5 Reasons Why the Resistance 2 Beta Sucks
Our Trophy Wars competition isn’t the only internal battle here at PS3 Attitude.
Whilst that is our personal ‘deathmatch’, the Resistance 2 Beta has created a ‘team deathmatch’ by splitting us straight down the middle.
Some of us (wrongly) think the R2 Beta rocks, but the more balanced members of the team aren’t blinded by the light of new-ness. We’ve seen all sorts of ‘wrong’ in the R2 Beta. Here’s our top 5…
1. Unbalanced weapons
Use the Wraith, you win. Use anything else, you lose. Seriously, could the guns be more unbalanced if they tried? Even the (formerly) mighty Carbine can’t match the new weapon on the block and in a game like Resistance this can’t be good. The day everyone starts using the same weapon because it is the only one worth using is the day the game dies.
2. Bugs. Lots of bugs.
Now don’t read this the wrong way, but when we’re playing Resistance 2 Beta we spend a lot of my time inside other people. And walls. And hills. And logs.
If it can be walked up to, it can be walked halfway through. In one game we even saw the enemy sticking halfway through a wall. I know it’s a beta, but please! It comes out in exactly one month from today - you think they have time to fix that?
And whilst we’re talking about the graphical issues, let’s just point out one more thing. The ‘water’. We say ‘water’ in quotes because it looks and acts like oil. Or treacle. Or honey. We’ve never seen such a uniform and unrealistic ’splash’ in all our lives, and the resulting wave is about four times the size of our puny human bodies. It’s as if an invisible - and yet perfectly spherical - elephant (named Gertrude, just in case you were wondering) jumped in with us.
3. 60 players online creates confusion.
60 player online is one of the big selling points of Resistance 2. And organising everyone into squads seems like a good way of getting small teams to work more strategically.
But there is no real incentive to do so. You don’t get penalised if you stray far away from your squad and there is no organisation of tasks, so there is no incentive to play as a team. The voice chat can be as clear as you like but with no goals or incentives to work together it’s a mute point.
Consequently you get 60 people who, at the sound of the starting pistol, scatter across the map. The end result? Twice as many people as usual running around like headless Chimerans not knowing what to do next.
4. A million bullets later…
Just how inaccurate are the guns in R2 right now? You shoot, and shoot, and shoot and still the bullets don’t hit the target. Or if they do, you need so many of the darn things that your enemy needs to look like Swiss cheese before they drop.
“But it’s OK”, we hear you cry, “you can press L1 to increase accuracy”. Except that in our tests the L1 button makes almost no difference to accuracy at all. Shooting from the hip is as accurate as using L1. The only benefit we’ve seen so far is that the Wraith keeps spinning under L1, so it starts shooting the one million bullets you need to take out your opponent just that little bit faster.
5. Where’s the fun stuff?
Insomniac make some of our favourite games in the world. Through the Ratchet & Clank series they are known for their inventive weapons and fun gaming experiences.
Resistance: Fall of Man had some of that pedigree even though the subject matter was all together darker. The weapons in the first game showed the same kind of invention seen in the R&C series (especially the Bullseye, Hedgehog grenades and Auger) and the multiplayer was good fun because of the variety it offered.
But Resistance 2 just doesn’t feel as much fun to play in multiplayer mode. Maybe it is a consolidation of all the problems I’ve highlighted above, or maybe it is just because I’m so used to Resistance: FOM that this doesn’t feel like a huge leap ahead. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
Unlike the other half of the team here at PS3 Attitude Towers, we know that CoD 4 is still the multiplayer daddy. Warhawk is still second.
Thankfully everything we’ve mentioned in 1-4 above can be fixed before release or by way of a patch. Let’s just hope number 5 is fixed by improving the other 4.
Was für ein n00b hat da wieder gespielt?
