Resistance 2 Review
The original Resistance was an amazing playing game brought down by its lack of compelling characters, story, graphical style and musical originality, it's a lot to be brought down by and almost sounds like I'm saying "It's amazing except for everything it is" but at the same time, Insomniac crafted a game that was so beautifully fluid in its mechanics and tough in its difficulty. It's hard not to love playing Resistance, you just had to push through the unoriginal visual, sonical and cinematic aesthetic. Resistance 2 does change things, some for the better, some for the worse, let's get straight into it.
Game play is key, game play stays the same. Great feeling shooting, guns feel great, moving is accurate, quick and responsive, basically everything that made Resistance feel great is still here, it's more... mechanical where they have changed some things. Most importantly, now your health regenerates and honestly, I've never been a big fan of this mechanic, makes the game too easy and almost feels like someone is nannying you. I really loved the health bar and picking up health in the original and I can only assume the change was made because this was what other shooters were doing at the time. Also... why restrict the amount of guns we can collect? Resistance was great for its variety of weapons and being able to use them whenever you fancied. Every gun you got, you added to the collection, in Resistance 2, this isn't an option. Resistance 2 restricts you to two weapons, if you want a different one, swap out. Once again feeling like it was restricted because of the games surrounding it, why? Why would you want to make your game stand out LESS than before? It's quite perplexing, but it is what it is, it doesn't break the game, but it is a disappointment.
Where Resistance 2 is infinitely more interesting to me, is its story and the way it develops, but honestly compared to the original Resistance, I guess that isn't saying a whole lot. A lot of people preferred the story of Resistance compared to the sequel precisely because it was a team effort, feeling like everybody was relying on each other and getting the job done together, honestly this baffles me because no-one was interesting in the original Resistance, no-one had a compelling personality... it was just empty emotionless shooting and getting the job done. Resistance 2 isn't interesting, it isn't a story-telling masterpiece, but at least I get to see Hale's progression into one of them, he may just stay a stern, head-shaved, tough-guy soldier, but at least there are progressions of his physical transformation. At least I get to follow something to the end. The story has never been strong in this series up to here, in fact it was a detriment, it let the series down, but I'm following someones story here, one singular person with an actual journey. Should I praise this? Probably not, but it's better than just throwing me in the battlefield and changing the scenery every now and then.
Let's blast through these quick, sound and graphics are basically exactly the same. I mean, technically graphically it might look better, but it's still the same smudgy grey and brown look, with the same sonical style, a pretty bland military feel. No point repeating what has already been said about the first game.
To conclude and not surprisingly, Resistance 2 excels at game play, with some restrictions being put in place that didn't need to be. However, most shocking is that Resistance 2 isn't quite the drab story experience that Resistance: Fall of Man was. It manages to incorporate much better boss battles, story-lines and manages to engage you far more than the original did. Because of this engagement that just did not exist in the original and the continuing strong game play elements, Resistance 2 ends up being a better sequel than Resistance: Fall of Man... but it's still just a good game. Check it out.
