14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
The PS3s Creepier Answer to Halo
Date of Review: Nov 10, 2008
The Bottom Line: If you can pick this up cheap. It's fun, has replay value and solid multiplayer matches.
Hooray! Another super realistic game that sends me wading through millions of enemies with a personal arsenal and limited or no allies. I've never seen anything like this before, oh wait, they named a whole genre after it.
To be fair, I was glad to have played Resistance: Fall of Man as the credits rolled through and have it in my library. I'm not quite sure though if it's just because I bought it used more than a year after it came out and that I had spent several nights rushing through it.
The plot is fairly straightforward at first - some type of species called Chimeras is taking over most of the world rapidly and England, the final hope of Europe, is all but overrun. American officials reach some type of deal with the Chimeras to stay out of the conflict, but secrectly send in soldiers, a.k.a you.
Enter Sgt. Nathan Hale, the only American soldier in your company to survive the initial firefight. Hale travels throughout England, working with the British resistance forces to repel the Chimera out of the occupied country. The game through nine towns/cities, with all but the last giving you three objectives to accomplish. The final location is London and your mission list is much longer. As you progress, the story is narrated by a woman leading the resistance from a past POV with black and white cinematics.
Most of the time the game pits you against hordes upon hordes of Chimera by yourself. Often they're just located in your path and right in front of you, although you'll sometimes find them drop down from behind or sneak up. What makes things even worse is when they pit you against a Stalker - a Chimeran vehicle - that shoots a machine gun, kill you by stepping on you and is only vulnerable on its back. I spent a lot of time in several levels running around trying to shoot it before the darned thing pivoted and opened fire on me. Only I didn't say darned and there were lots of colorful words flying out of my mouth at loud volumes as my controller went flying.
The dark and evil factor is one of the cool parts of the game. Your missions are just as likely to lead you in some dark tunnel as they are outside in the bright sunlight. You're given a flashlight, called a spotlight in the game, which helps some, but you're still very much in the dark. And of course, you're bound to run into plenty of baddies, like hybrids - the foot soldiers of the Chimera, while you're running around in the dark. There' nothing like making progress through a poorly lit bunker only to run into enemies.
Many of the Chimera act like humans, standing on two feet with some type of weapon and attacking you. However, there are a few special breeds that are far more likely to catch you off guard. Leapers are small, fast, scorpion-like creatures that run in you in large waves with only a sound as your warning, while rollers, which roll even quicker and spray venom are there advanced form. But by far, the scariest enemy has to be the weakest - the menial. They look like zombies and stumble about like them, easily killed by a couple of shots. But let them get close to you, or back into one, and they jump onto you, biting until you shake the controller to get them off. You find more than a dozen of these guys in one later level and its beyond easy to have one sneak up behind you.
Your weapon selection is ok at best, at least through the first run. You start out with your trusty M5A2 carbine, an automatic rifle with grenade launcher. Early on you'll pick up the hybrids weapon, the Bullseye - which allows you to tag an opponent and rapid fire projectiles towards that opponent from anywhere. Of course there's a shotgun, rocket launcher and a sniper rifle, even a take on the traditional railgun. But hands down, your arsenal gets some serious "BAM!" with the help of two experimental American weapons. The Hailstorm fire bolts at superfast speeds that bounce off of walls, it can also be set as an automatic turret. The Sapper, on the other hand, plops down biological mines. Yes, I said plop. They may sound and look stupid, but they can be a lifesaver when dealing with leapers and rollers.
You also start out with a couple of frag grenades, but pick up two others along the way. The Hedgehog grenade shoots out a ball of spikes while the Air Fuel grenade emits a flammable gas before igniting it. I'm a huge fan of the Air Fuel grenades because of the massive damage they do and the fact that they stick on walls.
Once you beat the game, it actually rewards you by granting access to five new guns and a fourth grenade. I haven't gotten around to going through the campaign again, but some of them I've used in deathmatches. The flamethrower shoots green flames, in bunches with the secondary weapon. I'd like to know why couldn't I use some of these in the first go around, they'd have made several situations a lot easier.
As the game picks up and you start using the Bullseye more and more since there's more ammo to go around, you'll notice that tagging enemies can sometimes be difficult. That's because crouching - hold L2, zoom in - hold R3 and secondary fire - press L1 is fairly difficult to do. Unfortunately, not all of the controls can be reassigned to every other button, leading to asinine and awkward fingering.
Another somewhat awkward feature of the game are your allies. Usually they're not good for much more than fodder and often they're few and far between. However, they will sometimes take out their fair share, especially if you protect them. This does not include Lt. Cartwright, who absolutely wrecks Chimeran forces with his sniper rifle.
Along the way you're also tasked with finding intelligence documents. Depicted as manilla folders lying around, intel offers information about specific Chimera strains, their suspected plans and other potentially useful stuff. Unfortunately, the game tells you everything in cut scenes anyway, so it's not really worth going out of your way.
And speaking of going out of your way, Resistance incorporates a bonus point system. The player can earn skill points by performing certain actions, squatting over 15 dead hybrids or defeating certain enemies with a specific weapon. Apparently the rewards for earning points are artwork and skins, although I never bothered. Good luck figuring out what earns you points though, you'll never figure it out by yourself.
But, because I feel guilty how bad I make Resistance sound, the story is more intriguing as you get towards the end. It left me feeling more in Hale's shoes then any other part of the game. And the ending reveals a few clues about things you may have seen in the game, but leave it wide open for the upcoming sequel.
If you've got a buddy available to come over to your place, the game borrows from Halo and lets you lay a co-op campaign. The maps are the same, but there are twice as many enemies. Thankfully, allies can heal fallen comrades to half-life, or just wait 30 seconds for the same effect.
Resistance also has a local deathmatch game, but why play with one other person when you can go online and destroy reactors in Breach, transform from humans to Chimera to spectator in Conversion or just kill the other race in Team Deathmatch.
