Resistance 2
November 11,2008 - Proving their name true, Insomniac managed to get the sequel to their first PS3 game out just in time for the holiday season. Resistance 2 looks to kick every aspect of the game up a notch and give PS3 owners more to do with their newest Insomniac game. Does R2 stack up to the highly-competitive competition in the first-person shooter genre?

Resistance 2 picks off right where the Fall of Man ended, with Nathan Hale stumbling through a snow-filled area as he’s picked up by these strange soldiers that he soon finds out are members of the Special Research Project Administration, or SRPA for short. They employ many others like Nathan that have survived the Chimeran infection and have gained special powers like him in a special task force called The Sentinels. The Chimerans have spread their grasp of the globe since they last saw Nathan, as they are now setting their sights on the last remaining bases in Iceland and North America to finish off the last remaining human armed forces. Though the story’s presentation isn’t as heavy-handed as it was in Fall of Man, the story here is fairly interesting and those that want more of the background and story can collect the intel hidden throughout the single-player and co-op campaigns. Just don’t play R2 if you hope for a bright and cheerful story and ending.

The single-player campaign in R2 is pretty much par for the course, as far as first-person shooters are concerned. The new two-weapon inventory system lets Insomniac give you the weapons you’ll need when you need them, which has its advantages, but also gives away some of the surprise since you’ll know what’s coming up when certain weapons are given to you. There are a good number of new Chimerans introduced in R2, which adds a bit more variety to the forces you’ll face, especially when they come out in groups with some of the larger enemies and some of the grunts, forcing you to be smart with who you take out first. You’ll see plenty of big bosses here that you’ll have to be careful when taking them out, though their weaknesses tend to be standard video game weaknesses, where you need to hit their weak spot or do something special to inflict damage on them a certain number of times, which takes a little of the coolness out of those kinds of fights. That doesn’t mean that fighting that well-publicized Leviathan wasn’t cool, but it mostly feels like you’re playing your role in a scripted play rather than actually fighting them.

R2’s new recharging health system is the same standard health HUD that most first-person shooters have these days, which works well, but the many groups of enemies can easily overwhelm you quickly if you’re not completely on the ball, leading to some cheap and frustrating deaths. Luckily, checkpoints are littered throughout the game, so you’ll run into one after a couple of encounters so those deaths don’t hurt you too badly. Like Fall of Man, R2 isn’t completely original either, as those new enemies are Chimeran interpretations of the Predator and zombies along with story elements pulled from movies like Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and more well-known sci-fi stories. Level design this time around feels a lot more natural, evoking a more typical sci-fi feel versus the typical WWII feel that Fall of Man had in spades, though there’s a lot here that feels a lot like Half Life 2 in the way your paths through levels are laid out. The single-player campaign is a bit of a brief experience here, lasting about eight hours or so depending on the difficulty you’re playing with and the entire experience feels like Insomniac listened to all of the criticisms of Fall of Man and worked hard to fix as many of them as possible.

It’s a good thing that Resistance 2 has a lot more to offer outside of the single-player campaign, which means the multiplayer that spans both co-op and competitive multiplayer. Taking inspiration from Call of Duty 4, you have a similar RPG-style level aspect to the entire game, meaning you can get experience from single-player, co-op, and multiplayer to building up your overall level along with the individual levels that each mode has. That gives you a nice incentive to try out everything to unlock more stuff for each mode to see what your next prize is. Another new addition to the multiplayer is the new allies system, or the fancy term for its party set-up that lets you invite friends to stay with you throughout multiplayer or co-op sessions.

