Resistance: Fall of Man (PlayStation 3)
Orson Welles delivered his infamous “War of the Worlds” radio show on Halloween, October 30th, 1938, frightening many of his listeners who believed that his unique take on H.G. Welles’ story about an invasion from Mars was actually happening. People shake their heads at it today, but suppose that his announcement did herald an invasion, one that would sweep through the Old World and blanket all of Russia beneath the burning embers of civilization? Insomniac Games has gone beyond radio to bring the first FPS on Sony’s next-gen flagship by dropping the player into an alternate history where WW2 had never happened and where the worst things to go bump in the night are coming up right from beneath your skin.
New World Order
The world of “Resistance: Fall of Man” takes place in an alternate history where Hitler never rose to power and the United States had remained staunchly isolationist in the face of a changing world. The Great Depression had never happened, Roosevelt never became a four term President, and Nichola Tesla invented VTOL aircraft. There’s a great deal of this background available on the official site which is never covered in the game, although players with a broadband connection can easily take a look for themselves with the PS3. Insomniac has taken great pains to develop the world that the player will be battling through and it is filled with as much alternate history as it is in graphical detail.
In an X-Files world gone wrong, Russia was the first to fall silent, closing its borders in 1921. The Bolsheviks had failed to bring Communism to the people, and the people led by their Tsar would eventually turn away from the world. They eventually build a wall that extended across their entire western frontier, sealing themselves in, while a united Europe enjoys several decades of prosperity as the rest of the world marches on following the end of the Great War. Curious events elsewhere, especially in those places that are found near Russia herself, unfold a strange mystery that some attempt to explore. Rumors of biological experiments within Russia along with entire villages and cities emptied of life, a single radio message from somewhere within her borders decades later urging those listening to beware the “Angry Night”, and strange things sighted in the skies.
In December, 1949, rumors gave way to an invasion as the Russian Wall bursts open, unleashing creatures unlike any that the world had ever imagined. Dubbed “the Chimera”, a horde whose inhuman soldiers send fear into the armies that face them, they explode across Europe forcing its conquest in a matter of weeks. The Chimera turn their attention to England in October, 1950, and tunnelling underneath the English Channel, invade the island nation and nearly overwhelm its island defenders in less than three months. Scattered pockets of resistance continue the fight, but it is only a matter of time before the Chimera wipe them out. By this time, the United States has awakened from its isolationist stance and has begun to prepare for war against an enemy that has nearly wiped out Western civilization.
In July 11th, 1951, Sergeant Nathan Hale and his team are dropped into England as a part of Operation Deliverance, in part to aid the waning British defense and to exchange vital intelligence for much needed firepower. The player will follow Hale’s exploits as they are recounted through aged stills, narration by one of those that had last seen him alive, and in fighting behind enemy lines over the next three days.
Gameplay
Insomniac’s extensive backstory sets the stage to an exciting FPS title filled with vehicles, war torn landscapes, and huge, seamless maps filled with a boggling amount of atmospheric detail which ranges from 1940’s and 1950’s inspired war propaganda posters to the typewritten notes and smudged blueprints that are found scattered everywhere else. Menus showing what the last special of the day before the fall of England decorate empty storefronts, steam vents out from pierced piping, and the wreckage of buildings and quarantine zones fill the streets of what had once been the heart of an empire. And when the player comes face to face with what the Chimerans call home, it’s as if the “X-Files”, “War of the Worlds”, and “Half Life 2″ had been mashed together to create an alien utopia covered in polished chrome looking back at the player from behind sealed, honeycombed glass. This is what the player will be fighting through for the next several hours of a lengthy campaign and is probably the most unique thing about the gameplay.
The controls are standard console FPS fare and are easy to get a grip on as the game doesn’t take many prisoners when it drops the player into the middle of a firefight right from the start. It can be hard and the Chimera have an uncanny ability to know exactly where the player is most of the time and will fill the air with plenty of firepower to kill them. Fortunately, there are three difficulty levels to choose from so players new to the FPS world won’t feel as if the game is trying to punish them for trying while leaving it open for those weaned on SOCOM, Halo, or even Gears to dive right into the flames. Saves are handled using a checkpoint system with most of the points are close enough so as to reduce the amount of frustration that some players may experience from having to repeat in fighting back to where they had died.
