Resistance 3 has been announced and our 3-part Resistance reviews are ongo­ing. Our next stop was the 2008 title Resistance 2. The game came out 2 years into the PS3’s life-cycle and 2 years after the hit game Resistance: Fall of Man. Is Resistance 2 the best of the series or does it fall under the hype? Here we will exam­ine what was right and wrong with Resistance 2 and what Insomniac should change for Resistance 3.

Story

Resistance 2 takes place two years after the destruc­tion of London’s tower. Hale gets recruited into the Sentinel pro­gram with fel­low sol­diers to com­bat the Chimeran threat that has now reached the U.S. shores. It’s up to Hale and his group of Sentinels to find a way to stop the Chimera before it’s too late.

Unlike Fall of Man, Resistance 2’s story just doesn’t hold up that well. Rather than the third-person nar­ra­tion with still images that made the ori­ginal so com­pel­ling, we get a strict first-person nar­rat­ive. Not much is learned about any­thing really except form the Intel that is pos­sible to miss if you aren’t pay­ing atten­tion. Despite the fact that we now get the story from the char­ac­ter, we learn vir­tu­ally noth­ing until the cor­rect pieces of Intel are col­lec­ted.

What is in the Intel though tells a great story. Like Fall of Man, the Intel details what happened in the 2 years between the 1^st and 2^nd, more info about the Chimera and their ori­gins, and also some great gov­ern­ment con­spir­acy. The game falls under the pres­sure of a B-line action flick. The mater­ial we’re given to watch and play is stand­ard action mater­ial. The stuff we get to read tells us the inter­est­ing parts that fans want to read, because of this though Insomniac ali­en­ates a lot of poten­tial fans that do not want to read through hours of Intel.

A new addi­tion to the fran­chise is a cent­ral Villain. The char­ac­ter Deadalus is a Human-Chimera hybrid. He comes in at the worst of times to cre­ate Hell and havoc for Hale and the rest of SRPA. The prob­lem with Dadealus, like all the other char­ac­ters, is that we don’t learn any­thing about him. His motives are clear but due to the small amount of time spent with him we never learn about him. There isn’t even much Intel relat­ing to him.

Resistance 2’s plot and story has numer­ous pacing issues. The game starts strongly with the first 2 levels, and then it pretty much dies until the end. Nothing of true sig­ni­fic­ance happened with many levels feel­ing like they didn’t need to even hap­pen. In fact an entire level ends up being a wild goose-chase. Kind of like how all of Super Mario Bros. was a goose chase to find the prin­cess. It isn’t till the end that things really pick back up and it becomes enthralling again.

This also feeds into the loc­a­tions. While the ori­ginal was set in England, every area vis­ited felt fluid and belonged within the game to help tell the story. Resistance 2’s loc­a­tions feel like they’ve been shoe­horned in. Some of the loc­a­tions make abso­lutely no sense to go to, espe­cially the one level that is a wild goose-chase. Nothing about these loc­a­tions feels inspired other than the fact that Insomniac wanted to get some amaz­ing sites from America in.

Resistance 2 feels like it’s try­ing really hard to be a hard­core action game, but because of this it lost what made the original’s story so spe­cial. Every change that Insomniac employed to make the story more like other shooter stor­ies just back­fires and for that the game’s story feels like a com­plete back­seat. If it were not for the Intel, then the story would be a true back­seat.

Score: 6/10

Design

Resistance 2 falls into a lot of clichés that other First-Person shoot­ers have fallen under. The game still offers a meaty play­time, but it isn’t always a fun play­time.

Many mis­sions in the game can get wear­i­some espe­cially because the game is just not built to handle the cliché shooter con­ven­tions the game tries to emu­late. Some breath­tak­ing envir­on­ments are shown, and they reek of explor­a­tion, but invis­ible walls lit­ter every­where cut­ting off explor­a­tion. This prob­lem also leaks into gun­fights which feel a lot weaker then Fall of Man. Set pieces just aren’t as big and battle­grounds feel much more sparse then the ori­ginal. What is there basic­ally screams to find dif­fer­ent ways to fight the Chimera, but this is a false hope as everything is just so stream­lined.

