The final instalment in the series meets with a little resistance...

When the first Resistance game landed with the PS3 in 2006, it had basically no competition on the console, and was hailed as a progressive and inventive shooter. It's gritty and realistic portrayal of an alternate 1950's Britain was a particularly high note in a game that was given an overwhelmingly positive reception.

When Resistance 2 hit in 2008, the games market for the PS3 had changed substantially. There was now much more competition on the console, and the bar had been raised much higher than before. However, Resistance 2 was a substantial and well produced game, and although it didn't receive quite the same reception as the first game, it was still a critical success.

The most damaging critiques of the game actually came from the senior community manager at Insomniac, James Stevenson. He said that the game "was a failure" for the hardcore fans, mostly because of the new additions and changes from the original, such as carrying a limited number of weapons and doing away with health packs and following the trend of taking cover to regenerate health. The much-loved co-op campaign was also gone, replaced with a separate mode with isolated and randomised objectives.

So Resistance 3 seems to be a game with a lot riding on it. Firstly, it has the expectations of any high-end console release, secondly, it has the pedigree of the series to hold up and conclude, and perhaps most importantly, it has to rekindle some of the love that was lost after the difficult second game... High targets to reach for any game.

The game begins by a [Spoiler] recap of the final events of Resistance 2, with the Nathan Hale, the protagonist for Resistance 1 & 2 being shot in the face by Joe Capelli, the poster boy for Resistance 3. The game then follows Joe as he attempts to save his family, thwart the plans of the Chimera and make it to New York, where a massive wormhole has been opened that is slowly freezing the planet.This story is a little familiar, but there are some good, emotionally charged scenes at the beginning that give you enough incentive to follow the plot through to the end, even if it does take some weird detours along the way.

Gameplay

The gameplay of the Resistance games has always been one of its strongest points. It has a familiar, robust and traditional feel to the camera and the controls. When you pick up the controller for the first time, you already know where all the buttons are, and what they all do. It's a good experience, and it really helps to smooth the transition between the games.

As you pick the game you will notice pretty quickly that Resistance 3 owes much more to the past generations of shooters than the current one. Your character moves around pretty quickly, and there is a jump button, something sorely missing from a lot of modern games. You can also carry as many guns as you please, with instant swapping and a fast and easy selection menu. Health does not regenerate either, and you will have to scrounge around the maps a bit to replenish your battle-weary body. These additions alone will have the hardcore fans breathing a sigh of relief, Insomniac have obviously looked at the changes they made in Resistance 2 and kept some that worked, and done away with the many that did not.

Controlling your protagonist is a familiar and comfortable experience, the game is sharp and responsive, playing smoothly throughout. There can be a few jumps and jerks though, and I noticed more than a little bit of screen-tearing in some locations, more of a graphics than a gameplay issue, but the small jumps did affect my immersion in the game, just not in a very major way.

As before, the arsenal of Resistance is one of its strongest points. With the ability to hold onto every gun you encounter in the game, you are never short of a new or more inventive way to kill a Chimera. Many of the old favourites return, the Bullseye, Auger, Magnum, Rossmore, Marksman and Carbine. They are also joined with some new weapons, like the Mutator, which fires blobs of goo that attach to enemies and cause them to choke and inflate, the Cryogun for freezing and shattering your enemies, and the Chimera's own Deadeye sniper rifle. All of these weapons have the familiar 'secondary fire' mode, providing the gun with a new attack, or an augmentation on their existing attack (the Rossmore fires a concussion grenade, the Cryogun releases a blast of air to shatter frozen foes...). All the guns now progress and level up as you use them, going through 3 stages of enhancements on the fly, unlocking powerful upgrades like incendiary ammo, explosive rounds, enhanced scopes and higher ammo capacity. The levelling-up works really well, and not only keeps the combat balanced as the enemies get more powerful and numerous further into the game, but also gives you a good incentive to keep changing your weapon, mixing it up and trying to level up as many different weapons as possible.

It may seem like an unfair advantage to be able to run around with enough guns and ammo to supply a small army, but the numbers and diversity of the Chimera soon make it obvious that this is not the case. Right from the beginning of the game you are battling with large numbers of the aliens in big, open environments, strewn with debris and collapsed buildings. True to the form of taking more from older shooters than the new generation, the play-style of the game is run-and-gun. You begin a fire fight in one location, but before too long you will have to move, the pressures of having to collect health, coupled with enemies that spawn behind you, run around you to flank or simply jump over your head forces to you utilise the whole environment you are fighting in. This doesn't really detract from the game itself, as the areas are well-designed with lots of buildings and hiding spots, but if you approach Resistance 3 with a mind to crouch behind a crate and pop off a couple of well-placed shots... Well, you won't last long, basically.

The Chimera themselves are a diverse and powerful bunch, and you will encounter many different types throughout the game. From the familiar solider-class from the previous games, to cloaked snipers, feral-ghoul-type grunts, leaping shock troops and lumbering brutes, there is always diversity to the enemies you are facing. Killing the Chimera is a also a pleasant experience, the weapons feel weighty and powerful, and bullets slam into your enemies. Kill a Chimera and it will howl in anguish and die, shoot its back-pack and it will explode, hurling its wearer forward with the blast. Head-shots remove heads, and enemies are frequently dismembered, blown apart of just disappear into a fountain of gore. Resistance 3 is definitely the most visceral game in the series, but it never really becomes gratuitous, it just feels like a reality of the ongoing war you are a part of.

