If art imitates life, then Halo must be life

by Mark Medeiros

Fun factor: Fun

Worth to: Rent

The First-Person Shooter of the month! In particular, Sony’s fifth or sixth-odd attempt at mimicking Halo, including all the Killzones and Hazes of the world.

Why it’s the ever-popular Humans versus Aliens! Actually I’m not quite too sure what these “Chimera” are supposed to be. Are they’re alien invaders, a virus that infects humans, or a combination? That had to have gotten those spaceships and lasers somehow. The game’s explanation is a bit confusing and their background isn’t explored beyond “these guys bad, shoot their heads.”

Halo, Halo!

You play as Nathan Hale, an especially skilled soldier who’s trying his absolute hardest to adopt the Master Chief’s personality, and at least manages to capture his lack of charisma. The story’s a throwaway, with the one humorous bit being that characters who are standing right next to you will still feel the need to communicate to you over their radio headsets.



Resistance 2 is a game that tries its damnedest to be like Halo. Like Halo, you and a squad of armored AI marines (who are mostly there for show) battle legions of aliens. Like Halo, you can only carry two weapons at a time. Like Halo, your health regenerates automatically when you avoid damage. Like Halo, you have separate buttons for melee attacks and grenade tosses. Like Halo, there are no puzzles to solve, just things to shoot. Unlike Halo, Resistance is supposed to be set in the 40 or 50s, which should make it like every other World War 2 shooter out there. But I can’t help but feel that the chance for some interesting, Fallout-style juxtaposition between 40s Americana and war-torn chaos is blown in all but one very clever level set in the suburbs, pitting you against the aliens in houses and a diner shootout. Otherwise all the levels are military bases, alien ships and warehouses. Kind of like Halo.

Joanna Dark would be proud of the arsenal

That said, the parts of Resistance that aren’t… well… like Halo, strike me as the game’s strongest attributes. For example, I’ve never seen secondary fire from weapons used to such great effect, and it extends further than “this weapon also shoots grenades and this weapon can add a silencer.” Magnums have manually-detonated exploding bullets; one alien gun has a tracking device that makes all the bullets home in on a target; another alien gun shoots through walls… okay Perfect Dark did some of this first, but we don’t see a lot of these ideas often. The weaponry helps keep things fresh, along with a bevy of enemy types ranging from bullet-soaking big monsters to annoying zombie thingys that run at you. It’s amazing the difference in a battle between a giant bullet-soaking monster with a rocket launcher paired with a few grunts and a giant bullet-soaking monster with a rocket launcher paired with bigger soldiers whose bullets pass through walls.



I’d say that Resistance’s greatest victory is that, except for one or two segments near the end of the game, you never feel like you’re just fighting wave after wave of enemies, even though you are. Almost every gunfight feels like an exciting gunfight as opposed to respawning baddies. Supplementing this idea, there’s no cliché gun turret sequence or vehicle sequence, the one involving a consistent stream of alien cyborg scum interfering in your path from Point A to Point B.

The Campaign is about 7 hours long, which is long enough, as the experience admittedly gets weary near the end and the final mission in particular feels like a massive dud. Actually, there are few moments in the campaign that stick out of my mind in memory so the game won’t leave any kind of lasting effect on you, but I enjoyed it while it lasted so it’s a good way to kill a week’s worth of gaming.

Remember when grinding was reserved to MMOs?

There are two separate multiplayer components and they all fall under the blanket of what is quickly becoming my least favorite new trend in shooters: grind-based multiplayer. Not that any shooter will call it grind; it may be “perk-based” or “class-based” but it’s still grinding, like you grind in an online RPG. Even when you shoot enemies, every bullet makes an experience point number appear above the enemy’s head, as if you were playing World of Warcraft.

Competitive multiplayer has all the usual modes, Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, etc. On paper, the game boasts about being able to have 60 players on a single map, but I struggled to find any game that had more than 15. Otherwise, the plague of perks strikes here too. I’m always going to hate the idea of the game giving competitive edges to those playing for weeks on end over someone who just wants to kill a few minutes every now and then, and the problem seemed to strike me as worse here in Resistance than it did in the Call of Duty games.



On the other hand, cooperative multiplayer holds up surprisingly well. There’s an original set of levels designed solely for co-op, even if there’s little in the way of story to hold everything together. You choose one of three classes: soldiers have big guns and shields to protect people; medics drain enemy health and use it to heal teammates and special ops people have long range scopes and give people ammo. It’s easy to keep track of when allies need help, even without a headset (and it seems nobody playing a PS3 online has one!) and there’s a considerably frantic pace in keeping track of everything going on. You’re still fighting waves of enemies, but in spite of the repetition and HEAVY borrowing from MMORPGs, it’s still a unique twist in its own right.

Summary

If you asked me to create a lineup of the top ten first-person shooters of 2008, number 1 would be “screw that, nothing this year touched Call of Duty 4” but number 2 would be Resistance 2. Though how much you consider it to be worth your hard-earned dollar depends on how much you value your cooperative multiplayer experience, and how badly you need to shoot aliens this very weekend. It’s enjoyable but forgettable; the first-person shooter flavor of the month that impresses all with its technology and not too much else, and is only on the collective consciousness of gamers until the next big shooter is released. And Killzone 2 isn’t too far away.