It's World War 2, and aliens have invaded.
That was the tagline that summarised what I knew about Resistance: Fall of Man back when it was pretty much the only game worth mentioning in the PS3's library. It is a game I didn't really look into for a while after I got the PS3, and I think I should have snapped it up much sooner than I did because it really was an awesome game. I fondly remember play through the entire campaign in co-op mode in about two sittings; not because it was short, but because we loved it so much we just kept on going!
But Resistance came out in 2006. That's a long time ago by gaming standards; Half Life was still fairly fresh, Halo could still pretend it wasn't a cash cow franchise, and Call of Duty hadn't begun to fuck over an entire genre with its bland, uninspired white-supremacy-promoting "modern" gameplay. How does this old warhorse hold up compared to the games of today?
Well, let's be honest here; in a lot of ways, it doesn't. My immediate concern with the game was its control layout, which was clearly designed by someone who'd never played a FPS on the Playstation before. You can reassign the buttons to your heart's content, but I still can't get over how weird the defaults felt. There's something just plain off about pressing the right stick to toggle zoom on and off... oh, and there's no zoom animation. It's a binary switch; something that sounds petty, but boy is it off-putting during play.
Once you get past those controls, the next thing you'll notice is the graphics. Resistance does not look bad. It doesn't look great either; it's middle of the road, passable and aiming for a safe Grace C from the teacher. I never thought the game looked that good when I first played it , but that's probably because my first PS3 game was MGS4; a game that came out two years later, and is still a joy to look at.
The third thing you will notice is that, if you haven't learned how to use cover really quickly, the game has murdered you.
I didn't really appreciate how wonderful that is until I completed the game and moved on to the sequel. Resistance has no intention of holding your hand and gently walking you through a few set piece scenarios where you press a button to make the story go forward. Resistance introduces you to the health bar mechanic by giving you four slots, enemies that can take a slot off in about three hits, and then dumping half a dozen of them on you in the first five seconds. The initial segment of the game can prove one of the most challenging due to how unforgiving the health system is at this point, and it's not until mission two that you get the plot-provided regeneration ability that makes it playable.
On the subject of health, Resistance's health system is weird, and whilst I liked it at the time I now feel it hurts the game more than helps it. You have, as mentioned, a four segment health bar. By mission two, you can regenerate health in the same way modern FPS's do; by cowering like a little girl behind the nearest box. Where Resistance throws in a curve ball is that the regeneration only brings you back to the nearest 25%. So, if you're on 76HP you'll regen to 100. If you're on 74, you only regen to 75. Remember how I said you can lose one segment of health in 3-4 hits? Yeah... that's on NORMAL difficulty. You screw up even slightly, you can find yourself on half health before you've worked out who's shooting you. If the Chimera get a melee attack off on you, that's guaranteed to take at least 1/4 of your health, and in later levels it seems to be a one-hit-kill ability.
Try as I might, I cannot work out what they wanted to do with the health system. Your regeneration is too limited to allow you to play as you would in a normal FPS, where a few hits are accepted and ignored for the sake of scoring a headshot. By the same token, you don't have enough HP in total to make run-and-gun play viable. You have to cling to cover and tentatively snipe at one target at a time; take two Chimeran Hybrids on at once (these being the default enemies by the way) and you will almost certainly lose a health segment unless you blow them up with a grenade or something. Again, this is on Normal. Where it Hard I'd accept that as fine, but Normal implies something that will challenge the average, ordinary gamer. I'm the kind of guy who plays most games on Hard and wonders if I'd accidentally shifted the difficulty down somewhere along the way; in my opinion, the game is too tough.
