Some Extraterrestrial Invasions Don't Come Easily

We all know a person like Insomniac Games, the developer of Resistance 2. Insomniac Games is, metaphorically, that person we all know who works incredibly hard, studies diligently for two hours every night before bed, and only parties on the weekend. Yet, despite all of Insomniac’s honest effort and enthusiasm, no matter how hard they work, the best they can ever score on an exam is a B+. Resistance 2, the sequel to PlayStation 3 title Resistance: Fall of Man, accomplishes just that. Despite a ton of evident hard work, Resistance 2 feels like a game that’s trying way too hard.

Resistance 2 picks up where Fall of Man left off in 2006 with the recruitment of Nathan Hale, the player character, by a special squad of elite soldiers to fend off an invading alien threat called the Chimera. The Chimera subdue humans with a virus that mutates them into Chimeran hybrids, but Hale manages to resist the virus. This grants him powers like health regeneration and super speed. While Fall of Man saw Hale fight off the Chimera on the British Isles, Resistance 2 takes place throughout North America.

Resistance 2 builds on a very solid foundation laid by Fall of Man—it nails most of the core fundamentals of what makes a shooter entertaining. The weapons (of which there are quite a few and whose designs share Insomniac’s penchant for innovative weapon designs) all feel meaty and offer nice feedback, and the aiming and control systems are all tight and not floaty. The third leg of any shooter foundation—the enemy artificial intelligence—is a bit wobbly here. The Chimeran threat is still more noteworthy for its sheer numbers than the intelligence of any one member—every Chimeran unit either mindlessly stands in place while you shoot it or charges directly at you. This is appropriate for some units—the Grim, for example, is essentially a zombie that charges at you in large numbers (think 50 or 60 of these things)—but for others it just feels kind of lame.

Resistance: Fall of Man was accused of being a game without an identity, more an amalgam of popular PC shooters grafted onto a console without any defining uniqueness. If this were true (and it isn’t), Resistance 2, then, is an amalgam of popular console shooters. Call of Duty 4’s dirty fingerprints are all over Resistance 2, and it doesn’t help the game. Gone is Fall of Man’s unique health system that was part-regenerative, part-absolute, as is the weapon wheel in favor of a more realistic two-at-a-time. This ends up severely diluting the product—Resistance 2 doesn’t feel much like the sequel to Fall of Man but instead like a rewriting of the original in hope that no one noticed.

The original game prided itself on its massive, free-form action set pieces, but Resistance 2 once again takes the CoD4 approach by scripting set pieces in order to impress players. Ultimately, though, it just falls flat. Scripting means that everything plays out exactly how a designer had in mind every single time you play. While this often makes a stellar first impression, subsequent play-throughs reveal the man behind the curtain. To compound this problem, Resistance 2 is a difficult game with the new health system, so you’ll be repeating these scripted set pieces many times. If fighting a gigantic Godzilla-style boss on Chicago rooftops sounds impressive, it is—the first time. Not the second time. And by the third time, it feels restrictive and annoying.

Resistance 2 is not bad, just unimpressive. It’s, like I said earlier, solid. The more I thought I liked the game, the more its flaws showed, and the more I realized it wasn’t much like the game I liked two years ago. Considering Resistance 2 will be facing Gears of War 2 this month, I sort of feel bad for everyone’s favorite B+ student.