Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

At the time of this review, it is very difficult to get your hands on a Playstation 3.  We are only a few days past the launch of the system, and early attach rates (how many items were purchased in addition to the unit itself) have been an abysmal 1.5 units.  I can tell you what title people are picking up to raise that attach rate without doing a single bit of research – they are picking up Resistance: Fall of Man.  Unless their systems went off to the land of speculative scalping, everyone I know with a PS3 has picked up this title.  What did they know that I didn’t?  As soon as I laid my hands on the system, it was the first disc to enter the tray.  After spending the last few days with the title, it is clear to me that everyone who picks up a PS3 should own this title – even if just to show off the amazing visuals to your friends.  While it won’t justify your purchase by itself, it is certainly a great flagship launch title. 

Resistance: Fall of Man starts off on July 11th, 1951.  A decade earlier, a genetically altered race of creatures called Chimera had assaulted the Eastern side of Europe.  It seems that Russia had begun a genetic alteration program in the 1930s, and their success had turned on them.  Early rumors spoke of unparalleled destruction to cities at lightning pace, with the entire continent falling under the black blanket of the insect-like Chimera by 1950.  England, thinking themselves safe, hid behind the natural water barrier between them and the rest of the continent.  The Chimera had other plans and dug under the channel, devastating all of England within three months. 

The United States launched a counter-offensive on the Eastern coast of England on July 11th, 1951.  You play as Sergeant Nathan Hale, a member of this offensive, as the game chronicles the events of July 11th through July 14th – the last day you were seen.

Sony has been shouting from the rooftops how powerful their system is.  Like any good launch title, Resistance: Fall of Man does a good job of giving us a taste of what developers have learned thus far, as well as giving us a glimpse of the potential for the system.  Since Resistance: Fall of Man takes place in an alternate timeline during the 50s, it is essentially set in the World War II environment. I wouldn’t be so hasty as to call it that though as the game is clearly more Sci-Fi than WWII shooter.

As I mentioned above, England has fallen to the Chimera.  The vast majority of the game is played in and around these war-torn buildings.  While the buildings are pretty standard fare WWII-Era bombed out husks, the terrain around these buildings is where things stand out.  During an early cutscene, everyone in your squad is cut down by the enemy, with only you surviving the encounter.  Before this happens, you’ll find yourself taking in the fantastic environment around you.  The surrounding trees look as good as anything we’ve seen to date on other platforms, but the framerate is locked at 30.  Flexing the horsepower of the PS3, the ground is similarly covered with plant life.  Weeds and grass stir around your boots, dust settling as you march through the dirt.  Similar attention to detail is paid to the weapons, and to a limited degree, the environments.  An excellent lighting engine shows off muzzle flash and light sourcing from your various weapons, and helping to bring your impressive arsenal to life. 

The buildings in Resistance: Fall of Man are somewhat uninspired.  The brown and grey textured buildings contain a respectable amount of detail, but are ultimately just controlling your patch to your next objective.  It is what fills those buildings that’ll have your jaw agape.

As you move through the single player game, you quickly find out that the Chimera were once human.  Looking at the creatures trying to kill you initially, you can imagine that to be the case.  They are bipedal and have fairly humanoid characteristic.  Panning up their torso you’ll find that they look far less human than you’d might like.  Four (or more) eyes, fangs the size of shot glasses, and  a jaw that opens wide enough to consume your entire head in a single bite make for an enemy that you can loathe and feel good about blasting into oblivion.  On the back of most of the Chimera you encounter you’ll see a backpack with tubing that goes into the body of the creatures.  Taking an enemy down often causes these backpacks to break, spraying fluid everywhere.  Hidden weakness?  Only time will tell.  Later on you’ll encounter more mechanized Chimera, often augmented with far better weapons and armor.  Clearly the Chimera know no bounds when it comes to twisting the bodies of their human victims.  Much the way that your skin crawls when you see a particularly disgusting insect of some sort, the Chimera invoke a sense of loathing almost immediately.  There is clearly some brilliant art direction on these creatures and the folks at Insomniac Games should be commended for it.

While playing the game, my staff artist noted a stray bullet had struck the glass behind an enemy.  We both marveled at how great the spidering of the glass looked, and I stood there knocking out windows for a while before moving on.  This level of detail makes it that much tougher that the environment isn’t more interactive.  There is a set path and you’ll follow it no matter what.  There isn’t a single door in the city that you can open without it being scripted, not even by hammering it with a tank shell.  A little more interactivity or destructibility would have gone a long way.

