If I had told you back in 2004 when Ratchet and Clank had hit its high point with R&C3 that its developer Insomniac games would make a WWII FPS in around 2 years time you would have laughed in my face and gone back to your beloved Lombax-Robot dynamic duo. Well 2006 would have come and I would have slapped you in the face with Insomniac's new WWII FPS franchise Resistance: Fall of Man.
No cuddly mascots like R&C or Spyro, no colourful environments and no easy ride, Resistance: Fall of Man is one of the PS3's must own launch games.
You play as Nathan Hale, a US Marine who is in an alternate 1951 where World War 2 never happened but instead humanity fights a war against an alien race known as the Chimera. Se over 3 days in jolly old England you follow Hale's story of how he, a lone US marine, won the war for the entire British army...you can tell this was written by Americans cant you.
The story isn't all that good in Resistance to be honest, it had great potential starting with an interesting concept of Hale being infected by the Chimera and thereby being some form of Human-Chimera hybrid but it quickly boils down to being fuelled along samey grey corridors shooting the same five enemies for 8 hours to get a pretty lousy ending.
So if its that bad why did I say its a must own title? Well its all to do with the gameplay this time.
Resistance: Fall of Man is very reminiscent of Unreal Tournament in its twitch shooter gameplay. Its fast, frantic and often frustrating but it works so well because of Insomniac being developer. Imagine a grey FPS of Ratchet and Clank and you pretty much have Resistance in a nutshell. Each gun is distinctly unique and each have 2 firing modes, these include the likes of an M4 with a grenade launcher, a shotgun with the choice of 1 or 2 barrel fire modes, a sniper which has the ability to slow down time, a minigun that can fire a drone to shoot for it giving you another gun on the battlefield and even a gun with homing bullets. Resistance has it all and you will need to master each and every weapon to make it through the game.
This is because the enemy A.I make the game one of the more difficult shooters out there, they actively take cover or seek you out when you duck behind a wall. They throw grenades to dig you out of a hidey-hole or attempt to flank you in more open areas. The Chimera are smart and difficult to kill, not to mention that Hale seems to be able to take less bullets than a flimsy piece of wood before dropping dead due to non-regenerating health.
Resistance also has a few vehicle sections, though the sections where you control human vehicles are relatively fine its when you get to handling Chimera transport methods that the system needs a bit of work needing done to it due to unresponsive controls and getting caught on scenery.
Resistance doesn’t look all the good either. I mean its OK, certainly looks like it belongs on the PS3 rather than the PS2 but due to everything being either grey or brown it begins to get boring on the eyes very very quickly. The voice acting is pretty poor too with all the English character having overly posh accents and most of the dialogue seems awkward and unnatural. Plus they cant decide whether Hale should be silent or not so he has about 5 words in the entire game all of which use an overly gruff US Military tough guy attitude. Now this could all be for some kind of comical effect however it just comes across as lazy voice acting and poor decision making rather than something you can laugh to.
The games sound is generally very good though, a nice soundtrack, guns have a good kick to them and the Chimera things sound very sci-fi and nothing seems out of place.
So from reading this you might think that Resistance is a pretty poor game, well in many areas it barley reaches satisfactory standards however the excellent twitch shooter gameplay and unique concept ultimately win you over. If the subsequent sequels are more of the same it wont necessarily be a bad thing but if it does continue this way it wont be Sony's answer to Halo nor will it be the PS3's flagship series that Insomniac have provided on both previous Playstation consoles with R&C and Spyro.
Resistance: Fall of Man – 7/10
+Awesome Gameplay
+Interesting Concept
-Uninteresting Story
-Boring Colour Palette
-Poor Voice Acting
