depths of the enemy mother ship by their glistening biceps before the ten-titted master alien pushes the big red button and unleashes the apocalypse on our unsuspecting human arses. In this sense at least, Resistance 2 worships at the altar of derivative sci-fi game narratives. Yet remarkably in some ways it manages to beat some originality from what is, at its core, a rotting cadaver of generic shooting.

I haven't played the tepidly received original Resistance: Fall of Man, so to be honest I was massively confused from the outset as to how and why events had transpired thus far. That said, I did embark on my journey in the knowledge that the first game was set in Northern England and caused a rather amusing stir for staging a battle in a place of Christian worship. Clearly the invading Chimera had grown tired of smashing the granny out of key strategic targets such as Churches in Rotherham, and decided they had bigger fish to fry. The focus for battle has rather sensibly been moved to the U.S., where the developers seem to be more comfortable and imaginative. The atmosphere has a distinct 'End-Game' feel to it, with towns and cities overrun with Chimera and their spawn, and alien ships skirting menacingly across the skyline. Enough of the hackneyed storyline though, as I'm sure you can work out the basic premise given it's been done a thousand times in one form or another. The question you probably want answering is why you should buy this game when you've already got several almost identical titles cluttering your DVD rack.

My answer? Guns. Lots of big, shiny guns.

Resistance is all about the variety of weapons and providing the environments and set-pieces to fully enjoy them. There are guns which shoot bullets. There are guns which shoot explosives. There are guns which shoot bullets and explosives. There are guns which fire through walls. There are guns which shoot oversized shuriken and send them ricocheting off solid surfaces. There are guns which attach tags to living targets and can be used to guide fire around corners. There's the obligatory Rocket Launcher and Chain-gun. There are several different varieties of grenade. As you can probably gather, Resistance is all about gun porn of the highest order. It might not have the sophisticated equilibrium of human vs. alien weapons witnessed in Halo, but the sheer imaginativeness of the tools at your disposal more than compensates.

All this gunplay would be a dull affair without solid level design, and despite suffering the same linear corridor/set-piece/corridor repetition as most FPS games, Resistance packs enough variety into its locales to make full use of the sci-fi arsenal at your disposal. From twitch-shooting through dangerous forests, to the more tactical flavour of the futuristic Chimeran architecture, the scope to explore your ever-expanding arsenal of weapons widens as the game gathers pace. To its detriment there's almost always an overt 'best' method of completing each section - a point reinforced by its habit of having the correct weapon for the task ahead conspicuously placed in your path - but the experience isn't dulled significantly by this as the action rattles along with enough pace to make you forget that you're being spoon-fed.

The only bile I'd fire in the direction of level design relates to the mercifully infrequent quasi-platforming sections, which, as anyone without a pickaxe implanted in their temple will tell you is a bad idea on par with starting a bonfire on a petrol station forecourt. For some inexplicable reason the developers saw fit to task the player with a few fiddly jumping sections to progress to the next set-piece, with the penalty for losing your footing into the mire below being an insta-death mauling at the hands of an indestructible mutant fish. Far am I from being an expert level designer, but this struck me as a perceptibly crap idea. Platforming and the first person view share the same physical relationship as water and oil; they just don't mix. It struck me as a cheap way of stringing the action together when things started feeling a little repetitive. In fact, more unfair instant death scenarios crop up elsewhere in the game, which given the generous and mainly sensible checkpointing are more minor annoyance than major frustration, but they do serve to weaken the sense of satisfaction a little.

The only other real bugbear I had with Resistance was the AI. On normal difficulty at least, the ability of my Chimeran opposition lurched erratically from unerring gnats-left-buttock-from-200-yards accuracy to abject custard pie lobbing comedy stupidity. There just didn't seem to be any middle ground between pinning me down under intense fire from distance and charging indiscriminately toward my position on some lunatic bullet-slalom. More significant still, there lacked any clear cohesive strategy between onrushing enemies; this is perhaps where titles like Halo and Gears of War wind down their windows and shout some obscenities before haughtily accelerating away into the distance. That's not to say Resistance doesn't offer a comparable challenge - on Normal settings a competent player will find plenty to keep them occupied - it's just that most of that challenge is attributable to volume of enemies rather than their respective intelligence. Advancement through the tougher encounters is more a question of finding a sequence through repetition than thinking on your feet. The final boss fight is also a disappointment, especially as they wasted programming time on an archaic 'escape from the exploding ship' race against time section I thought went out of fashion with shoulder pads, although my tolerance for unsatisfying conclusions to games has been raised a notch after playing Gears of War 2 so I'll file this finale away in my memory under 'crap, but not Gears of War crap'.

On the Multiplayer front Resistance manages to provide an initially satisfying if unsophisticated experience. Up to sixty players in one game may sound alluring, but these claims are put into perspective by the fact that it's not 30 vs. 30 as suggested, rather smaller groups fighting localised battles as part of a larger cumulative unit. Weapon balance is the chief issue which prevents this from challenging the Halo's and Call of Duty's of the online world; the sheer volume and variety of weapons available serving the ironic purpose of destabilising the gameplay and removing some of its satisfaction. Most of the larger game lobbies descend into confused and disjointed run and gun affairs, although the chaos factor can be reduced by joining smaller parties. Ten v ten seems to work best, and if you can find some players who know their onions and want to play as a unit, you'll easily lose a few hours online chasing trophies.

Overall Resistance rates very high in some areas, then goes and lets itself down like some serial-tanking sportsman afraid of success. It's as if they got scared of how good it could have been and decided to include some crappiness in case the sequel seemed too much of a departure from the first game. Some of the set-pieces are brilliant, the weapons great fun to use, aesthetically and acoustically it's highly competent - it could have muscled its way into the upper echelons of a very competitive and saturated genre. As it stands, a lack of refinement in key areas leaves it occupying a middle ground between the stellar FPS fraternity and the parade of mediocrity its predecessor resides in. Still, progress is a good thing, and on this evidence the inevitable Resistance 3 should be something to look forward to.

Just scrapes a four. Rent it. Use it. Dump it.

Summary: Almost brilliant, but still the PS3 awaits its AAA shooter