Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)

As a PlayStation 3 launch title and a game released when the first person shooter fad was about to take the seventh generation of video game consoles by storm, Resistance: Fall of Man was in an excellent position to draw a lot of attention. It dominated in sales and received great acclaim at the time, but the footprint of the series seems much smaller than some of its contemporaries. The first game in the series at least seems like a decent start, although the room for improvement it has for the sequels is fairly evident as well.

Set in an alternate version of the 1950s, an alien race known as the Chimera appear in Russia and quickly spread out all across Europe. Able to sustain their forces by infecting and modifying human beings into new members of their species, their glut of troops and a clear technological advantage means mankind has hardly any chance of pushing back against the growing Chimeran invasion. When the Chimera push into England, however, mankind finally finds a small hope for their resistance movement. Nathan Hale, a U.S. Army Sergeant, is the character the player plays as, and he seems to be in a constant state of pure anger. His face’s default expression is a pronounced scowl and he only gets more angry as he faces off against the Chimeran troops, although he also appears too angry to talk much. Besides perhaps being the angriest man alive, Nathan also seems to have the unique trait of resisting the infection of the Chimera, cleanly integrating their DNA into his but not converting into one of their troops like other humans have. With this edge, Hale is able to push into areas other humans could not enter and the war effort to save England from being overrun by the alien invaders finally has a chance of success. The way this story is presented isn’t the best though, the game relying mostly on narration where the character speaking either lacks certain details to give a full picture of events or presents them rather flatly with little visual context as if it was part of a historical documentary.

Since the plot of the game is a fairly standard war effort, albeit it one against an alien species, there really isn’t much going on in it besides gaining ground, taking down key enemy bases, and fighting to take back cities across the United Kingdom. Despite every area in the game being based on a big name city in Britain, the levels manage to have a somewhat distinct feel to them. Admittedly, the color variety ranges from brown to grey, but the level layouts give each city a different feel, and the ways the Chimera have altered them with their attacks or technology mean the layouts don’t feel too repetitive during the campaign.  You will see a lot of ruined cities, but you’ll end up moving through cramped corridors, pushing through city blocks in a dangerous forward advance, jumping across rooftops, and going through special buildings or underground tunnels as you do so. The areas are even set up to make firefights feel different, areas packed with cover for you and your enemies and managing to keep arrangements somewhat varied. Because of this, many of the story mode levels are transitioned wholesale into multiplayer maps which further shows the strength of the maps designwise.

Weapon variety is fairly good in both single player and multiplayer as well, the first person shooting having a good weighty feel to it with most weapons. Enemies are able to take a bit of punishment though, even able to take multiple headshots from the weaker weapons, but that helps make your equipment use more diverse. Nathan Hale is slowly doled out weapons during the campaign, but he gets to keep any weapon he’s found, giving the player a slowly growing arsenal. Starting off with standard human fare like an assault rifle and shotgun, you eventually pick up the enemy weapons to turn against them. Human weapons are often a bit basic but good for their tasks, but Resistance gets fairly creative with its original designs. Fore example, the Bullseye is an automatic weapon where you can tag an enemy to make your shots home in on them, and the Auger can fire through walls or create a shield for you to blast through. The game even has some decent grenade variety! It’s refreshing when grenades are useful in a first-person shooter in the first place, with some game having barely any range on their explosions, but it was easy to fall back on grenades in Resistance as a way to clear enemy clusters or entrenched enemies, the different grenade types each having different advantages. Outside the regular frag, the Hedgehog Grenade sends spikes bursting out, potentially damaging nearby enemies even if it wasn’t close enough to kill. The Air Fuel Grenade is more powerful, but it takes a bit to release gas before it scorches anything standing in the cloud. Most weapons have some sort of alternate fire or nifty trick to make them more interesting than your typical fare in a gunfight, but there are a few duds. The Sapper places explosive bubbles at short range that burst when enemies get near, but they’re fairly obvious and most fights happen from far away. Ammo distribution is intelligent enough that the player will never have too much for their more devastating and effective weaponry, but it does mean that you’ll fall back on automatics a lot. There are a few vehicle sections, some where you pilot heavy armor and get to use the cannons, but a few just involve you toting around a turret gunner as the driver, although in co-op it can be a bit more interesting as an actual human can do the firing instead of your slow and inconsistent AI ally.

