Resistance: Fall of Man Review

Meet my friend, whatshisname

And just like any of the gazillion 'cinematic' WW2 games produced over the years, the game populates the scene with dozens of anonymous squad-mates that charge into battle, only to get mown down and airbrushed from the scenery in a matter of seconds. It's supposed to add that essential chaotic intensity of battle, but you won't care when the 400th hapless squaddie gets raked with Chimeran fire. You've seen it all before. You know how this plays out.

For the first hour or so, it's hard to tell whether Resistance does anything different whatsoever. For all the world, it's yet another linear, set-piece driven first-person shooter, with corridors to funnel you down very prescribed routes, populated with manageable clusters of identical enemies who display depressingly little flair in their combat tactics beyond 'duck, shoot, peek out, shoot, lob grenade, repeat' until death. No flanking, no teamwork, no alarms, no surprises.

The main surprise that hits you early on is how unforgiving the first level is. With no health packs lying around, and good old fashioned health that - gasp - doesn't recharge, you're tasked with guiding Nathan Hale to safety with only a sharp aim and careful avoidance of enemy fire. No cheating recharging health or overly forgiving checkpointing here, sir. The first few levels remind you what shooters used to be like before publishers got fed up with us whining about games being too tough and implemented all of the above. And then, of course, having toughened you up with some brutal reality, Insomniac caves and shoehorns a means of giving you regenerating health anyway.

Wanted: recharging enthusiasm

At a stroke, Resistance reverts to FPS type, where little actual combat skill is required to blitz through the game in about 10 or 12 hours on normal. Like every shooter from Halo onwards, it simply reduces the task at hand to observing when you're about to lose a unit of health and making sure you duck back into cover whenever it's looking a bit dicey. In between, you're given the freedom to wander into the open, fire a few well-placed pot-shots and dive back to get your health back. It solves the frustration of having to be genuinely good at the game, but means the game - like most shooters these days - lacks tension almost throughout.

And even when things are hanging on a slender thread and you're skipping between cover points with one unit of health left, you can generally rely on discarded health packs all over the battlefield. All that's required of you is to diligently backtrack, gather them up and resume the battle fully replenished. Like so many regulation, unambitious shooters, at no stage will the enemy consider chasing you down as you frantically retreat. They just sit waiting at their spawn point, ducking and firing, ducking and firing. If we hadn't seen this sort of braindead enemy AI behaviour about eight thousand times before, we might be more pumped about it. Does it matter that this is on a PS3? Well, yes. It's a machine that's inordinately more powerful, therefore ought to be capable of throwing a few surprises at us. Should we let the game off because it's a first generation PS3 title? A little, but not much. As we said before, Insomniac is capable of making games with excellent combat and imaginative weaponry in them. That's the very least we'd expect from Ted Price and his team for a flagship first party release. A lot of what we're complaining about, in terms of the core gameplay, would have been an issue three years ago.

Just a little more environmental imagination would have made a lot of difference too, but we're talking about a game where the most you can expect is that your cover points will get blown apart. No matter how rickety a building looks, or how temporary a particular shelter might look, you could fire a shell from a tank and not even make a dent. Likewise, when all hell is breaking loose and you're standing in a building that's barely upright, how ridiculous to see that you're entirely safe from an onslaught of rocket fire if you just duck down behind a rickety brick wall. "Ground breaking" would actually be quite nice in this case. It might force us, and our enemies, to be a little more dynamic in the way we play. Instead, what we're faced with is the same old show, playing to the same old rules. For some that might be enough, and in most senses Resistance is no worse an offender than any other number of games of this ilk, but wherever you look it conforms to the standard unreality that we're all used to.

The Price of being first

So, the only sliver of hope was that Insomniac could inject some sense of novelty and creativity in how it uses its weapons. Certainly, Ted Price's presentations of the game prior to its launch elsewhere in the world last year focused heavily on things like the hedgehog grenade that spits out individual spines. By pausing the game and panning around the environment, he showed just how cool the effect was, with each spine shooting out at a precise angle and velocity and capable of inflicting their victims with a certain amount of damage depending on where they hit.

Such technical demonstrations looked cool, no question, but the practical difference between this grenade and any other grenade used in an FPS is almost zero. It goes off. You must get out of the way somehow. If you don't, it will dish out a lot of damage. In real-life gameplay terms nothing whatsoever changes.

Other weapons, like the Bullseye, do add something to the gameplay, but it's marketing spin gone mad to suggest that it adds more than an increment of an increment. Being able to 'tag' someone and duck around a corner and giggle as your bullets get drawn to your hapless victim is an undeniably cool moment, but it's a novelty that wears off pretty quickly (besides, you soon realise that it's just as effective to pick them off as you normally would, which is kind of where such innovations fade into the background).

