A generic FPS game with some good ideas.
Resistance is an interesting FPS game with some good ideas but the execution is a bit uneven. I was excited to try out Sony's potential killer app but it seems maybe my expectations were too high.
The first thing you'll notice are the graphics. While sharp and solid, the art direction is fairly generic. The majority of the game is very reminiscent of other WW2 shooters such as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. There are a lot of browns and greens throughout the game except for a couple of chapters. While it was novel in the beginning of the game (since it was populated with Chimera instead of humans), the levels looked fairly boring and generic as you progressed.
Speaking of the Chimera, their designs were decent but too many of them look too similar which made fighting them quickly tiring. There were only a few enemies that looked different and they didn't appear a lot compared to the grunts. While people rave about the guns in the game, I didn't find them that special or different than any other FPS games out there. They looked nice but the animations for the guns weren't anything special. Overall, the design and art direction for the game were fairly generic.
The sound and music is pretty good. The voice acting is solid but there's nothing overly memorable or outstanding about them. It's good not great. The music is decent with a lot of WW2 style military music that you'd come to expect from a game of this type. But it's not very memorable just like the voice acting. I was bit disappointed that the game didn't have any strong musical scores to pull you into the game either.
Now we have the main meat of the game; the gameplay. Resistance is a strange mix of all types FPS games that any other fellow FPS player has seen or experienced. The main game feels like it was inspired from games like the Medal of Honor/Call of Duty series. There are lots of battles with fellow soldiers and explosions everywhere. Later in the game, we have claustrophobic levels with a lot of shadows that is similar to Doom 3 including plenty of enemy scares. Finally, there are some levels which were clearly inspired by the Halo series with its sci-fi motif and structures. I can also list a few levels where it reminded me of games like the Half-Life series etc. You can tell that Insomniac was heavily influenced by all those games when they were making this game.
But all those various styles didn't really help the game meld together. Some levels were wildly inconsistent with its length. Some levels ended in a few minutes while other sections lasted a good amount of time before you hit a checkpoint. It's somewhat annoying and made the game either too easy or too hard. The enemy AI is also fairly dumb. They would either rush you or pop in and out behind cover. They were extremely predictable and very easy to dispatch once you remember their spawn points. I wasn't too impressed with any of the enemies in the game at all. I also found the guns to be overrated by other reviews. Only a few guns were interesting but I didn't find them that unique or fun to play. Their secondary attacks weren't that useful for me compared to their primary attacks.
Finally, the boring story. While the aliens in WW2 premise was unique, the narrative felt uninspired and uninteresting. The main character, Hale, is as generic as it gets and we hardly learn anything about the rest of the few characters we meet along the way. None of the Chimera show any sort of unique intelligence nor do they have any personalities. I was fairly disappointed with the story overall. I wish they developed the characters more and I really wish they made Hale more interesting. Couldn't they give us more background on the military and Chimera enemies? I guess not.
The real winner is the multiplayer. Logging into games is a breeze and matches are fun and relatively short. The various maps are well designed and the amount of players in these games are great. I had no lag when I was playing and finding a game is very easy and quick. This is the main reason why you would want to play this game. It's a lot more fun than the single player by a large margin. You will not be disappointed.
Overall, Resistance is fairly generic FPS game which tried to take in too many ideas and ended up with a lot of inconsistent levels and gameplay. The story is weak, the characters are forgettable and the entire experience is not very deep. I had to force myself to beat the single player simply because the levels were sooo boring. The single player is worth checking out, but the multiplayer is what saves Resistance from mediocrity.