Insomniac’s reputation for weird weapons continues with futuristic takes on some of what could have been turned out by the United States and Great Britain in this alternate timeline. The extensive collection includes a minelayer that lays organic “bubble” mines, a guided rocket, and aerial fuel mines that fill the air with gas fumes before being set off by fire for a nice, big, burning bang. The Chimeran weapons are even stranger, and just as powerful, with hedghog grenades that send spikes flying everywhere instead of shrapnel, the Auger that can shoot through walls and can even project its own shield, and a rifle that can peg a target with a marker that allows every shot fired afterwards to home in on even if the player…or the poor sap…are behind cover. Most weapons have an alternate mode of fire making Hale’s arsenal more than enough to take on the impossible odds that the player will be experiencing in his mission.
In addition to weapons, there are points in the story where the player will be accompanied by soldiers that will do their best to try and help out. Hale can’t give them orders, though, and all they’ll really do is try and follow along until they get killed or aren’t needed. Guess which happens first? There are opportunities to try and save them when a leaper jumps on top of them and tries to gnaw their face off, but for the most part, they’ll end up chew toys or bullet barriers. It would have been nice to be able to issue some orders to them, but as it is, they’re not much use.
Flying Bullets
Much of the game will have the player fighting through one location to the next, often indoors or among the ruins of what had once been a nice neighborhood as the Chimera continue to pour in from everywhere. Occasionally, the player may even drive a jeep across grassy plains to make a break for a Chimeran stronghold, or pilot a tank through the streets of London in a desperate bid to break the enemy’s spearhead. The jeep was a lot of fun to drive, but the controls for the tank could have used a bit more polish especially in allowing the player to turn the turret one way while driving another.
On foot, Hale is able to duck, but that’s as evasive as it gets when it comes to what one can do in Resistance to try and lower their chances for an early death. The rest of the gameplay is something that most FPS fans have seen elsewhere before with a few tweaks. There’s plenty of alien strangeness to send away in pieces, though, and it’s never short on action, but some players may feel that they’ve been here before.
The feeling that the player is facing a mass of attacking flesh that has no regard whether it lives or dies is made clear as the Chimera continue to throw plenty of grunts into the player’s path. The AI driving the Chimeran horde provides a pretty decent challenge, but much of it is due to the enemy attempting to overwhelm Hale with sheer numbers. They’ll take cover behind obstacles and wait for the player to make the first mistake, but for the most part, they’ll try and simply shoot at the player as soon as they show themselves or rush forward. A few distant foes will also tend to simply stand still until the player shoots at them, although this doesn’t happen often. From time to time, the game will also use scripted triggers to send in reinforcements behind the player from areas that they thought that they had cleared to keep them on their toes, or to ambush them as they head deeper into an enemy stronghold.
One improvement that Insomniac had worked into the formula to make things more fun was in allowing Hale to leave behind ammo he doesn’t use. In many FPs shooters, picking up ammunition usually meant that the clip or container disappeared from view as it was grabbed. In Resistance, Hale will grab enough ammo to fill up on what he needs. Anything leftover stays behind. This allows the player to leave behind caches of stuff that they might not need in case they run into a Chimeran ambush unprepared, firing blindly to survive.
Resistance also makes use of the regenerating health feature found in more and more FPS-style titles, although the twist is that Hale’s life bar is broken up into four sections. As long as any one section has some health in it, it can regenerate. If it goes to the next bar, Hale has to find a bottle of healing bacteria on the battlefield to make up the loss. He won’t have this ability at the beginning until he reaches a certain point, but even with this advantage, many of the firefights can still easily strip away his life especially when the enemy starts lobbing hedgehogs.
The player will also be able to earn in-game extras by doing certain things such as killing so many Chimera with a certain weapon on a stage or in picking up intelligence dossiers that they might run into. These add up points that will unlock bonuses from the game such as an art gallery showing off some of what went into creating the world of Resistance. It’s a nice incentive for players to keep playing through the game just to find out what exactly they need to do to unlock some of these and Resistance makes it easy by allowing the player to start a game and jump into any area previously unlocked through the campaign. Even when the main campaign is completed, there’s still something to do. As for the ending, the final battle could have been better, but it does wrap things up with more than just a pat on the back. For those that sit through the credits, there’s an additional mystery waiting that helps to set the stage for the next inevitable chapter.
Crop Circles
Resistance’s graphics are a strange mix of great detail and sometimes bland appearance which can be confusing. On one hand, there are plenty of small details filling the game from train schedules posted on the walls to posters urging citizens to fight the Chimeran threat complete with alien caricatures to refrigerators that open up when bashed. There are even instructions posted on the walls of some of the places that Hale will find himself in, giving advice as to what to do in the case of an atomic attack or warning against entering certain areas. Much of these details help add to the feeling that the world that Insomniac has created is a living, breathing piece of war time fiction much like what Valve had done with “Half Life 2″ with their own, stark vision of a post-invasion world. On the other hand, some of the scenes can appear to lack some of this detail with bad lighting or flat textures occasionally breaking the illusion, but it still does a great job in presenting a world torn apart by an alien invasion in the 1950’s despite these shortcomings.
