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| Fight the Hype - Resistance: Fall of Man |
| Tuesday 26 August 2008 |
 In this feature we will take another look at the games of yesteryear as we attempt to smash those rose tinted glasses and cast off the shackles of hype. For our first feature, Resistance: Fall of Man will be under the spotlight.
With Resistance 2 racing towards us I decided to dip back into the first iteration of the series. First off, I’ll give you a bit of background. Not about the game but how the game and I crossed paths.
The Playstation 3 launched and with it came Resistance. I can’t really remember what I thought of it, needless to say, that fact alone shows just how much an impression it had on me. However fate insisted I get to grips with the game.
And so it was, 3402 miles and a couple of awful in-flight movies later, I find myself more than slightly bored in Dubai airport. I hadn’t slept for a good 20 hours by this point so I did what any sane person would do - I looked for a Starbucks. Having struck insomniac gold I wondered through duty free half dazed, definitely confused and more than a little jacked up on caffeine. I stumble across a PS3 demo booth with none other than Resistance: Fall of Man on show. As my hyperactive twitching abates, I proceed to play.
Now, my first impression of the game has stuck with me. It is brown. Very brown. I can’t escape this fact. Even now I keep expecting a honky-tonk piano to start playing with the occasional intertitle displaying a boot-eating objective to stave off starvation.
The next impression that I remember was that the enemy design was pretty bland, pretty generic. Having played it again recently, I’ve come to appreciate the Chimera a bit more. Okay, they're thick and predictable and if you just add a bit more muscle to their spindly legs, put the forgotten love child of an assault rifle and a chainsaw in their hands, they would look like them lot from Gears of War… except with more eyes... and traffic cones on their backs. That is a bit unfair though as there are other enemies that spice up the mix, my personal favorite being the little worker aliens that shuffle towards with a view to a chunk of your neck. They make crazy grumbling noises when you hit them for that added incentive.
 Brown. Very Brown.
Another thing that sticks out is the ability to strafe faster than a speeding bullet. It’s almost like playing Space Invaders at times. It’s bizarre.
It sounds like I have major problems with this game but really these are quite minor when it comes down to it. I know it should all bug me but it doesn’t because at its core the game is solid fun. I even found that posh woman who narrates the pretty involving, yet uneventful and obvious, story perfect in keeping with the whole “chosen one” complex.
The level design is varied but the outdoor environments are definitely more enjoyable than the indoor corridor-fests. The graphics, although brown, are clean but they lack detail in some parts and so the game feels dated. The controls… well you can reassign them like I did, more games should do this. Finally the inclusion of co-op is great, I’ve always felt it can make any game a lot more enjoyable and Resistance is no exception.
Resistance, as a whole, has aged pretty well but maybe that’s because there is nothing new about it, it is the most vanilla sci-fi shooter around. A solid and fun game, but stuck in the past.
6/10
Labels: Daft, Features, Fight the Hype, Playstation 3, Resistance: Fall of Man |
posted by Daft @ 12:30  |
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