Playstation System Game of the Week (Week of 11-11-12)



Resistance: Fall of Man-




Resistance was an early high profile game for the PS3 made by the developers known best for Ratchet and Clank, and Spyro the Dragon. Insomniac also developed the nearly forgotten PS1 FPS Disruptor, so they had some experience in the genre, even if it was a completely different style of FPS.

I remember the biggest complaint about the game was that the graphics looked like an HD PS2 game, but launch titles rarely push the system they are on. It may not look great compared to current FPS games, but it still looks good, and plays smoothly.

As far as the single player goes, though I have still yet to play Resistance 3 (sorry, my backlog of games is pretty massive, but I will eventually get to it), I like the single player campaign in the first resistance, probably upwards of ten times better than the one in Resistance 2. R2 was a big fat disappointment of over-scripting, cheap areas of instant deaths, and probably the weakest regenerating health system ever devised making Nathan Hale the biggest p***y ever in FPS history. R2 may have a bunch of great online modes, but it's single player was just blah in my opinion, vastly inferior to the original's SP campaign.

Resistance 1 may not have all the modes of R2 in the online arena, but it does have some hectic 40 player matches, and servers that are still populated. Even today, six years later, 40 player matches is pretty respectable for online multiplayer on the consoles.

As I said, I still really enjoy the single player campaign in the first Resistance. It may not have some of the current gameplay conventions in the FPS genre, like a sprint button, and full regenerating health (like the original Killzone, it uses a mixture of healt pickups, and regenerating health), but the smoothness and all around great feel of the gameplay makes up for it. The story may not be the most original or spectacular, but it is decent (the Chimera are sort of like the Strogg from Quake II/IV who were kind of like the Borg from Star Trek).

My only big complaint I have is that you cannot adjust the vertical and horizontal aiming separately to fine-tune the controls, so the aim feels just a little bit off. However, it still feels better in R1 than in R2. Another complaint that can be waged against the game by some people is that there is no trophy support for the game. I don't care about that myself, but for those who absolutely have to have trophy data, you may actually have to choose to play this game because you want to.

Overall, I still really like this game despite it's age, and it was a great launch game with it's solid single player, and it's frantic online matches doing well to distract the early PS3 adopters who were mostly just waiting for Metal Gear Solid 4. It also fueled the fanboy flame wars for Resistance vs Gears of War arguments which in hindsight, were two completely different games doing two completely different things, and I like both in different ways.


Here is footage of the game in action:



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