Multiplayer was the biggest part of the first Resistance and R2 manages to go beyond the big 40 player limit that Fall of Man’s online mode had. This time, 60 players can get together and duke it out for the win and some experience, which Insomniac has a new mode in store for competitive fans to take advantage of the new player limit, called Skirmish. This splits everybody up into squads of five to six people and gives them objects to complete against opposing squads that work towards an eventual finish for one side of the fight, which is a cool, unique game type when you’ve got good squads working together. The rest of the modes are your typical deathmatch and team deathmatch modes that are fun and a bit more chaotic with the new 60 player limit along with core control being the game’s capture the flag mode, so it’s a bit disappointing that there are not more modes in terms of quantity and unique ideas that take advantage of the 60 player limit and the new locales, but maybe DLC will fix that in the future. It seems that R2 online play is on dedicated servers once again, so lag is virtually gone and the game is smooth, though the browser to find games is a bit lackluster since you can’t create your own search terms to find the games you want to get into.

If there’s one mode in shooters these days that is still in its early stages of life, it’s the co-op mode, which Insomniac has obviously put a lot of work into fleshing out for Resistance 2. Instead of just playing with identical versions of the same character with the same abilities, co-op in R2 takes on the form of an MMO-style raid where you join up with seven others taking one of three roles to work together as a team to get through levels and defeat the end boss to complete your mission and rack up the experience. Each of the three roles are unique, as the soldier is the tank, the medic keeps an eye on the health of their teammates, and the spec-ops keeps everybody full of ammo while assisting the soldier in killing enemies, and each role is useful and fun to play as. With a group of friends, this experience gets even better, though strangers can work together just fine with some decent communication. Instead of taking place over one long campaign, the co-op missions are separated for ease of play, though you do need to unlock story levels after the opening Chicago level and story is kept to the intel lying around those levels and the mission briefing that’s showing while loading the level. With the randomized objective structure and unlockables for each of the classes, the cooperative mode in R2 is easily the most fun co-op out there right now and this is probably the mode that will keep many people coming back to this game time and time again.

While Fall of Man was easily the top of the class as far as launch PS3 games were concerned in the visuals department, things have changed a lot in the two years since then. Insomniac has done a good job breathing some life into the graphics by just adding colors outside of brown and gray, so you’ll see plenty of swamps and forests along with towns and alien architecture. The campaign has its moments where it’ll look great and other moments where it merely looks good, as things like wonky physics causing objects to bounce around awkwardly and react to your took in violent manner that makes this engine feel like a wonky version of the Source engine. Water looks fairly good at times, but it can react to rag doll bodies in a manner that looks more like Mercury than the water we’ve all played around in. There are definitely some nice effects in R2, particularly the organs splattering where the body once stood when enemies explode and the very nice use of lighting for the more tense situations along with the excellent glass-splintering physics that Fall of Man was well-known for. The game has a nice graphical style to it, even if the entire game doesn’t really feel 100% original, but those huge boss set pieces look great and definitely satisfy that need to beat up on huge enemies.

What’s easily the best part of Insomniac’s presentation in Resistance 2 has to be the audio work. From the squishy sounds of your feet walking through alien goo and tissue to oddly demonic chatter of the Chimerans, this game is an audio delight that rewards those with a great sound set-up and is a treat for those who like details in their audio. The orchestrated score here is really well-done, adding a great deal to the atmosphere, even when the story may not be enough of a reason to feel tense when wading through a dark tunnel as Grims, R2’s version of quick zombies, swarm over you or be willing to kick some ass when Nathan needs to step up his game. The voice acting is well-done with Nathan Hale’s interaction with his teammates, though it’s odd to hear the guys right around you talking through their radio, even when it’s a scientist that’s not wearing a headset.

It seems like for the first time in Insomniac’s history, they made a game that feels like it didn’t quite live up to the potential, so maybe that the yearly schedule left them with so much to work on, that they couldn’t give every mode the attention that it deserved. The Resistance 2 that Insomniac did release is still a great game that is a lot of fun to play, but there is just enough here that is somewhat lacking that could’ve helped the campaign and competitive modes reach their potential. The latter can be touched up with DLC in the coming months while the former is what it is, a good single-player campaign. The Co-op mode is absolutely what makes this game stand out above the rest with its unique and rewarding gameplay that we definitely recommend to anyone that loves co-op in their games. Don’t resist this game for another minute.

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