...But maybe that's Call of Duty poisoning my brain. Maybe the filth that is the Modern FPS has corrupted me to the point where I expect the game to hold my hand and never give me a real challenge. During my retrospective playthrough I can't honestly say I died that often, and more than once I died due to my own stupidity - falling off ledges, accidentally throwing a grenade at my own feet, taking cover behind explosive barrels... you get the idea. The number of times I actually died to enemy action is probably no more than most other games. Why then do I feel like Resistance is so much harder than it should be? I guess it's the health bar again. The idea you can actually see how much health you have, and work out how many hits you can take before you'll die, is a concept long abandoned by the talentless hacks that pass for game designers in the FPS market. It falls to me, the player, to monitor my life and to go hunting for healing items when I screw up and take hits. Resistance is kind enough with said healing that you can make mistakes and still win the day; it even respawns you on full health when you die.
Sidenote there; this game is stingy as all hell with the checkpoints. Go into this expecting to redo most, if not all of a level each time you die. I'm serious about that. Again, I guess I'm used to having my hand held by games that give you a checkpoint each time you face more than two enemies at a time...
I've not talked about weapons yet, and I haven't done so because I wanted to get my bitching out of the way first. I honestly have no bad words to say about the weaponry in this game. Okay, the shotgun does feel a bit weak and I don't see why you'd ever actually need to use the minelayer, but the game gives you eight guns (plus more on your second playthrough I believe) and you can carry them all at the same time!
And such guns! Your default is a 50-round machine gun that has an under-slung grenade launcher. Next is the Bullseye - a Chimeran energy weapon that can fire homing tags, drawing the bullets into your target. The shotgun and rocket launcher are pretty much as you'd expect, but the last four are pretty special.
There's a minelayer that sprays sticky exploding gelatin, which explodes on contact or when you remote detonate. There's a flechette launcher that shoots bouncing bullets, and its secondary fire dumps the ammo mag out as an auto-turret. The sniper rifle has a bullet-time mode to allow you to line up headshots no matter how much fire comes your way.
Last, but by no means least, the Auger. This weapon is the bane of your life when the Chimera use it, but your deadliest weapon once recovered. It's a plasma rifle with noclip bullets, and its secondary fire is a force-field projector. What do I mean by noclip? I mean it goes through everything! Cover doesn't stop it, walls don't stop it, nothing stops it! I've seen Auger shots bore through a dozen pieces of scenery and keep on going. The thing can even be used on bosses to fire through the boss and strike its otherwise hidden weak points! The Auger is king, and it goes a long way to removing the frustration inherent to the 'hide to heal' game mechanic; if you're pinned down by enemy fire, shoot through the wall with an Auger and thin their ranks with impunity!
There's a couple of vehicle sections in the game too. They aren't bad at all really, especially in two player mode when using the Jeep. In single player the Jeep suffers a bit from having an AI gunner, but I never really resented these sections. They make a nice break and the controls work for the most part. I especially love being able to whizz about in the first Jeep stage as though it was a Mario Kart racetrack, performing crazy powerslides and jumping off stuff. The actual objectives become almost an afterthought.
So, overall, does this game hold up? I'm going to say "yes". It's not that pretty, the story delivery is a bit dry and stiff at times, the controls need work and the health system annoyed the hell out of me, but I enjoyed every last hour of it. Nothing about the game felt forced to me the way more modern games do. To highlight the difference I replayed the prologue mission of Resistance 2, and it felt awful. "Go here. Do this. Do that. Watch this setpiece. Watch another one over here. Look, Wargamer, maybe you should give me the controller so you don't miss all the really cool stuff we put into the game. What do you mean you want more than two guns? Why would you ever need so many?"
It's a problem with all modern shooters. I loved Resistance 2 to bits when it came out, so much so you could possibly have called me a Resistance Fanboy. Whilst I still think the Multiplayer holds up, the single player's opening left me frustrated, irritable and with no desire to keep going. The original Resistance, on the other hand, drew me in just enough to overcome my scepticism of how bad a 6+ year old FPS would be, and delivered a solid gaming experience that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Hmm... seems I'm getting a little off topic here. Maybe I should play Resistance 2 again and see how that game holds up...
Final verdict: If you own a PS3, you owe it to yourself to play Resistance: Fall of Man. It's rough around the edges and it won't amaze anyone who's played more modern titles, but it is a true First Person Shooter - a game, not an interactive cutscene. Plus, its setting and mythos are epic.