Augers well for innovation

Probably the one truly innovative weapon is the Auger, which allows the recipient to shoot through walls, with a delayed burst of white energy emerging from any solid barrier. But, again, it's pretty easy to avoid, and in terms of actually killing your enemy, you're often better off getting a proper bead on them. Gamers don't need weapons that look cool, as such, and the rather standard load-out (shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and various rapid-fire guns) demonstrates that. It's far more important to give players enemies that are reactive, dynamic and intelligent. That's, ultimately, where Resistance fails, without wishing to labour the point to death.

And having done little to make the core shooting gameplay in any way different to any number of games that have gone before, it's perhaps even more gutting to see the title fail to shine as a next generation spectacle. As a first party title, at least part of its job is to act as a technical showcase for the PlayStation 3. The fact that the results are so strangely unambitious makes it even harder to care about Nathan Hale's Chimeran fightback. Right from the start, the game world is bordering on sterile, feeling like yet another indestructible set that never allows you to carve a different path through, or even vaguely interact with on any meaningful level. Sure, the environmental geometry is well up to scratch, and Insomniac has managed to tick most of the boxes that give it the initial ambience of being an impressive spectacle, but you don't have to look very hard before it all feels decidedly underwhelming.

Mostly, it's just like any other bombed out WW2 set, and just as restrictive in how you're allowed to navigate your way through it. It's yet another instance of 'look but don't touch', and never once even gives the hint that you can cut loose and do things your own way. It's just move on, clear out, move on through numerous short sections before the narrative curve fades to a blur. In a way that's a fitting visual cue, because, played end to end, the game tries to string together a coherent narrative, but fails to effectively link together the action in a credible sense. Missions often end suddenly, with no real sense of having concluded your efforts. The stylish cut-scenes do, admittedly, lend a polished reward to your efforts, but it doesn't really make up for the harsh edits. Meanwhile, no matter what goes on, Hale remains the dead-eyed mute throughout, as if adhering to some unwritten FPS law. After Insomniac's personality-laden past, Resistance is the polar opposite, and you have no real affection for him as a result.

A weekend in the cities

It makes a pleasant change to be playing in places like York, Grimsby, Manchester, Nottingham and eventually London, but even if you're familiar with such places, for most of the game you could be fighting anywhere. The hilarity of hitting London and seeing three red telephone boxes standing in a line (apparently in a side room of an indoor market of all places) just adds to the cut and paste feeling of some of the sets. And did they even have those 'keep left' traffic bollards in 1951? (And while we're on this, why is the radio communication so sophisticated? In 2007 I can't even use my mobile phone on the underground trains, so how, exactly, is Hale able to get updates when he's deep underground?) There was clearly so much potential in this 'what if?' scenario, but even by the end we don't really fully get a picture of the Chimeran motivations, or why it all started, or anything that leaves you with any resolution. By boiling the whole episode down to good versus evil mutants, there's not even the scant consolation of a great storyline to rake over at the conclusion.

All the game can offer the player at the end is the chance to play through again and unlock some new weapons. If we're honest, playing it through once was enough of a slog (and only out of duty) - the desire to run through a tired, derivative cookie cutter FPS like this would have to come with a cash prize attached to it to make us do it again. And the discovery of concept art as a reward for unlocking the various skill points felt like the ultimate slap in the mush. Are they trying to upset us?

Of course, many would point to the lure of the co-op or competitive multiplayer. Well, for one thing, the potential lure of co-op is dampened by the fact that it's offline split-screen only, while the other modes are competitive only. Upon entering the online menu for the first time, the update patch takes fully 15 minutes to download and apply itself - and the promise of 40-player online relies on extensive waiting around and other players' patience. Most matches during the review phase were limited to 16-player only, which evidently makes it difficult to comment on the mayhem of mass deathmatch madness.

Balancing act

But as many have noted, the game's best weapons are the real star of the online game, and make it a lot easier to tolerate the utter blandness of some of the maps. The balanced nature of the weaponry makes it an intriguing battle on some levels, with weapons like the Auger making it a real cat and mouse affair - especially with someone, say, capable of rebounding Hailstorm fire with skill. The addition of thousands of European gamers on the servers won't hurt the game's appeal in the initial launch period, but it's hard to say whether that will last long. Certainly, the US servers still had plenty of games up and running even at unfavourable times of day, which is a good sign.

That said, in the cut and thrust world of online shooters, Resistance ranks well below some of the established big hitters out there. The lack of co-op, in particular, is a major oversight. Time will tell if it's significant, but given how popular the co-op online modes of Gears of War, GRAW 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas have been, you can't help but feel that gamers have a basic requirement for collaborative online play these days. Another black mark, then.