Since I never bought my PS3 at launch, I easily skipped over this launch title which already has a sequel available.  Natalie was nice enough to let me borrow her copy and I beat the game over the last week.  I wasn’t expecting to like it, it’s basically a first person shooter like Gears of War or Halo, but then as I started playing it I remembered that I loved those games.

FPS on the PC bug me, I just don’t play well with a mouse and keyboard; maybe they are at the wrong position and I just don’t get confortable.  It seems the PC games are geared more for multiplayer and by the time I get into a game the community on the whole is rediculously good.  This usually gives you little chance to advance and become better, and I typically feel I’m wasting my time.

These games seem a lot more fun on a console, probably because I’m in a more confortable position, I can pause whenever I like, bigger screen, etc.  Resistance is no different, when I got into it, I found myself wanting to play it all the time, and I spent quite a few late nights finishing off a section.

I think what made the game so addicting, and if I remember correctly Gears and Halo do this also, is that there aren’t levels as such.  There are lots of sections where you have a goal, and some of the larger goals have checkpoints midway, but mostly they are broken up into easily manageable chunks.  This makes it a lot easier to pick up for an hour, but also easily draws you in for another hour after it.

One big problem with the game is the first level you are advancing with your squad, you only have a crappy weapon and you don’t regen any health like later in the game.  This is to explain how fragile a human you are, but it creates a huge block for people to get into the real part of the game.  Regardless of your dying a lot at the beginning, to move on you must make it to the end of the section.  Afterward there are generous amounts of health and you regen a certain amount if you get out of combat for a few seconds.  After the first section (where I died at least 7 times) I only died about 7 more times in the entire game.

What I think they should do in games like this is have a full section that you could go through, but if you happen to get blown up by a mine early on, just progress the story from there naturally.  I think this goes for respawns as well; I wish there was a realistic way to explain how after you lost all your health and “died” that you just start back at the beginning of the level (or checkpoint) with all your health and ammo again.  One thing I thought of while playing Resistance was that specifically for this game, since the aliens keep bodies they find on the battlefield for mutating, you could be carried off when assumed dead and just heal up enough that you can get up and sneak away.  This might get tiresome eventually though and makes little sense during a boss fight.

Summary: I think this was a great game, I had no issues with the gameplay except the difficulty at the beginning, and felt it was fun and suspensful to play through.

• Alien
• England
• Game Review
• Gears Of War
• Halo
• PlayStation 3
• Resistance