Resistance 2

In Resistance Fall of Man an intelligent virus of unknown origin (but somehow tied to the famous Tunguska meteor fall in the early 20th century) presumedly infected some people in some way and turned them into “Chimera” which are apparently hyper-intelligent monsters that build incredible feats of super-science engineering and then hang around them growling and otherwise acting like idiotic zombie thugs. In order to turn other people into Chimera, it was necessary for them to somehow create alien black scarab beetles that would burrow into people (lovely, I know) and turn them into inert proto-Chimera, which would then be brought to huge “processing plants” where they would be further exposed to a complicated network of vats and tubes that somehow melded them with metal cyborg parts and completed their gross anatomical restructuring. Are you confused yet?

First Impressions by Tanx
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Resistance 2
Platform: PS3
Played For: 12 hours


It seems that the expert video game crafters at Naughty Dog decided that this whole monster creation process was a bit hard to swallow... it looked like creating a standard Chimera soldier would require resources that could bankrupt your average small nation. So now, in Resistance 2, just about every precept from the previous installment has been completely done away with. Rather than evolving, the Chimera seem to have undergone a creationist change... although in this case it may be more akin to “unintelligent design.” Rather than large scary processing plants and scuttling scarab beetles and stuff, Chimera are now grown in cocoons spun by angry little.... armadillos? Well.... they kinda look like armadillos anyway. Really.

As the alien mutant viral armadillos don’t appear to be hostile (they’re actually quite cute), I’m still not sure how people get “infected” or cocooned in the first place. In fact, after 7 hours of the world’s shortest single-player campaign and some messing around with co-op, I can’t answer even the simplest questions regarding the so-called Chimeran virus. Is it airborne, or does it still require a beetle vector? Is everyone in America infected, and only staying clear of being cocooned because they are taking “suppressants” or is that just something special about our main character? Where did that big monster rampaging through Chicago come from? And what do the Chimera want anyway, other than to wander around growling a lot?

Resistance 2 is a game full of random scenery, fun action, and a complete absence of sensibility. I’d say it has plot holes, but the “hole” to “plot” ratio is such a large number that I can’t quite make out the tiny strands of story amidst all that empty intellectual space. When playing this game, expect to be whisked about to different lovely locations... you’ll go to besieged San Francisco, ruined Chicago, still swampy Louisiana, and even two brief jaunts to Iceland (levels which sadly did not take advantage of the very weird mossy volcanic jumbled rock that the real Iceland has to offer... really, you ought to visit... the terrain is like being on an alien planet. Oh, and the Blue Lagoon is nice too.) But as to what you are doing in this game at any given moment... well, you’re reacting to a lot of commands, but you never have a strong sense of what’s going on.

All I’ve garnered is that America is being invaded by the Chimera. But wait, there are actually these ancient metal towers underground that pre-date civilization and have for whatever reason just sprung up out of the ground. Oh, and if any three of them is activated something VERY BAD happens. What exactly is going to happen? How many towers exist? Why are they all in the United States and Iceland? And how is this related to primordial chimera or armadillos? Sorry... I just can’t help asking... and lamenting that with writing like this, an otherwise decent game concept is destined to fade into obscurity. When nothing makes an iota of sense in a game, it is impossible to get too involved or actually care about the fate of the hero or the world he is defending. Is Valve the only company that can really succeed at generating player involvement with the story in an FPS?

So we are left with a string of disjoint but pretty set pieces where you get to shoot a lot of stuff. The graphics are never stunning (and errors abound, like a table I knocked over at the start of the game, only to find that the things resting on the table continued to hover unmoving in the air where the table used to be.) In addition, behemoth monsters and gigantic tanks have the same issue that early ventures in computer graphics had for Hollywood... nothing seems to have any weight. The animators have not figured out how to convey a sense of mass and heft to large objects like they have in, oh, say, Gears of War 2 (oops... couldn’t help myself there.) Resistance is not on the Unreal engine, which may be why it feels like Naughy Dog is busy re-inventing the wheel, rather than pushing things forward to new horizons.

To give credit where credit is due, though, the art direction in Resistance 2 is rather good, and the places you visit are well-realized and interesting to explore. A small town covered in cocoons is both creepy and tragic, lending an atmosphere of actual widespread disaster to the too often noisy ongoing war. Likewise hordes of skinny aliens rushing you in a ruined Chicago hotel makes for an exciting scene. And a memorable scene fending off a horde of Chimera from an elegant southern plantation house is just icing on the cake. Resistance 2 is consistently fun both visually and on an encounter by encounter level.

And of course, a good deal of attention was given to the multiplayer component. Dutiful cousin CotangentX joined me to attempt the Co-op campaign, only to find it to be extraordinarily difficult without a few more people to help out. There are three job classes you can assume, and two of them... the medic and the special ops, are absolutely necessary as they are the only source of ammo and healing. Forced to play these two roles, we got into the groove and had some fun tossing ammo and healing goo at each other, collecting “gray tech” and otherwise running around like maniacs shooting anything that moved. However, there’s a lot of required repetition and again, not much in the way of story.

While the promise of new and swanky abilities for leveling up our co-op characters was tempting, the need to repeat the same missions over and over again inevitably led us to boredom and abandonment. As I’m not into playing with large numbers of probably teenage strangers online, that was the end of my Resistance part Deux. I leave mutant-infested Chicago and the rest of it all to other, more capable online players.

Will I play it more: the day I find 60 friends who own a PS3