PS3 Review: Resistance 2

Resistance 2 throws away everything that made the first Resistance’s single player experience so much fun, but the new multi-player Co-op mode more than makes up for it. Maybe they should have just launched it as a multiplayer title and called it Resistance Online?

Insomniac’s Resistance: Fall of Man was probably the best launch title for the Playstation 3, featuring some fun, classic first-person shooter action with an off-line 2-player co-op mode through the single player campaign. The game also featured some basic online multiplayer, but the main draw to the game was the single player adventure. Unlike most “console-ized” FPS games *cough Halo cough* Resistance: Fall of Man stayed true to the hardcore roots of the genre, featuring a wide arsenal of weapons and, of all things, a health bar.

But even more than simply having he features, Resistance did it all right. The weapon-switching system, where you held down a shoulder button and picked the weapon from a radial menu, worked really well and, once you knew which direction each weapon was in, you could switch weapons as quickly as you could on a PC with the number keys. The game also featured a slower, more methodical pace, where players simultaneously handled overwhelming odds and seemingly impossible challenges but also had the time to scout around and find the best route to attack the problem.

Resistance 2 does away with all of those niceties. The game is fast and in-your-face, which doesn’t mesh well with the high accuracy yet hard to aim control interface. Gone is the wonderful health bar, instead your screen just goes red and eventually you die. And, most disturbingly, gone is the arsenal of weapons, replaced by a very limited two weapon system. Oh, sure, there’s still tons of different weapons in the game, but you can only pick up two at a time, and their ammo is so limited there’s no sensible way to carry your weapon of choice past areas not specifically designed for it. You pretty much use the weapons they lay out for you, and it’s pretty obvious what they want you to use and where. Heck, they should have just skipped the whole ‘hold square to switch’ and simply forced the weapons they want you to use straight into your hands.

Oh, wait. They actually do that throughout the game.

The graphics in Resistance 2 are another bundle of mismatched odds and ends. Some things in the game, like the animations, are really smooth and nice. The water animation is particularly amazing. On the other hand, the resolution is low and suffers from very notable pixel crawl, there’s no sign of any effort to anti-alias anything, the textures are extremely crude on many objects in the environment, and the particle effects are so blocky they look like they came straight from a 1990’s DOS game.

There’s also a lot of neat things that made Resistance unique that are, again, absent from Resistance 2. One of the fun things you could do with the standard enemy Chimera shock troops in Fall of Man was to shoot out the coolant tubes connected to the radiators on their backs, causing them to overheat and explode. Not only does Resistance 2 lack any sort of environmental interactivity on that level, the Chimera don’t even have coolant tubes anymore.

The single player experience in Resistance 2 was a very big disappointment, but the multi-player more than makes up for it. Resistance 2 features an on-line co-op mode where up to 8 players can play partially randomly generated missions. The way it works is pretty ingenious: each map has a large number of pre-scripted ‘encounters’ with full voice-over direction. When you play on any given map, it randomly assembles a number of these encounters together to create an ‘adventure’ for you to play. After playing enough, you’ll start to find many of the encounters to be familiar, but it still doesn’t have the boring, repetitive feel that truly static maps have. You never know what encounter will be next!

Even better, Resistance 2’s co-op is class-based to promote team-work. There are three classes: the soldier, the medic, and the sniper. The soldier acts in a tank-like role, by putting up a shield that other allies can hide behind and shoot through. The trick is that it has a limited amount of ‘ammo’ before the shield takes too much damage and falls, so snipers, who also re-supply the team with ammunition, have to stick close to the soldiers and keep their shields up. Medics just go around healing people who can’t find a shield to hide behind.

{slot15}

Even more MMO-like, you gain experience and ‘grey tech’ that let you level up your three classes and purchase upgrades for them. The whole package is a great and very fun multi-player game that alone is worth picking up Resistance 2 to play. It seems clear that this was the true focus of Resistance 2’s development. The multiplayer game features a huge number of enemies and players and projectiles and explosions and handles it all like a star, probably thanks to the lower textures and particles that, while a detriment to the single-player experience, blend so fluidly into the multi-player game that you don’t notice them.

So, in the end, you’ll probably want to pick up Resistance 2 for its multi-player game rather than single-player campaign. Sadly, both off-line and on-line co-op of the single-player campaign is absent from the game, though you can play the new co-op mode with two players split screen. You can also go online with two local players, a very nice touch.

Score: (single player) 8.5/10 (multi-player) 9.5/10

What's new with Review? Latest News In PS3

You can share this Review news story with your friends or family from our PS3 section. This article can be shared through e-mail or sent to online social Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. You can choose from one of the options below.

Share Article Link:

Send Link via Email: