It's an amazing ride from start to finish, and leaves you wanting more.
There is no defense. There is no cure. Each of our casualties just increases their numbers. Russia went dark over a year ago. Europe fell a few weeks later. The Chimera will reach the other continents within days. It is July 11th, 1951. Amidst the ruins of England, U.S. and British forces take a final stand…
There are two things that truly make this game stand out:
1) This game was a launch title for the Playstation 3 that does NOT include GIANT ENEMY CRABS!!! Lol…All jokes aside, all you really have to do is HIT ITS WEAK POINT FOR MASSIVE DAMAGE!!! Seriously though, the production values for this game are truly phenomenal for a launch title or any title within a console's first two years actually.
2) The gameplay is actually really good for a First Person Shooter considering the fact that the company that made this game only made one FPS game before, and that was Disruptor for the Playstation nearly eleven years ago. For a company that has only made games in the Spyro vein for eight years, this is outstanding.
And now, it is time to get a little more in depth with this review. So, without further ado, let's get down to the nitty-gritty:
Story:
Like I said above, Resistance, follows the tale of Nathan Hale, a Sergeant in the United States Army who was on his merry little way to Europe…York actually, to meet up with British forces for an all out assault on the Chimera. What I didn't tell you, is how he makes it to York. He arrives shaken, not stirred, and is thrown right into the fray when his helicopter is blown out of the sky by several Chimeran foes. York was thought to be safe, or at least, someone told them it was. Sounds like a trap to me. The game puts you into the heat of battle right off the bat, telling you to use a simple but effective Carbine, which is more commonly known as a machine gun.
The story is told through a combination of cut scenes, and image stills with overlapping narration. However, there isn't a lot of story, but what there is happens to be really gripping and engaging. I cannot reveal much, but I will tell you this: it started in Russia. What British intelligence thought was experimentation for biological warfare turned out to be much, much worse. The story REALLY picks up around level two of the campaign, where the Chimera launches a spire attack on York. Out of the spires come literally thousands upon thousands of Crawlers. These little insects happen to carry the virus that is responsible for the creation of the Chimera. Normally, the virus sends its victim into a coma, and then they are collected by Chimera transports and sent to a Conversion center to speed up the process. The Chimera power these centers through miles upon miles of underground power conduits. They use tunnels under the earth to maintain and uphold these power conduits. Each tunnel leads to a tower that outputs the power needed for the conversion centers by use of a single nuclear fission reactor. Destroying that reactor will destroy the tunnels and stuff connected to it. I shall not reveal anymore. Due to the story being great, but sparsely mentioned, this part of the review shall take an acceptable 8.5 out of 10.
Graphics:
Being a first gen title for a new platform does not excuse a game or having bad graphics. Fortunately, this launch title (first gen title) has some of the best launch graphics I have seen in a good long while. Everything about the graphics is polished and clean. Enemy animations are fluent, as are your allies. This game manages to convey the setting perfectly. The graphics are realistic, yet fantastic at the same time. I have only two complaints. One: fire sometimes looks like paper. Two: the water definitely looks fake. These little things do detract from the overall tone of the game itself. This section receives a score of 9 out of 10.
Gameplay:
Ah! The place where it really counts! What is a game without gameplay? A movie? Well, despite the fact that Resistance LOOKS like a movie, it is an actual game! It is a first person shooter, something everyone is probably familiar with in this day and age. For those who don't know, a first person shooter puts you behind the eyes of the main character and requires you to take aim with the weapon. Resistance leaves the norm in some respects. Resistance uses a combination of regenerative health and health packs. You can regenerate ¼ of your health, but to get more than that, you need to find a health pack. In theory, this is a great idea. In execution, this method sucks. Your character absorbs damage like a wet sponge, not very well at all. It takes about two or three hits and you're down a bar and a half. I wouldn't mind so much if there were more health packs. As it is, the game throws you into a room with half of your ammo gone (at least, it took ME half of my ammo to kill a certain group), with half of your health, two health packs and then it throws thirty or so enemies at you and says," Good luck!"
Where the gameplay exceeds is all the crazy weapons you have and how the enemies take death. Some don't take it very well at all, while others will take multiple hits to bring down. One of my favorite weapons has to be the Auger. This weapon shoots energy bolts that can shoot through any solid object. The guns alternate fire shoots a semi-permeable energy shield. By semi-permeable, I mean that it will only allow Auger bullets to pass by. At the same time as being the coolest weapon, it is also the most useless. Why? Well, it's not very fun or smart to use this weapon after you get it due to the fact that almost every other enemy carries one as well. On top of the crazy a** weaponry, you also have crazy a** grenades. Yes, I said it…Grenades. What is a FPS without grenades? One that isn't very good. You have your standard frag grenade…Boring, I know, bear with me, it gets way better. Then you have something called the Hedgehog. All this unique little grenade does is blow up and send fifty or so sharp, painful needles towards the enemies. Can anyone say shish kebob? Then we have the Air-Fuel Grenade. This is quite possible the best thing since sliced bread. Simply throw the grenade, and a cloud of noxious fumes saturate the air around it…But that's not all. Within seconds, the fuel ignites, causing your enemies to feel the pain of a thousand suns…Just be careful though, fire does tend to hurt those that it touches, even you.
I've talked enough about the weapons. Now I need to spend eight years of your time talking about the single player. Roughly nine to ten hours long, the campaign consists of you fighting thousands of foes across war-torn Europe. You'll go from big, open battlefields, to dark and scary corridors, to a peaceful summertime gorge, back to dark scary tunnels, and then into a war-torn city known as London.
How were those eight years? Time for the multiplayer. The online is absolutely, without a doubt, horrifyingly abysmal. After five minutes of being online, I wanted to stab myself in the face with a dinner fork because of all the annoying little noobs. Everyone says that PSN doesn't have these annoying little buggers, but I found a whole nest of them. And even if it didn't have these noobs, the online still wouldn't be very great. Why? Because all the matches have the One-Hit-Kill mode turned on. Why in the heck would anyone wish to play that? A game of who can squeeze the trigger faster? I'm sorry, but I need games with skill involved, not little nooblets that shoot the mess out of everything when a bird flies by. The coolest part of the gameplay is indeed the co-op story mode. This section receives a score of 7.9 out of 10.
Extras:
This game features a plethora of bonus material, all unlocked by doing tasks in the game, tasks such as teabagging fifteen enemy corpses. There are also skill points that are awarded or accomplishing extra tasks in the game, such as killing every enemy in a certain room with one weapon that has limited ammo. While these features are great, nothing compares to playing the game on a higher difficulty you unlocked. While this sounds like a GOOD idea, it is really a bad idea due to the difficulty on Easy being extreme, having FULL use of the word. This section receives a score of 9.5 out of 10.
Score: 9.0/10
Recommended: Highly