Resistance: Fall of Man

Along with Ratchet and Clank, I decided to grab the equally ridiculously low-priced Resistance. I had heard nothing but great reviews, it's a PS3 "classic", and I needed an FPS in my arsenal of games so I figured why not.

I have to say, I am severely disappointed.

Resistance is an alternate history scenario where instead of the Nazis ruining everything, a rogue alien force called the Chimera attack the world. From what I could understand it's essentially a virus that mutates humans into disfigured killing machines who need a cooling system attached by tubes to their back since it massively upgrades their metabolism and would normally cause them to combust. You play through the game as Nathan Hale, an American soldier sent over to Britain to help them defeat the infestation. After battling your way through several of them, a gigantic spire crashes into the ground, releasing tiny spores which infect and kill everyone...but you. Instead of mutating into a Chimeran, you simply gain the ability to regain portions of health over time and use the equivalent of Chimeran med packs. So you and your newfound abilities go out and wipe the Chimeran scourge from Britain.

While the premise is certainly interesting, almost nothing is done with it. This is one of the most typical first person shooters I've ever played, with no real innovations. There are some interesting alien weapons you can pick up, the most interesting of which is the Auger, which allows you to shoot through walls (and that increases in damage with each barrier it goes through). The first alien weapon you get, the bullseye, has the much required function of letting you "tag" enemies and then fire anywhere and still hit your target. Why required? Well let me tell you.

This game made the horrible mistake of trying to be a cover based game, with no cover controls. The only way you can dodge most things is to hide behind objects by ducking, and even then most enemy weapons will still catch you on the head. Yet the game likes to throw huge crowds of enemies at you and give you plenty of places to hide, but as soon as you pop your head out you get a nice huge volley of plasma in your face. Cause you don't just pop your head out. You can't. You have to move your entire body out from behind cover, get a few shots off, return to cover, heal after a few seconds, then rinse and repeat. It's a reaaaaally boring strategy, especially when many times you can just run into the crowd, toss some grenades, shoot like mad, and then find health packs and ammo refills right around the corner to recover. Only towards the end of the game does that not really work anymore.

There are some missions where you get to drive a tank, which you think would be awesome, until you try driving it. Instead of doing the normal thing and having the left stick be full movement with the right stick just swiveling the camera, they decided that the left stick is only used as acceleration in the up and down directions, and then you have to swivel the camera to where you want it to go. This creates endlessly frustrating situations where you would like to, say, move to the side while still shooting at big bad guys but have to turn the camera away from them, move, and then turn it back to fire. IT'S STUPID.

A couple "boss" fights happen along the way, though they're more sub-bosses that show up repeatedly as the game goes on. When they first showed up, I thought "ALL RIGHT, AWESOME, LET'S DO THIS!!!!" and then killed them rather quickly and kept killing them over and over as they kept showing up. The first boss you fight is a giant mechanical walker that is vulnerable at a point on its back, and you keep trying to get around it and let your little soldier buddies distract it long enough but EVERY FUCKING ENEMY has the amazing tendency to pick you out of a crowd and focus all their fire on you. Then you remember you have a gun that can shoot through anything and sure enough it gets the job done. Well at one point you face three of them in a row, along with a giant baddie that spews bio-mines at you or just claws you if you get too close. This was about the closest thing to an epic, hard, and awesome battle there was in the game. But what about the ending you ask? Isn't there some gigantic boss waiting for you at the end?

Nope. You get an improvement to the bullseye right before the final battle, which made me happy that I could start kicking more ass, but then you quickly realize that all the other enemies now have it and their health upgraded too. So basically...there is no point to it. It takes the same amount of time to kill them and the increased damage they do is negligible. So you're there in this ultimate Chimeran tower that is supposed to be the most heavily defended and impossible to destroy places in Britain, and all you have to do is kill some normal enemies and a miniboss to reach a button that opens these panels and expose these rods that you shoot and destroy while avoiding enemy fire. That's it. That's the end. You blow up some rods while you avoid getting killed. No huge epic monster, no nothing. It was one of the least satisfactory endings to a game ever.

I can understand that maybe around the launch of the PS3 it was considered excellent since the other launch titles were crap, but by now I'm surprised so many people don't recognize it as nothing more than a standard FPS with a great premise and lackluster execution.

Resistance: Fall of Man gets a 6/10.