This is the game everyone is looking at to set the tone for the PS3. Can it bear the weight of these heavy expectations?
This is it. This is the game Sony's been talking about, the flagship first-party title for the launch of the PS3. This is the game that's intended to usher in the "HD Era," the marquee title for the new system. This is the game everyone's looking at to set the tone for the PS3. Of course, it's not at all fair to lay this heavy a trip on a single game--but fair or not, Resistance is the first-party game Sony's pushing the hardest for launch, and that means it has a great deal to live up to. Now the question is: Can it bear the weight of all these heavy expectations?
The answer is a reasonably solid "yes." But before I go into detail, let me tell you what Resistance isn't. It's not the greatest first-person shooter ever devised, nor is it a revolutionary leap forward in technology. Its graphics won't make your brain explode, nor will they make you think you're living in the fourth dimension.
What Resistance is, though, is a really excellent, story-driven FPS. It's a marked step forward in the genre, bringing together elements from some of the best shooters on the market, infusing them with Insomniac's insane ability to craft unconventional weapons, and wrapping them up in a beautifully presented package.
From previous coverage of the game, you may think Resistance looks like a World War II shooter. Seeing other screens, you may think it looks like a sci-fi horror game in the vein of Half-Life or Doom 3. You'd be right on both counts. The game takes large-scale, cinematic action that's reminiscent of epic band-of-brothers WWII shooters and fuses it with claustrophobic, edge-of-your-seat horror segments where it's just you and whatever horrible thing lurks around the next corner. And both elements work really well.
One of the most impressive things about Resistance is the very topmost level design. I'm talking about basic pacing, balance, sound design--that sort of thing. These elements all mesh to draw you inexorably into the game. Here's an example: I'm working my way through the streets of Manchester, England with a group of my fellow soldiers. We're slowly advancing on a fairly well-entrenched company of Chimera. We move from cover to cover, popping out and taking potshots at any goon foolish enough to show his face. As we move on, the enemy forces grow more and more dense, until the air is thick with bullets flying from both sides. It's a madhouse, but we keep relatively cool; a few comrades go down, but our losses aren't too high. Gradually, we clean out the area...and it goes quiet.
Too quiet. Suddenly, there are no bullets flying, no explosions, not even any stirring martial music playing in the background. It's just our footfalls and the distant sound of pigeons. We know there are more Chimera hiding out somewhere, but we have no idea where. So we move into a narrow street, checking windows and doorways as we go. The tension grows. A house sits open to the elements; I dash in with a fresh clip, expecting to find a raging Chimera kegger going on inside...but it's silent, save for the creak of floorboards.
Back out on the street, we advance slowly, ever more slowly, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We hear the sounds of a deserted city, but nothing else. After a few more moments, I start to relax, figuring we've passed the worst of it.
We're just nearing the end of a deserted street when all hell breaks loose. Chimera jump out from behind abandoned cars and open up full bore on our squad. I literally jump, open up with machine-gun fire, just spraying wildly in the Chimera's general direction; all my squadmates do the same. It's pandemonium, I've lost track of which way we were heading, and all I'm thinking is that I've got just one bar of health left and nowhere to hide to recharge it if I get nailed. Picture the scene in Aliens where Vasquez finally loses her s*** and just opens the throttle of that waist-slung machine gun all the way, screaming and swiveling. It's kind of like that.
When the dust settles, I take stock of our kills: two. There were only two Chimera hiding on this street. But I was so high-strung from the emptiness before that the encounter was as threatening as if I'd faced a whole squad.
This effect wouldn't have worked if all the elements hadn't come together just right. But the combination of the long, empty pause, the effectively minimalist (almost Kubrick-like) sound design, and the depleted health from the previous firefight made this extremely minor encounter into one of the more memorable moments in the game for me.
That fine sense of high design extends into level structure as well. All of the settings in Resistance--11 separate areas divided into about 30 chapters--exhibit impressive variety; you move from tightly enclosed spaces to wide-open fields of battle and back again. And while the levels are actually fairly linear, clever design tricks make them feel extremely open.
At the end of a deserted street, all hell breaks loose.
