Resistance: Fall of Man review (PlayStation 3)

I’ve been playing video games for my whole life (give or take a few years) and I honestly never thought that for my first experience of a new console I’d be playing a game that took place in Grimsby. To be fair, it is only one section of the game in Grimsby, but it took me by surprise. Resistance: Fall of Man is a first person shooter from Insomniac, the creators of Ratchet & Clank, but before you go forming comparisons between the games, they are few and far between. An exclusive launch title for the PS3, Resistance gives you control of U.S. soldier Nathan Hale in the midst of second world war, but instead of Nazis taking Europe by storm, it’s aliens.

Now, the casual reader may miss this fact, but yes, an alien force, known as the Chimera have invaded Europe, leaving a trail of destruction, death and futuristic technology that give us an alternate history. The story continues with Great Britain losing the war, and much like you may expect, America saves the day, through a lone soldier’s efforts and skills. Unlike most games of this style, it does try to explain why it falls to you to fulfill all of the objectives rather successfully, giving back story between each level with a combination of video sequences and still images as if the entire experience is being told as an historical story, which seems to fit the style well.

An FPS is an FPS

Undoubtedly anyone familiar with the genre will know pretty much what to expect, and without giving you too many surprises, you’re probably quite close to the mark, but that doesn’t avoid the fact that while Resistance breaks few new gameplay design boundaries, everything it does is done very well. Health is broken into four bars, and while each bar can be refilled with a health canister, a partially filled bar will recharge after avoiding being hit for a few seconds. As an example of the PS3’s power, it does have some outstanding set pieces, and without exception, the level design is superlative. Creating a war torn Britain could have been formulaic and pretty repetitive, but the combinations of alien installations and even the towns that you will explore look unique and very stylish.

Environmental effects, acting as the cherry on top put a nice finish to the game’s visuals, with heat haze, a fantastic glass breaking system, and snow effects that look stunning. The physics engine is also put to great use as explosions rock the environment, and everything has a decent weight from cars rocking and doors swinging open when shot to the occasional brilliant use of using the environment to your advantage, shooting away walkways to cause Chimera to fall to their death.

More visuals

The enemy design is suitably psychotic, giving us a wide variety of monsters to kill, admire and simply run away from. All of them can take a pounding with almost every weapon, which emphasizes their power, but can sometimes frustrate when you do need a few perfect headshots to take even the weaker menials out. The weapon design is perfectly adequate, but many of them are harder to identify because of their similarity. Sometimes it would be nice to have more visual range to the (substantial) array, so that you can instantly tell apart everything from sight.

The design of the usage of the weapons however is fantastic, and a throw back to how good Ratchet & Clank’s were. There are the standard Shotgun and Machine Gun present, but others such as the Auger that shoots through walls (and becomes more powerful with each wall it passes through) and has an alternate fire that creates a barrier only allowing Auger shots through and the Bullseye, an alien machine gun that gives you the alternate fire of a homing target, that once planted will make all shots fly towards it, are inspired in their implementation. The Bullseye even has a neat trick where you can hold your alternate fire button while firing normally creating what they call a Bullseye Trap that spins the projectiles around you. The weapons are truly balanced very well, and added to by a series of grenades that come in very useful in a firefight. My favourites are the Air-Fuel Grenade that latches onto a surface, sprays out fuel in the vicinity and then ignites it to fireball the entire area, and the Backlash grenade that explodes out a shield that can block all Chimera firepower; a barrier to either contain the enemies or protect yourself from incoming fire.

Why do creatures always scream at you?

Resistance certainly satisfies in the sound side of things, orchestrally enhancing the mood with original dramatic music, and creepy alternatives depending on the events taking place. If you finish a big firefight, the music will come to a natural conclusion to relax the tension, and build if something big is coming to stomp on you. Equally, the voice acting is nothing to sniff at, mid-game barking out orders, reactions and even congratulating you on a job well done. (My favourite is being locked in a room with a rather powerful chunky enemy, only to emerge to the sight of friendlies, one of which announces ‘Lucky bastard, you haven’t got a scratch on you.’)

While the story is hardly a Final Fantasy mammoth showpiece, it is more than respectable for a game of this genre, and it develops in front of you, through the back-story between-level segments and also through pieces of ‘Intel’ you will find scattered around the levels. There is incentive to collect them all, not least to read what information is contained within that could help your tactics, but also because collecting certain numbers will give you ‘Skill Points’.

No doubt borrowed in concept from the Xbox 360’s Achievement system, as you play through, and fulfill certain criteria (such as killing enemies within a level using only alien weapons, or even the questionable ‘squat over 15 hybrid corpses’ called ‘lovely parting gifts’) you are awarded points, that will unlock further aspects of the game, such as optionally reflecting the maps or allowing you to watch a ‘making of’ feature on the game. This gives plenty of purpose to playing the game through further times, and trying to work out what the cryptic messages are demanding can be an amusing pass time. Take ‘Why are these candles screaming’ for example; setting fire to a number of enemies within 30 seconds will unlock that one, whereas ‘Acupuncture is cheaper’ can be achieved by killing 3 or more enemies with a single Hedgehog Grenade.

One area to the next

The flow of the game is more than impressive, taking you from area to area before it gets boring, and the constant development of your enemies and your own weapons keeps the game interesting even on the second play through (a whole new menu of new weapons is unlocked by completing the game once), and changing weapons is a breeze, holding your change weapon button to pause the game into your weapons menu while you move the analogue stick to the direction of your desired item.

As if that wasn’t enough, the occasional vehicular level brings another aspect of variety to the gameplay, giving you a Tank early on and a speedy Jeep to run over enemies with as you visit Somerset. The one aspect that I would bring attention to is the slight regularity and formulaic qualities to some levels, when you will find it very obvious that a swarm of leapers is coming when everything seems a little too quiet, but this is no different to the crescendo of music in a horror movie alerting you to an upcoming shock.

Be a Chimera

A few nice multiplayer modes are present, with a great Co-op mode for you to play with a friend locally on your machine if you have two pads yet. It is a shame that it can’t be played over the net in co-op, but perhaps the scale of the battles, AI, and physics at work made that tricky to implement. Online gives us a load of standard modes like Team Deathmatches (one side are the Chimera, and the other are the poor scared humans) and a few more interesting ones such as Meltdown that demands you capture and defend objectives and Breach that lets you capture spawn points in an attempt to destroy your opponents reactor.

The online modes work very well, are great fun to play and I might add are free, giving further life to an already solid, decent length single player experience. There is promise of some downloadable content to be added to the game and made available within the next month or so, and while this is likely to be a couple of multiplayer maps, ruminations of further single player experiences and story are floating around the net. Either way, if it explains a little more about the sinister ‘Cloven’ mentioned throughout the game, that you’ll have to play the game to find out more about, I’ll be happy.

Ultimately, as a launch game, Resistance has held my attention through at least two play throughs already and I have no sign of stopping yet. The harder difficulties provide enough of a challenge to keep me going for quite some time (as well as a few more skill points if I can finish hard.) It seems obvious that a lot of effort to refine the game’s experience has paid off, and despite one half hearted attempt at using the Sixaxis controller in a novel way (if an enemy grabs onto you, you have to shake the controller till you are freed; unfortunately, you are never sure if you’re really having an effect), it feels like it is not necessary in making Resistance: Fall of Man an excellent shooter, and a must by for PS3 early adopters. It is a great game, and I am inches away from giving it a higher score than I am doing, but with the potential the Playstation 3 has, I don’t think we should set the bar too high too fast, despite my full recommendation of the game.