Your Chimeran enemies are fairly good opponents in the single player. They mostly come in three broad types: tiny crawlers who move fast and aim to swarm you, the Hybrids which use the same weaponry as you and are on pretty equal footing with you, and larger boss types with devastating attacks and huge health reserves. There is of course variation with each of these subsets, the large enemies coming as spider tanks, enormous aliens with rocket launchers, and more, but the main push of the game is to kill every bad guy in the area and push on into the next and that’s usually through the typical soldier types. The AI is okay at controlling them, but sometimes you will encounter them all staring into the distance and waiting for you to trigger them, although the damage they can dish out usually makes up for their inconsistent intelligence. You gradually learn a bit about this unusual species, from story cutscenes, intel you find in the level, and the art galleries you get for fulfilling certain achievement-like objectives, but there are still a lot of mysteries when the game ends and some things never even addressed. Many pieces of intel mention the terrifying Cloven but they never pop up once in the story. Still, while not all there in the development department, they are sufficient in their role as enemies to gun down, putting up a fairly good fight in part thanks to the game’s health system. Thanks to his Chimeran infection, Nathan has slight regenerative capabilities. With four small bars of health, Nathan can lose them fairly quickly if he isn’t careful, but so long as a bar is not fully depleted, he can restore the health to it by avoiding enemy fire. To fill a depleted one he needs to find health pickups, and this marriage of regenerating health and pickups makes for some fairly tense moments. Checkpoints start out generous but dial back in frequency the further you get, leading to moments where you might have to enter a firefight close to death, but you’ll always have a small buffer if you can find time to hide and restore a nearly empty health bar. It discourages sloppiness and makes you consider alternate tactics to better preserve your health without being too punishing, a fine difficulty compromise for a first-person shooter.

Although the multiplayer servers are offline, local play still has some legs. The 40 player levels might be too big to play in reasonably with only 4 humans, but Resistance’s multiplayer has quite a lot of options to customize your experience with. Every weapon can be turned on or off, some levels come in different sizes, and perhaps the option with the biggest impact is being able to play as a human or Chimera. Both nominally have certain advantages, Humans can sprint better, are smaller, and have a radar… but the Chimeran Rage Mode is incredibly useful. It makes them stronger, faster, and able to see through walls with thermal imagery, and while it drains a Chimera’s health to use, it certainly beats blips on a radar for finding opponents. You can choose whether or not to allow Chimerans though or even cleverly work them in as a comeback mechanic for the Conversion mode, so you can at least determine how the Chimeras will affect the game to ensure a more enjoyable bit of shooting with your friends.

THE VERDICT: Resistance: Fall of Man is a well-constructed first-person shooter, able to keep the single-player campaign and the multiplayer fairly interesting with diverse weapons and responsive shooting. The weapon types make it more than just pointing and shooting at your enemies, with some fun and effective designs, a balanced health system, and some strong level designs that ensure that there are actual firefights rather than abrupt kills. The fundamentals are all there and there are enough gimmicks to give the game an identity, but it doesn’t quite go far enough to be exceptional. The story mode is straightforward and not very creative, and while the confrontations are good challenges, they aren’t very inventive and boil down to going from fight A to fight B and so on. Multiplayer does fare a bit better though thanks to its wealth of options, but it does still feel like a gussied up war shooter for the most part.

And so, I give Resistance: Fall of Man for the PlayStation 3…

A GOOD rating. Resistance has a lot going for it, but the reason it likely faded from the public memory is the missing spark to start a bigger fire. It’s mechanically sound, has some good level designs, and the alien weaponry is interesting, but dull greys and drab browns draped over English cities make it hard to get invested, as does an enemy force that doesn’t quite reach its potential in variety or concept. Resistance only really has its good shooting to fall back on. In that department, everything is well-tuned and enjoyable enough, but straightforward objectives in single-player and multiplayer means there’s not much room for a consistently fresh experience.

Resistance: Fall of Man is still a fairly good first-person shooter to pick up on PS3. What it does do different ensures it doesn’t blend in with the crowd that would follow after its release, but that diversity isn’t put to the best use due to the standard war shooter structures it does adhere to. Because of this, the first Resistance title didn’t quite cement itself as a classic FPS title.