It also gets down to the point where the entire middle of the game gets bor­ing. The story does take some fault while the design takes the other. Everything is just so bland and straight­for­ward. At times the game hints at bring­ing some­thing truly amaz­ing, but it soon becomes repet­it­ive and wear­i­some. This includes the pro­claimed epic bosses. They all give off a great first impres­sion, but it is soon lost once you find out their attack pat­terns and just how easy they are to kill. Behemoths like the Leviathan should not be so eas­ily killed off by 6 small rock­ets to the face.

What really gives Resistance 2 its legs is the excel­lent replay value. The cam­paign is still a meaty length with so much left to do after the game. Once again, many Intel pieces are scattered through­out the levels detail­ing the rich back-story of the uni­verse. On top of this are the excel­lent co-op and com­pet­it­ive modes that will keep you com­ing back for more.

Resistance 2 doesn’t have a hor­rible design. It truly does suc­ceed in mak­ing the player come back for more. However, many things in Resistance 2 just lack in com­par­ison to Fall of Man. Many things that made the ori­ginal so unique were lost as Resistance 2 aimed to be much more like cur­rent shoot­ers.

Score: 8/10

Gameplay

Fall of Man was made fam­ous by its unique weapons, run-and-gun style of game­play, and its huge sense of vari­ety. Insomniac opted out of their for­mula for a Call of Duty like game. Resistance 2 relies heav­ily upon cer­tain mech­an­ics that truly do not feel like they fit the game.

Unlike the ori­ginal, Resistance 2 relies heav­ily upon the Aim down the Sights System. Due to this, many but­tons had to be re-mapped to the point where it does feel like a mod for Call of Duty. While the sys­tem isn’t broken at all, it doesn’t feel like it fits the game. Returning guns such as the Bullseye and Carbine don’t work very well with the sys­tem. In fact, dur­ing mul­ti­player it is much easier to get kills with these guns by just point­ing and shoot­ing rather than aim­ing. Newer guns do feel good with the new aim­ing sys­tem but the old guns just aren’t built for it.

Speaking of guns, Insomniac con­tin­ued their tra­di­tion of provid­ing invent­ive ways to kill with Fall of Man. Insomniac has for­saken this tra­di­tion in this game. While it is under­stand­able that some guns have to con­tinue over since it is a series, far too many guns return and barely any new guns make an appear­ance. Guns like the Bellock, Splicer, and Marksman just aren’t inter­est­ing and have been done in other games bet­ter. Another prob­lem is the reload­ing and clip sizes.

Instead of a fast-reload, large clip-size, and tough enemies, Resistance 2 fea­tures slow-reload, small clip-size, and still tough enemies. Common hybrids take far too many bul­lets and they’re just a simple enemy! While it isn’t as bad towards the begin­ning of the game, once the enemies get more armor it can become a huge prob­lem and it just takes away from the enjoy­ment of the game.

What can be said though is that everything just works. While it isn’t as enjoy­able as the first, the game man­ages to stay play­able with no bugs. The new game­play sys­tem also works really great with co-op since the slow nature and smal­ler clip sizes force play­ers to work together to over­come the vari­ous obstacles.

All in all, Resistance 2 provides aver­age game­play. Unlike other shoot­ers, it just doesn’t have much charm or ori­gin­al­ity.

Score: 7/10

Multiplayer

Resistance 2 ups the mul­ti­player from Fall of Man in more pos­it­ive than neg­at­ive ways. While the game­play isn’t as fast or intense the game is still quite fun. Competitive-wise the game hits all the right spots. The maps are smartly designed to take advant­age of a large amount of play­ers.