Much of the detail and many of the better graphics are found with the Chimera and the massive machines that they can send against the player along with their alien technology found buried at the end of the game. Each kind of Chimera that comes at the player have their own way of tearing Hale into small bits and they all look pretty good, even when they’re dead. Physics will also send them flying into the air and, sometimes, unintentionally stuck to the wall or ceiling in odd ways in one of the title’s technical glitches.
The cut scenes in between each point in the mission are done in the style of narrated stills with grainy, black and white photographs presenting Hale’s story as part of what appears to be a report effectively telling the story. There are also occasional cinematics that appear in-game where Hale and the other characters that he meets grimace, smirk, and glare around at them as they head off into the unknown or try and help each other out of trouble. Although there’s still not quite as much detail to what is going on in the game as there is on the official website, the player is told enough to know what is going on in the game and it works.
The voice acting shares as much detail as the world that Insomniac has put together. Hale isn’t the strong, silent, type as he does have a few lines spoken in a voice that won’t have the player wishing they were someone else. The sound effects, in particular for the weapons, will pound and shake your speakers with every bullet and explosion in the game helping to bring the flavor of a war torn scene into your ears. The ambient sounds of the distant crackle of machine gun fire, the thrumming echo of strange alien machinery hidden deep beneath the earth, the screeching yells of the Chimera, the skittering clicking of hundreds of clawed feet as leapers swarm over walls and obstacles on their way to you in a living tide of death, and the thumping drumbeat of cannon fire fill the game. The martial music, as good as it was in certain scenes, was not as memorable as “Call of Duty’s” inspired music or “Rainbow Six Vegas’” adrenaline charged tracks.
Multiplayer
Resistance comes right out of the box with multiplayer support for forty players in most of its gametypes along with a selection of community oriented options making it one of the most complete online offerings for consoles. After clicking through the online agreement which, for whatever reason, has to be agreed to every time multiplayer is launched, the player is presented with several options in how they want to go about getting into a firefight. They can even customize their avatar with different camoflauge options and accessories as they become unlocked through play, and there are even “ribbons” that can be earned for special accomplishments during their online tour of duty.
Deathmatch is available, Capture the Flag, and a few other gametypes that Unreal Tournament players might recognize. “Breach” pits a team of players against another that has to defend their reactor from being destroyed in an assault-style setup. “Meltdown” is a conquest-style game where capturing nodes on the map will force the other team’s reactor to overload. “Conversion” starts everyone off as a human until they are killed, respawning them as a Chimera. After killing the player as a Chimera, that’s it until the game starts up again. Or, players can choose what race they want to start out as when they spawn, as mixed teams of Chimera and human soldiers fight their way to the next objective. There’s also Co-op play, but its limited to split screen on the same console with no online capability which “Gears” and “Rainbow Six: Vegas” fans might miss.
A lobby system showing all available games makes it easier for the player to pick and choose what they want and how crowded a server they want to get into and play performance was pretty good with many of the maps as detailed as those found in the single player campaign. Many of these are filled with a variety of tricky pathways, chokepoints, and convenient nesting areas that can be confusing to those simply starting out since the maps are also pretty big. But the intense action found on a packed server is the real meat of the experience and if you have a headset, you can talk trash to everyone else online or send them a text message. With plenty of maps, gametypes, and support for an incredible number of players at any one time, Resistance has plenty going for it online. There are also options to create a party of players that you prefer to game with, or for those that want to branch out and create their own online presence, there’s a clan utility for creating and managing your own.
Winning the Battle
After Rainbow Six: Vegas and Gears of War had raised the bar with an excellent cover system, helpful teammates that the player can protect and direct, as well as in having the enemies actually pause to reload their own weapons, Resistance may seem a little light on features to the players coming in from those two titles. But as a no-nonsense take on the formula that had helped propel Halo to the top and which others had managed to survive in Half-Life 2, Resistance offers plenty of desperate firefights as it drops players into the thick of the action. Multiplayer supporting up to forty players dishing it out across several large, sprawling maps, provides more excitement long after Hale’s campaign has been completed and may be the real reason that some may want to look into Resistance. Insomniac’s epic struggle is off to a solid start with questions remaining at the end, leaving the door open to further adventures as the fighting continues to prevent the fall of man.
Related Stories
Comments
Leave a Reply
-
Top News
Latest Articles
Listen to Primocasts
Newest Previews
Recent Reviews
Fresh Media
-
Sponsor
Links