That was the tagline that summarised what I knew about Resistance: Fall of Man back when it was pretty much the only game worth mentioning in the PS3's library. It is a game I didn't really look into for a while after I got the PS3, and I think I should have snapped it up much sooner than I did because it really was an awesome game. I fondly remember play through the entire campaign in co-op mode in about two sittings; not because it was short, but because we loved it so much we just kept on going!
But Resistance came out in 2006. That's a long time ago by gaming standards; Half Life was still fairly fresh, Halo could still pretend it wasn't a cash cow franchise, and Call of Duty hadn't begun to fuck over an entire genre with its bland, uninspired white-supremacy-promoting "modern" gameplay. How does this old warhorse hold up compared to the games of today?
Well, let's be honest here; in a lot of ways, it doesn't. My immediate concern with the game was its control layout, which was clearly designed by someone who'd never played a FPS on the Playstation before. You can reassign the buttons to your heart's content, but I still can't get over how weird the defaults felt. There's something just plain off about pressing the right stick to toggle zoom on and off... oh, and there's no zoom animation. It's a binary switch; something that sounds petty, but boy is it off-putting during play.
Once you get past those controls, the next thing you'll notice is the graphics. Resistance does not look bad. It doesn't look great either; it's middle of the road, passable and aiming for a safe Grace C from the teacher. I never thought the game looked that good when I first played it , but that's probably because my first PS3 game was MGS4; a game that came out two years later, and is still a joy to look at.
The third thing you will notice is that, if you haven't learned how to use cover really quickly, the game has murdered you.
I didn't really appreciate how wonderful that is until I completed the game and moved on to the sequel. Resistance has no intention of holding your hand and gently walking you through a few set piece scenarios where you press a button to make the story go forward. Resistance introduces you to the health bar mechanic by giving you four slots, enemies that can take a slot off in about three hits, and then dumping half a dozen of them on you in the first five seconds. The initial segment of the game can prove one of the most challenging due to how unforgiving the health system is at this point, and it's not until mission two that you get the plot-provided regeneration ability that makes it playable.
On the subject of health, Resistance's health system is weird, and whilst I liked it at the time I now feel it hurts the game more than helps it. You have, as mentioned, a four segment health bar. By mission two, you can regenerate health in the same way modern FPS's do; by cowering like a little girl behind the nearest box. Where Resistance throws in a curve ball is that the regeneration only brings you back to the nearest 25%. So, if you're on 76HP you'll regen to 100. If you're on 74, you only regen to 75. Remember how I said you can lose one segment of health in 3-4 hits? Yeah... that's on NORMAL difficulty. You screw up even slightly, you can find yourself on half health before you've worked out who's shooting you. If the Chimera get a melee attack off on you, that's guaranteed to take at least 1/4 of your health, and in later levels it seems to be a one-hit-kill ability.
Try as I might, I cannot work out what they wanted to do with the health system. Your regeneration is too limited to allow you to play as you would in a normal FPS, where a few hits are accepted and ignored for the sake of scoring a headshot. By the same token, you don't have enough HP in total to make run-and-gun play viable. You have to cling to cover and tentatively snipe at one target at a time; take two Chimeran Hybrids on at once (these being the default enemies by the way) and you will almost certainly lose a health segment unless you blow them up with a grenade or something. Again, this is on Normal. Where it Hard I'd accept that as fine, but Normal implies something that will challenge the average, ordinary gamer. I'm the kind of guy who plays most games on Hard and wonders if I'd accidentally shifted the difficulty down somewhere along the way; in my opinion, the game is too tough.
...But maybe that's Call of Duty poisoning my brain. Maybe the filth that is the Modern FPS has corrupted me to the point where I expect the game to hold my hand and never give me a real challenge. During my retrospective playthrough I can't honestly say I died that often, and more than once I died due to my own stupidity - falling off ledges, accidentally throwing a grenade at my own feet, taking cover behind explosive barrels... you get the idea. The number of times I actually died to enemy action is probably no more than most other games. Why then do I feel like Resistance is so much harder than it should be? I guess it's the health bar again. The idea you can actually see how much health you have, and work out how many hits you can take before you'll die, is a concept long abandoned by the talentless hacks that pass for game designers in the FPS market. It falls to me, the player, to monitor my life and to go hunting for healing items when I screw up and take hits. Resistance is kind enough with said healing that you can make mistakes and still win the day; it even respawns you on full health when you die.
