Game Info :
Format PlayStation 3
Developer Insomniac Games
Publisher Sony
Genre First Person Shooter
Release Date: November 04, 2008
Game Preview :
Resistance had its fair share of critics. Consider the following statement: "Few knew who this Sergeant Nathan Hale was, why the American soldier with an impossibly generic face had muscled into Britain's fight for survival against the Chimeran menace. Or why it was thought a workable idea for him to be described in the third-person throughout a first-person game."
No, that's not a quote from Captain Rachel Parker, the distancing voice of exposition from Resistance: Fall of Man. It's just our way to point out how lame her inclusion was and why, in Resistance 2, her absence is just one of many brilliant changes that are set to make the sequel stand head and shoulders above the original.
It's going to be bigger to the point of qualifying as 'vast', deeper than a French poet drunk on laudanum and more social than an STD. And at last, the cookie-cutter hero, the infected American soldier Hale, will finally get to defend his own country after being overpaid, over-sexed (well, probed by aliens) and over here. Go on. Bugger off.
Fall of Man was a PS3 launch title and with that came some benefits, namely if you were one of the first people to buy the new console, then you had bugger all choice of what to get with it should you have hankered for something to kill.
The decision was easy. While the online multiplayer modes offered ace 40-player action, the single-player campaign was mired by poorly realised restart points and a sucky health system that managed to combine the most infuriating elements of recharging health bars and collectible medical packs yet devised.
The Chimeran, as bog-standard mutant alien bad dudes, contrasted their sharp detail and design with settings that, although they were set in Fifties UK, might as well (aside from famous landmarks) have come from a PS2 Medal of Honor title set in Normandy.
It's still a decent shooter in many areas, but when viewed through the prism of more recent fare like Call of Duty 4 and even Blacksite: Area 51's depiction of aliens rampaging through urban dereliction, it's obviously not the game to continue to define the console. It's already looking to be greying at the temples and unable to keep up with the pace set by more modern titles, less than a year since its original release.
Resistance 2 starts just after the original ended. Nathan Hale, a man seemingly named by machines designed to grind out action movie hero monikers, had fought through the Chimerian invasion of Britain.
He'd rescued Parker, been abducted, tested on and had escaped from an alien processing facility as well as being tainted with an alien infection that enabled him to recharge his health and ended the single-player campaign surrounded by sinister masked agents who abducted him by helicopter and flew him to a secret base in Iceland.
While there's nothing wrong with Bjork's barren homeland, it doesn't really lend itself to a first-person shooter set on earth during the Fifties. You may as well set the game on the moon.
Thankfully a plot device has been used in which Hale's chopper is shot down, enabling him to make his way back to the United States where he joins up with the American resistance and settles into a special unit of hard nuts known as The Sentinels.
Two years after Britain falls, it's invaded from the East and West coasts by massive alien airships packed with unworldly firepower and a seemingly incessant horde of Chimera. Middle America is going to get a taste.
America's geography offers some notable differences to Britain's. It features expansive areas of woodland, mountain ranges and deserts as well as gargantuan cities - and Resistance 2 sees Hale battling through a gamut of them with his first bout of homeland action taking place in San Francisco.
The most obvious difference is scale. America is massive and consequently so are the battlefields found here. The invasion is of an unprecedented scale and you, as Hale, will always be battling against seemingly insurmountable odds including Chimeran bosses that can stand 150 feet tall as they smash their way through urban decay and across sprawling planes.
The Sentinels have developed immunity to the alien virus, but they've still got a fight on their hands on a scale that the PS3 has never seen. There are more enemies on screen, a greater variety of enemies and even boss fights to break up the run-and-gun gameplay. It's going to be fantastic.
Resistance 2's single-player campaign follows directly on from the original game's narrative, but a parallel story can also be played with either two-players on the same screen or with eight online in co-operative combat.
This doesn't mean you'll have to meet the same seven other players online to continue the game after a session. The online co-op game will log your position and, more importantly, your skill level as defined by your previous performance.
You can log on and play with matched-up strangers who have fought to the same point as you and groups comprised of players who share your ability with the DualShock. You won't be forced to make sure the same crack troop of soldiers meet up, again and again, until the campaign's conclusion. Co-op mode will provide the same, if not more, play time than the main game.
The special-ops soldier is a dab hand with a modified version of the original game's Bullseye rifle that now comes equipped with extra zoom modes making for even more accuracy backed by more power, but it's the medic that offers the most interesting inclusion.
Usually in class-based online shooters, the player who chooses to perform medical duties spends most of their game time being shouted at by other players who bitch and bawl that medics aren't there immediately on-site to patch up their wounds. Resistance 2's medics aren't to be stuck wiping the bloody brows of reckless gamers, but instead can take a more pro-active role thanks to the Medicator gun.
This weapon can fire deadly red shots at enemies with each kill charging up a meter. Aim the same weapon at a friendly unit and when you pull the trigger, you'll automatically shoot a healing balm of blue energy at them and so be able to fix their broken bodies without having to be danger.
Delivering the goods
Best of all, medics have a real excuse to get into combat since if they haven't killed they can't offer medical aid. What gives co-op, and Resistance 2 its unending replayability is the new graphics system used to draw the game. Level designers are skilled artisans, no doubt, and totally necessary to the requirements of a first-person shooter - without them there would be bullet-bound bedlam.
Resistance 2's levels will feature set geography, like the placements of buildings and topological detail, but will also include a randomising element that means that each time you play through, you'll find new areas of cover and therefore new strategies that need to be developed to garner success. You won't be able to read a 'go here and shoot him' walkthrough for the game because it just wouldn't work.
You'd need a player to act as a switchboard for starters. This isn't a problem that Insomniac hasn't made moves to counter - and while online games will feature sixty players they will be corralled into smaller, more workable squads.
You'll log into a lobby system and build up your team of between four to eight comrades-in-arms, prep yourselves for battle by agreeing on roles and then get launched into a full-scale war. Each squad is given objectives to achieve beyond the simple annihilation of the enemy and so the chaos of conflict is formalised into a workable arena. Good job, since these battlefield are sprawling worlds that will encompass everything from tight inner-city fighting to massive open-ground slogs.
By using dedicated servers rather than peer-to-peer networking, Insomniac hope to build a greater sense of an online PS3 community than ever. Profile pages will continually update on www.myresistance.com and thanks to a totally open party and clan system, there will be no need to send out invites.
Dedicated servers not only make 60-player fluidly feasible, they'll also enable cleaner voice-chat - invaluable in a game where tactical player talk is vital if you don't all want to get slaughtered in a haze of ill communication.
Fall of Man was developed before the PlayStation 3 was released and therefore before developers, including Insomniac, had the time to build-up the expertise needed to get the most from the world's most powerful console. The levels in Resistance will not only be larger, but will offer more structural variety as well as featuring more vibrant digital light.
Texture detail is up, as are the numbers of polys and on-screen baddies. It's to be truly next-gen - and not feel, like the original often did, like a PS2 game running on an over-clocked machine. Enemies will display new behaviour patterns that alter depending on how near they are to the player. At range, they won't jostle about randomly but will dive for cover. When they get in close, this AI will shift to close-range mode, enabling them to work on you with new tricks that are dependant on how much they view you as a threat.
This is where the console war could turn. Resistance should amaze everyone who sees it in action.
Taken From : http://www.computerandvideogames.com
E3 2008: Resistance 2 Trailer (PS3)
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Game : Resistance 2
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