FPS titles are ten-a-penny and there aren’t many gamers that don’t know it. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t any room for well-implemented titles to stand out though and given the solid performance of Insomniac’s initial entry into the Resistance series, the high quality of Resistance 2 doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
The main thing that Resistance 2 (as with the original title) has going for it is an incredibly strong storyline. In the first game, you were fighting the alien Chimera as they threatened to wipe out the European population and here – despite winning many battles that first time round – the stocky Nathan Hale has been forced to return to the safety of the United States, given that Europe and the rest of the World has fallen to the Chimera. Two years later, and the Chimera are attacking the US and wiping out entire cities. As Hale, you must join a secret government agency and try to defend the human race’s last standpoint.
It’s all very dramatic and over-the-top, but that isn’t to say that Resistance 2 doesn’t present itself well. The storyline drags you in – which is surprising for an FPS these days – and wills you to play on, just so that you can see what happens next. Over the ten or eleven hours of the single-player campaign, you’ll feel anger, rage, sadness, remorse and that super-special feeling that only comes from firing a grenade into an absolutely humungous enemy’s mouth from a Carbine. Indeed, Resistance 2 delivers the atmosphere in spades.
And this flows over to the gameplay too. Weapons are relatively varied and provide handy second functions such as the Carbine’s ability to fire grenades or the Magnum’s controllable exploding bullets. Being able to carry two guns and multiple grenade types also adds to the ability to take on your killing tasks in different ways and this suggests a kind of free-roaming aspect that doesn’t really flesh itself out as you play on, given that the game is pretty serious about keeping you moving in the direction that it wants you to go. A reliance on unmarked check and trigger points can cause issue here too, with sequences sometimes failing to play themselves out naturally, only starting off when you’ve stomped your boot onto the exact point that the game expects you to. Occasionally, this threatens to break the atmosphere as you wander around a corner and see twenty or so Chimeran soldiers going about their daily business, completely oblivious to the six-man team that is staring them in the face. Only when you take position behind the correct barrier does the attack start. In addition to this, using the game’s cover system to get behind that barrier may not be a good idea, since on more than one occasion I found myself reloading after dying from being hit by several bullets or a stream of flames that passed through a wall or other solid defence. It doesn’t happen every single time you cover up, but it’s enough to become an annoyance on some levels.
From my perspective, the enemy AI didn’t seem to be as smart as other reviewers were saying that it was – although it does have its moments. In general, gun battles against Hybrids consist of covering up and popping out to take a shot or two until they’re all gone, whilst in some situations, the game will just throw massive enemies at you to provide some depth and difficulty. And difficult it is. Even on the standard “two-star” difficulty mode, I was finding that some sections could have been called Restart City and let me tell you, I was the MAYOR of Restart City. Whether it was down to my lack of skill or not, I don’t know – but I’m fairly sure that in some cases the game just expected me to have the weaponry that it had decided would be best to tackle this situation, and nothing else was going to let me pass. This point is blindingly obvious in several places, as you’re suddenly presented with the option to pick up a weapon that you’ve never seen before, without any indication as to when, where and why you’d use it. Just to fill you in – you’ll need it about thirty seconds after you find it.
As you progress through the single-player game, Resistance 2 starts to show exactly how much work has gone into developing a solid and coherent experience. I found myself stopping to listen to the increasingly despairing broadcasts coming from each radio that I happened upon, simply because it helped to load on the atmosphere with a shovel. The rest of the aural experience has been polished just as well, too – and even on the most basic of sound systems, will absolutely blow you away.
There are one or two things that I could nitpick about, but I’ve already covered them. Without those problems, Resistance 2 is an incredibly competent game that can hang right up there with the best of them. It even heads into more traditional survival-horror territory from time to time, with deft flashlight use required to predict attacks from the hatching Spinners and to help to defend against them as they come at you in their hundreds. And as if a solid single-player game wasn’t enough, Insomniac have put together an incredibly decent multiplayer package, which allows up to sixty players to battle it out in the Resistance world, as well as allowing co-operative campaign modes that run in parallel with the single-player story. There are glitches here and there, and frustrating sections that always threaten to make you deem the game to be unfair, but despite this, Resistance 2 is every bit as epic as Sony hoped that it would be. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the game, given my luke-warm reception of the first title, but the fact that I enjoyed Resistance 2 as much as I did stands as testament to the work that has been done here. Worth every penny.[rmgallery id=69]
