The best launch title on any platform, and a great FPS as well. If you have a PS3 you need this game. It's that simple.
Resistance: Fall of Man, or R:FoM for short, is a first-person shooter set in England in the 1950's where Hitler never got a chance to strike because a terrifying alien race known as the Chimera struck first. Nathan Hale, an American soldier fighting the Chimera in an overrun England is the main character in this story, and the whole thing is narrated by a woman he meets for a brief time in a Chimeran facility. The ideas behind the story and the mythos to the game are engaging, but the characters introduced are hardly explained, not to mention that Hale says about 5 sentences throughout the campaign. But that can be forgiven as the entire videogame is amazing, and just the story of the Chimera invading is engaging enough. The campaign is truly an example that many first-person shooters should live by, the length of it being about 14 hours, which is longer than most FPSs (especially you, HALO 2!). And though throughout most of the game you will be fighting against the standard-issue "Hybrid" Chimera, there is enough variety in level design to keep you occupied enough to hardly notice. Plus, there are quite a few different types of Chimera so it's not to say that the Hybrids are all you will be shooting at. The levels are amazing. When you get farther and farther through the game, the blown up city streets of England start changing more and more into Chimeran bases and just to see all of the Chimeran technology progressing throughout the game is a reason to keep playing in itself. Another thing that really shows off the power of the PS3 is the fact that when you go through a level, especially an outside one, so many things are happening at once that you won't know where to look. It's truly a sight to behold when you run through a war-torn England setting while guys in bunkers are having their heads cut through by bug-creatures, helicopters are being blown out of the sky, enemy dropships are hovering past, all while about fifty Chimeran soldiers are running up towards you while another ten flank your position with red glowing bullets whizzing by your head while you're still trying to figure out which gun to use. The game also shines with its spectacular physics. The glass is the most realistic ever seen in a video game when it's being shot at for one thing. When you shoot aliens who were all standing in the same spot, they won't just fall down and glitch through each other, no. In the next generation there is no glitching. They all stack on top of each other in a big pile. Even when they're up against a small railing their arms or legs wont glitch through it, their limbs will react completely realistically, hanging on it or doing whatever depending on how they hit it. Throwing grenades it extremely fun to see as the bodies fly in every which way, and though they are using ragdoll physics, the ragdoll physics look so much more real here, totally immersing the player into the game.
The graphics, while extremely attractive when everything's in motion (if maybe the slightest bit cartoony), when you run up real close to somethig and look at it, the textures really are pretty low-res. For example, I was running around and this certain wall looked really crisp and clear, like a real brick wall. And so I had to investigate, and when I looked at it close, it was actually a blurry mess that wasn't very impressive on any front. So the moral of the story here is don't look at the textures up close because they will disappoint. But on the flip side of that coin, some of the wooden floors and things like that have some extremely realistic bump-mapping, making it supremely satisfying to circle strafe them and just look at the light reflect off of them (yes, dear readers, this is how I play my video games). And the Chimera character models, especially the Hybrids, which were scaled down but still have the properties of 1,000,000 pixel models (!) look amazing when you just gaze at their dead bodies on the ground. Not to mention if you shoot one of the tubes connecting from their little backback things which cool them down the tubes will spray round and round until they run out of air, the cool part about it being that they cut in the exact spot you shot them in. Just pay no attention to the ground under him which looks like the background in a blurry photo of Sasquatch.
But, the real draw here isn't the graphics but the weapons, considering this game is made by Insomniac, creators of the Ratchet & Clank series. And how they deliver! There are plenty of weapons to choose from, each not being your standard issue shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle (though those are in the game) but hey all have special properties when you press L1 (or whatever button you set it to because of its fully customizable controller settings). So, the sniper rifle has a focus mode which slows down time and makes the blood which gushes from the spot you shot them in like no game has really done before that much more satisfying. There are also the alien weapons, like the bullseye, which can "tag" an enemy for a short time, making it so every shot you fire hits that target until you run out of time or until he's dead, there's the Auger, which can shoot through walls and make shields for a few seconds, there's the LAARK rcket launcher, which can stop its rockets in mid air until you tell them where to go, and much more. And the good thing is that the weapons aren't just your HALO style human tech and then alien tech that does the same exact thing but just looks different, they are all unique. And, as if that's not enough, once you beat the game's campaign mode once, you can play it a second time, but in the second playthrough, there is a whole other set of weapons to get as the game progresses, maming it have twice the amount of weapons you'll see in the single player campaign in your first playthrough.
What the game really does, as many sources have said already, is combine all of the elements of the best first-person shooters. But in my opinion, it just makes something completely different, which has never quite been seen before in this fashion. And the multiplayer is amazing too. It can support up to 40 players in a match and if you have less, it will scale down the levels to support the size of the game. It has a bunch of different modes to play in (though not as customizable as something like HALO 2 in ranked games, but what game is nowadays?) including such faves as capture the flag, deathmatch, and team deathmatch. But there are a few Resistance-specific online modes such as Conversion, where everyone starts out as a human with two lives, if they die once, they respawn as a Chimera and if they die again, they are out. The last player standing is the winner. It's actually quite fun to play, as are all of the modes in the game, thanks in part to the special abilities of each race. The humans can sprint forever (which is a bigger advantage than one might think) and have maps that tell you where all allies and enemies are, but can't shot accurately while sprinting, and the chimera can go into a rage mode which makes them a little harder to kill, lets them sprint, can shoot accurately while running, and lets them see players through walls if they're a certain distance away, but if they stay in that rage mode too long, they will overheat and start losing health. Though in concept it sounds like the Chimera have an advantage, it's a very well-balanced trade-off in practice. The only thing about the online is that when you die you will almost always glitch through something. Your arms will go through the wall you're next to, and things like that, but who cares? It's the online mode, and it's not really supposed to have as much realism, but besides that, the graphics are pretty much the same. The game has its own achievements, which can unlock you new clothing and appearance modifications to your online characer, though there are no achievements cross-games like in Xbox Live. And the only other thing about online is that your friends list in the game does not add them to your friends list out of the game.
But despite its few minor flaws, Resistance is a game that doesn't really change the way you'll play games forever, but it is surely something you haven't seen before, and if you were lucky enough to get a PlayStation 3 on launch day, this is the one game to get with your shiny new hardware. Resistance delivers on all fronts, and it delivers in spades. This might just be the best launch title of all time on any system and it would have impressed a year into the launch of the system, it being out now makes it just that much more impressive. If you have a PS3 you need this game, it's as simple as that.