And that openness is a good thing, since it gives you a nice, broad arena in which to make the most of the game's really exceptional weapon lineup. As I mentioned previously, we learned from the Ratchet games that Insomniac can whip up some truly odd weapons, and they make good use of this ability here. It's toned down a bit, to be sure--you won't find any black-hole launchers here--but it's clear the developers were thinking outside the box.
Take, for example, the Bullseye. This snazzy little number lets you send out a "tag' that future bullets will all home in on. Guy around the corner getting you down? Pop out, tag him, and then duck back behind cover and let loose a stream of homing bullets to finish him off.
Or there's the Arc Charger, which links enemies in a sizzling jolt of shared electricity: Zap one guy, and when you hit someone next to him, he takes additional damage. Or the Hailstorm, featuring ricocheting bullets (that actually increase in power after bouncing off surfaces) and alternate fire that creates a whirling turret of doom.
That openness is a good thing.
Even traditional weapons get unusual treatment here. The sniper rifle in Resistance boasts an interesting feature, for example: When looking through the scope, you can slow down time to let you get the perfect head shot. And the rockets for the rocket launcher feature an innovative air brake: Squeeze the alt-fire button and the rocket slows to a stop, allowing you to guide it by hand after launching. You can even have it tag along behind you like a faithful retriever. A retriever that explodes. You know, whatever.
With a generous amount of variety in setting and tone, Resistance does a nice job of keeping things moving; the 12 or so hours it took me to finish the game on medium difficulty seemed to fly by. And those 12 hours are just the beginning; there are significant reasons to play again. First, the game includes four weapons and one grenade that can only be accessed on your second playthrough. Second, the higher difficulties offer a legitimately new challenge in the form of more enemies (often placed in areas that were quite safe the first time through) rather than just more difficult ones. And finally, there's no way in hell you'll get the whole story your first time through.
And that leads me to Resistance's most significant flaw. While the alternate-history backstory provides exceptionally fertile ground for both the setting and the story, the story itself ends up feeling surprisingly thin. It's told in an unusual style, and it certainly goes beyond the FPS standard (which is, basically, no story at all), but it fails to expand far beyond the fairly traditional alien-invasion or viral-infection trope.
There are significant reasons to play again.
Here's the interesting thing, though: While playing straight through gives you this somewhat thin story and surprisingly weak ending, Insomniac allows players to flesh out the story in unusual ways. For one thing, scattered throughout every level are intelligence documents--primarily journals of the recently departed--that occasionally offer hints for upcoming segments, but more often deliver tantalizing glimpses into a broader story, a story that seems to extend far beyond what the main story line delivers. Beyond this, though, is the game's website, which features an extensive timeline of events leading up to the game. And furthermore, the game itself will offer clues that can be used to explore the website more thoroughly. It's an interesting experiment, employing an element of the alternate-reality game (like the I Love Bees ARG designed to promote Halo 2) to make sense of the main story of the game itself.
It's nice to see developers thinking outside the box a bit, but I couldn't help feeling like it would have been better to have a satisfying story in the game and then more stuff to find in addition to that, rather than having to do detective work to fill in fundamental holes in the plot. Perhaps I'm lazy.
This is a fairly minor gripe, though...as are most of my other gripes. For example, I found the humanoid Chimera hybrids--by far the most numerous enemy in the game--to be a little too similar; while there's a nice variety in enemy types overall, more often than not you're encountering minor variations of the same type, which can get a small bit monotonous. I also found a couple of the weapons to be significantly less useful than the others, but of course that could just my particular playing style.
Another complaint is that, while the game features an extensive competitive online component (for details, see the Unfriendly Competition sidebar on the left]), co-op play is splitscreen only. The designers insist that co-op is more fun in person, but for those of us who do most of our multiplayer gaming online, the lack of online co-op feels like a significant omission.
To me, though, these are minor quibbles. The bottom line is that Resistance is a truly excellent FPS, rich in variety, atmosphere, and sheer entertainment. With a launch game this good, I can only imagine what untapped power lurks in the PS3's innards.
Verdict: A supremely competent shooter that excels at top-level design. A few minor flaws hurt the overall score, but not much.
Score: 9|10
