Once you hit the more alien architecture, the game just goes "teh wow."
Resistance is so fantastic for a few reasons: first, it's really the first great "Playstation franchise shooter" that is going to become symbolic of FPS on PS3 for the next generation, and second, the core elements of the game are done SO DAMN WELL. Satisfying gunplay, smart AI, rocksolid framerate, huge open environments...
Ok, after the majority of Manchester this game is freaking awesome. The gameplay is just SO FREAKING INTENSE. Mines popping out everywhere, great variety of hard ass enemies running around and hiding everywhere. Tons of stuff going on all the time. Really, really fun game.
I can see why the early stuff seems sorta unimpressive too. Since they wanted a locked 30fps with no drops/slowdown from start to finish they had to make the early non-crazy parts 30fps even though they probably could've had them run at 60fps. I guess it would be jarring if the early parts of the game were 60fps and then when huge battles with a billion things flying everywhere was going on the game dropped to 30fps. I'm fairly impressed by the number of enemies, amount of destruction, amount of bullets going on at any one time.
The little touches are extremely nice as well. I love seeing the birds flying around, the dust blowing by, signs swinging as their hit, concrete exploding into pieces, etc.., etc; the game is just so incredibly polished. Moreso than the majority of launch titles to date.
The weapons are also very enjoyable. firefights through walls are INTENSE (well all battles are). Running through areas with 1 hit until your dead, fearing every corner and new step of ground and hoping to see a yellow container is a very engaging experience. Good stuff.
Now, as a graphic's whore I gotta nitpick a bit on the visuals as I think the game was this close to being one of the best looking next-gen games, but because of one single thing they completely blew it and that makes me upset
AF
Here is a shot of a building. Why a shot of building? Well because when I was standing at this distance (aka, 15 feet or so away) the building looked like a blurry mess out of a last-gen game.