Resistance: Fall of Man is visually impressive.  There is a great amount of detail in your enemies and your allies, and seeing dozens of both on the screen simultaneously without a single frame drop gives me a taste of what this system can do.  Many launch titles fall short in the visual department, but Resistance: Fall of Man is not one of them.

I’ve said it hundreds of times – sound can make or break a game.  It is clear to me that Insomniac is aware of this as well as they have enlisted some great voice actors to breathe life into their characters.  The game storyline is told through the observations of a female convoy officer as she retells the events of July 11th through the 14th.  You’ll meet up with her, several other British officers, fellow Americans, and more than a few Chimera that are superbly voiced. As great as the voice is, however, the sound effects are even better.

With a good surround sound system, you’ll get the full effect that Resistance: Fall of Man has to offer.  The skitter of the smaller Chimera, the distant orders of your comrades, the stiff spring sound of reloading your shotgun, the building energy of the Auger as it drills through solid objects – every sound in the game is rendered to perfection.

There is one area where the sound is somewhat ‘off’.  While war doesn’t need its own theme music, Resistance has almost none.  There are some generic soundtrack filler that races when a particularly harrowing scene plays itself out, and quieter slow-paced music fills the gaps when the action settles, but overall the game is fairly devoid of music.  A few instances also had the full-on action music going while nary an enemy was on screen.  Pretty minor for a game that gets so much right in the sound department. 

The controls for Resistance: Fall of Man are fairly standard fare.  You use the left and right analog to move and aim, the R2 switches weapons, and R1 fires them.  L1 handles alternate fire, while L2 makes you crouch.  X is jump and Triangle serves as both melee attack and an action button.  O tosses the selected grenade type and Square reloads.  The D pad cycles through your grenade types, as well as turning your spotlight on and off.  R3 rounds out the controls by allowing you to zoom your weapon.  While all of this is straight forward, it is when the Sixaxis controller comes into play that the controls get fun.

We’ve already established that the Chimera are predatory, using human hosts to conquer the world.  Every once in a while, and never when you expect it, one of those little Chimera bastards will attempt to make you the next host by jumping on to your face.  You shake the Sixaxis controller violently to shake the little beast off of your skull.  You can use an alternating left and right motion on the analog, but is really kills the fun.  While these moments are infrequent, they are pretty nasty and creepy when they do happen. 

There are a few moments where you have to briefly drive a vehicle, but are so infrequent and simple that it isn’t worth describing.  Your war will take place on foot.

Overall the controls work just fine.  The new controllers R2 and L2 buttons take a little bit of time to get used to, as does the fact that you can’t crouch in multiplayer when playing the Chimera (I guess when you are part of a parasitic horde hiding isn’t on your ‘to do’ list), but for the most part we’ve been here before.  Other than ridding your face of critters, you know what to expect here.

Knife, Pistol, Rifle, Shotgun, Machine Gun, Bigger Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher, Uberweapon.  This has to be the most tired linear progression model of giving players new weapons, but so many developers insist on using it.  Thankfully, this game is made by Insomniac – a company known for innovation in weaponry.  Veterans of the extremely popular Ratchet & Clank series, Insomniac gives us our weapon cache at a slower pace throughout the game, and the weapons are not just one-off derivations of the sad formula above.  Certainly, you’ll start off with normal weapons such as the M5A2 Carbine rifle and Rossmore 236 shotgun, but eventually you’ll lay your hands on the Chimera BullsEye.  This enemy weapon allows you to ‘tag’ your target with the alt fire, with subsequent rounds all ‘homing’ in on that enemy.  This is a fantastic alternative to the classic sniper rifle as it allows you to fire from cover.  The Auger is another fantastic weapon of Chimera design.  It allows you to fire projectiles that ‘phase’ through solid objects.  Needless to say, this completely negates cover.  Even more deadly is that it gains power as it shifts through objects, so feel free to fire on an enemy through a half dozen crates and pillars, the end result will be spectacular.  Eventually you’ll get a sniper rifle called the L23 Far Eye.  When you use this weapon, your heightened senses will kick in, allowing you to fire in slow motion with deadly accuracy.  You even get some new weapons for beating the game. There are more than 12 weapons in all, but I won’t spoil the fun of discovering them.  Let’s talk about grenades instead.