Sidenote there; this game is stingy as all hell with the checkpoints. Go into this expecting to redo most, if not all of a level each time you die. I'm serious about that. Again, I guess I'm used to having my hand held by games that give you a checkpoint each time you face more than two enemies at a time...
I've not talked about weapons yet, and I haven't done so because I wanted to get my bitching out of the way first. I honestly have no bad words to say about the weaponry in this game. Okay, the shotgun does feel a bit weak and I don't see why you'd ever actually need to use the minelayer, but the game gives you eight guns (plus more on your second playthrough I believe) and you can carry them all at the same time!
And such guns! Your default is a 50-round machine gun that has an under-slung grenade launcher. Next is the Bullseye - a Chimeran energy weapon that can fire homing tags, drawing the bullets into your target. The shotgun and rocket launcher are pretty much as you'd expect, but the last four are pretty special.
There's a minelayer that sprays sticky exploding gelatin, which explodes on contact or when you remote detonate. There's a flechette launcher that shoots bouncing bullets, and its secondary fire dumps the ammo mag out as an auto-turret. The sniper rifle has a bullet-time mode to allow you to line up headshots no matter how much fire comes your way.
Last, but by no means least, the Auger. This weapon is the bane of your life when the Chimera use it, but your deadliest weapon once recovered. It's a plasma rifle with noclip bullets, and its secondary fire is a force-field projector. What do I mean by noclip? I mean it goes through everything! Cover doesn't stop it, walls don't stop it, nothing stops it! I've seen Auger shots bore through a dozen pieces of scenery and keep on going. The thing can even be used on bosses to fire through the boss and strike its otherwise hidden weak points! The Auger is king, and it goes a long way to removing the frustration inherent to the 'hide to heal' game mechanic; if you're pinned down by enemy fire, shoot through the wall with an Auger and thin their ranks with impunity!
There's a couple of vehicle sections in the game too. They aren't bad at all really, especially in two player mode when using the Jeep. In single player the Jeep suffers a bit from having an AI gunner, but I never really resented these sections. They make a nice break and the controls work for the most part. I especially love being able to whizz about in the first Jeep stage as though it was a Mario Kart racetrack, performing crazy powerslides and jumping off stuff. The actual objectives become almost an afterthought.
So, overall, does this game hold up? I'm going to say "yes". It's not that pretty, the story delivery is a bit dry and stiff at times, the controls need work and the health system annoyed the hell out of me, but I enjoyed every last hour of it. Nothing about the game felt forced to me the way more modern games do. To highlight the difference I replayed the prologue mission of Resistance 2, and it felt awful. "Go here. Do this. Do that. Watch this setpiece. Watch another one over here. Look, Wargamer, maybe you should give me the controller so you don't miss all the really cool stuff we put into the game. What do you mean you want more than two guns? Why would you ever need so many?"
It's a problem with all modern shooters. I loved Resistance 2 to bits when it came out, so much so you could possibly have called me a Resistance Fanboy. Whilst I still think the Multiplayer holds up, the single player's opening left me frustrated, irritable and with no desire to keep going. The original Resistance, on the other hand, drew me in just enough to overcome my scepticism of how bad a 6+ year old FPS would be, and delivered a solid gaming experience that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Hmm... seems I'm getting a little off topic here. Maybe I should play Resistance 2 again and see how that game holds up...
Final verdict: If you own a PS3, you owe it to yourself to play Resistance: Fall of Man. It's rough around the edges and it won't amaze anyone who's played more modern titles, but it is a true First Person Shooter - a game, not an interactive cutscene. Plus, its setting and mythos are epic.