Games take place in 30 vs. 30 teams. Resistance 2 man­ages to never lag des­pite the fact that 60 play­ers are caus­ing mass may­hem through­out some truly remark­able maps. There is a large vari­ety of modes includ­ing some excel­lent object­ive based matches. Even with the slower con­trols it man­ages to find the sense of speed the Single-Player just can’t cap­ture.

What’s even bet­ter than the com­pet­it­ive mul­ti­player is the deep and reward­ing co-operative play. The co-op in Resistance 2 sends groups of 8 play­ers on Campaign-esque mis­sions. The group is given a main object­ive across 8 loc­a­tions (6 from the cam­paign, 2 from England). Some of these object­ives could include killing a boss, gath­er­ing a cer­tain amount of “Grey Tech,” or res­cuing civil­ians. Every time the map changes to keep you on your toes. The load­ing screen also unlocks even more Intel which details events that happened before the game and what is going on in Europe with Parker from Fall of Man. Three classes are given, the Soldier, Recon, and Medic with each get­ting a spe­cific weapon to use. It is a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment that more classes are not avail­able, as this could’ve fur­ther increased the depth of this already fine co-op mode.

What pulls every mode together (Co-op, Competitive, and Single-Player) is exper­i­ence. You earn exper­i­ence from everything you do that goes towards build­ing your own per­sonal Avatar for both the Humans and Chimera. Different skins are avail­able for both fac­tions as well as mis­cel­laneous gear to cus­tom­ize your look. Co-Op allows you to buy weapon and armor upgrades with Grey Tech. This exper­i­ence based sys­tem gives Resistance 2 an edge over other shoot­ers because it is fun to col­lect all those little things to cre­ate an avatar that just looks awe­some. Plus this gives the game a deep RPG feel that is truly unique.

Sure, it isn’t as fun as Fall of Man, but Resistance 2 does a lot of things right with its mul­ti­player and offers up a lot of con­tent not found in a lot of other shoot­ers.

Score: 8/10

Presentation

Resistance 2 puts it best foot for­ward from the very begin­ning show­ing spec­tac­u­lar epic battles with a giant Goliath. However things start to go down­hill from there. With the advance­ment in visu­als on the PS3, one would expect Resistance 2 to take full advant­age of the PS3 and its archi­tec­ture, how­ever the game doesn’t.

Once again the Chimera take the spot­light from the humans. All of the Chimera and their toys are superb. The mod­els, tex­tures, anim­a­tions, and even the saliva that crawl down their teeth are rather impress­ive. While not as many vari­ations appear, the amount that can be shoved on screen is quite impress­ive with the frame-rate never buck­ling once.

The prob­lems once again come from the humans. Like Fall of Man the mod­els, tex­tures, and anim­a­tions are sub-par. No one ever looks quite right with the humans look­ing more alien then the Chimera.

Effects bor­der the line between fant­astic and creepy. Water looks good when it’s in puddles or small amounts, how­ever when in large amount it just looks extremely creepy as it wobbles around like jelly. Blood looks great with entrails and intest­ines pop­ping out of bod­ies in glory good­ness. Clipping does hap­pen every once in a while, espe­cially with fall­ing water.

The atmo­sphere exchanges dreary England for sunny America. While there are some truly jaw-dropping moments in the game, it never man­ages to cap­ture the same feel­ing that Fall of Man cap­tured. It never really ever feels like all hope is lost or that you really are alone. It isn’t hor­rible, but America just doesn’t add much to the game.

Resistance 2 is a fine look­ing game. It may not be the best look­ing on the block, but it still man­ages to hold up ok in today’s mar­ket with its impress­ive Chimera.

Score: 9/10

Final Thoughts

Resistance 2 is clearly the weak­est link in the fran­chise. Rather than stick­ing with what worked, Insomniac went out and almost ended up cre­at­ing a whole new game and while some of the new ideas add to the uni­verse many other fail. Hopefully Resistance 3 will not fol­low Resistance 2’s path. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it just doesn’t do enough to stand out.