The grenades in Resistance: Fall of Man start off pretty normal.  You’ll be throwing standard Army issue pineapple grenades that do a surprisingly small amount of damage.  The Chimera on the other hand get cool grenades called Hedgehogs that pop up into the air and launch spikes in all directions.  You can also eventually pick up the Hedgehogs for yourself, as well as the Air Fuel Grenade which functions in a similar fashion to the plasma grenades from Halo.  Since they are rarer than the aforementioned title, you have to be very tactical and selective in their use. 

The health system in Resistance: Fall of Man is a familiar one.  You have four ‘sections’ to your health, and as you take damage that health bar will decrease.  If you stand still and out of danger, you’ll regain some of that health.  Should you lose enough health to put you below one of the sections you can only recover to the top of the previous section.  This ensures that you can’t simply rest and get back to full health any time you please, which adds a bit of tension to the firefights.  You’ll be less likely to stick your neck out if there is a good chance you could take lasting damage from it.  You can get more health from Chimera canisters, but those are spaced well enough to keep the tension high.

Milton Berle once said “Only steal from the best” and Resistance: Fall of Man could easily be accused of that.  There are nods to Half-Life, Halo, Call of Duty, and many other FPS classics without committing outright theft.  It takes a lot of the conventions from those titles and puts a cool spin on them in a genre that often has little to no innovation to speak of. This title is clearly Sony’s flagship title for the launch, and while it won’t sell PS3s like God of War III or Grand Theft Auto IV would have, it’ll do just fine…if you can get your hands on the hardware.

Once you’ve put in the 10-12 hours it takes to complete the single player game, you should really invest yourself in the multiplayer of Resistance: Fall of Man.  Insomniac gives us a whopping 40 player multiplayer system that can be customized greatly.  You can play via the PS3’s online system, or via WLAN with your local friends.  There is a robust ranking system that allows you to find players of similar skill.  You can also set up clans, which are rumored to be manageable on the MyResistance.net site, which is currently in Beta testing. You can also set up a party of your friends to allow you to join a game as a group.  This entire infrastructure is meant to support both ranked and unranked multiplayer modes.  You have Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag as staples of any FPS, but Insominac brings a few new modes to the table as well.

Meltdown is a new mode which you try to destroy the cooling nodes of the enemy reactor.  Once a node has been destroyed, it serves as a spawn point, so this turns into a real war of attrition between both sides.  Breach on the other hand is similar to Meltdown in that you are trying to destroy a reactor, but you can defend the capture points with turrets to make it harder to retake.  This mode was more popular than Meltdown as it required a bit more teamwork.  Finally, the most popular mode is Conversion.  In Conversion you start off this deathmatch as a human, but if you are killed you come back as a Chimera.  Once you are killed a second time you are put into spectator mode until the end of the round. 

To add to the fun, the humans and Chimera play slightly different.  Humans have the ever-present Radar to help navigate to their objectives and they can hide behind objects, crouch, and run.  The Chimera are more frenzied, eschewing the crouch, run, and radar functions for a very cool Rage mode that allows them to see their enemies through obstacles and do double damage at the expense of a small portion of heath.

There is one other option that you should know about on the multiplayer side of things – co-op mode.  You can play the entirety of the single player game with a friend via the split-screen co-op mode.  Unfortunately, the fun ends there as you cannot play co-op online.  With Insomniac prying 40 players into one multiplayer match, it is a complete mystery to me why they couldn’t get co-op online running. 

The only pain I felt playing online multiplayer is the hardware and software shortage of the PS3.  It was hard to find a good 8 on 8 game, much less a 40 player server.  Until more hardware gets into the channel, the multiplayer matches will be fast, furious, and unfortunately small for the time being. Until then, be content with the various difficulty levels of the dozen-hour single player game.

While you run through the single player portion of the game you’ll acquire points for simply fighting well.  You’ll get a point for using a turret properly, another point for using a grenade to take out a nest of enemies.  You’ll get one for driving the tank and taking out roadblocks.  These points are used to unlock concept art and the like, if you are into that sort of thing.

Resistance: Fall of Man gets a lot of things right.  For a launch title it is exceptionally good.  You normally expect to see this level of polish a year down the road for a new platform.  The single player is robust and action packed, while the multiplayer tends to be a bit more tactical.  While there aren’t a lot of people with PS3s at this point, as players join the online modes this game should fill out nicely. 

Gaming Trend Score

89

1. Graphics: 90
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 87
4. Gameplay: 90
5. Value/Replay: 87
6. OVERALL:89