The only time when the gameplay is let down is when you are overwhelmed. With too many enemies around you it becomes very, very difficult to move around and fight them off, and they have a bad habit of standing right in front of your face, only letting you see a snarling mouth and blossoms of blood as you unload into them. It is supposed to feel overwhelming and intense, but more often it is just disorientating and confusing, you are not really in danger, you can usually just shoot your way out, but you are often left unsure of which way you came, how you got there or where the aliens are actually coming from. It's a common problem in a lot of shooters, but it seems especially pronounced in Resistance 3.

Presentation and Story

When I first turned on my copy of Resistance 3, I was actually pretty disappointed with the graphics. I expect a lot from PS3 exclusives, as they are dedicated to development on one console, instead of the 2 or 3 platforms most games have to be adapted for, and with the substantial power available in the PS3, I was expecting a lot from one of the flagship exclusives.

My first impressions were that the graphics were pretty grainy, and kind of choppy too, if you moved around a lot and tried to focus on one object, you can see a lot of screen-tear between the frames. The edges of people and scenery also seemed quite fuzzy and rough, seemingly behind some much older games, and certainly miles away from other PS3 exclusives, like the stellar presentation of God Of War iii. However, after you start moving forward with the game, these issues decrease, mostly because when a hectic battle begins, the minor faults become insignificant, and you are left looking at the big picture, and the game as a whole, not just focusing on one tiny aspect. For the most part, the graphics work in these situations, they are sharp enough to see everything that is happening, and the bullets, explosions and blood-splatter all work together very effectively, producing battle scenes that look realistic and enthralling.

The environments on display in Resistance 3 also begin with a lacklustre showing. If I had to describe the first half of the game in one word it would be brown. Because everything, everything is brown. The floor, sky, buildings, clothing, people, interiors, exteriors, if it isn't brown then you can bet it is attached to something brown. I'm sure this was a conscious decision to give everything a feeling of continuity, or degradation, or hopelessness, or woe, but it really just gives everything a feeling of brown. Luckily, the game mixes this up in the later levels, with some snow and cool interior levels, but before then you must endure some lengthy tunnels and mines (brown) and train ride through some brown countryside and a decaying and rusted prison complex, which is brown. It isn't really a major complain that they used such a restricted colour pallet, as the environments are well detailed and realistically textured, but they all feel like the same place, there is no sense of travel, or distance between all these big, brown places. Looking at screenshots it can be pretty difficult to decipher where in the story the player is, because he is inevitably somewhere very brown.

The slightly, sub-par graphics and brown-ness of the game are carried through by the excellent gameplay, and to be honest, if you are not playing the game with an overly critical eye, then you probably won't even notice these points, because you will be so busy with the exciting and involving battles that occur throughout the game. But one thing you won't be able to escape is the storyline and its telling.

In my reading of some other reviews, people seem to be making a lot of the emotional weight of the story, and its clever and enthralling progression, but I'm afraid that I just didn't see it. The game builds a good attachment between Capelli and his wife and young son, but it never goes beyond the standard video game clichés, they are in danger, and you are sometimes torn between your family and the mission, but all the decisions are made for you, and you never actually get the opportunity to do something differently, so the whole experience feels a bit detached. The progression of the story was something else I had a bit of a problem with, you set off on your way to New York, and along the way you meet different groups of people that give you different missions in order to progress. It just seems like a very familiar way to write a shooter storyline. You have an end goal, and you set off towards it, then you meet someone or something, and have to get it a power-core, then you meet something else, and have to kill a boss-monster for it, then something else happens, and you are taken to a prison. The majority of the time you are not actually making your way towards New York at all, you are simply carrying out a task for someone you have encountered along the way. And while this set-up works well for a lot of shooters, (and really doesn't let this one down either) I was just expecting a lot more from a climactic end to a high-budget series. The ending of the game was also a let-down for me, the final battles are great, don't get me wrong, but the final resolution is not the moving and amazing victory you'd expect, it is quite vague, and left me feeling quite disappointed at how the series was concluded.

Multiplayer

For some the main selling point of the Resistance games has been its multiplayer. Resistance 2 had huge, frantic matches with up to 60 players all battling it out online. Sadly, this has been reduced to just 16 for Resistance 3. However, 16 is still plenty of players, and the maps are intelligently designed, funnelling players together in choke points and around objectives, so the fall in player numbers is never felt too strongly.

The online game-modes and old favourites like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Breach and Capture the Flag, but they all work well and are fast paced and enjoyable. Weapon and character progression has also been added in to the multiplayer modes, as you progress you unlock weapon upgrades and character load outs. All the guns are not available from the start, and must be unlocked by earning XP, but this does not necessarily hinder new players, as guns are picked up automatically by passing over them, so simply by staying alive a little while you can amass quite an arsenal.

The co-op mode that was so sorely missed from Resistance 2 is back, and adds some great replay value to the main campaign, having a friend battle with you through the intense fire fights really helps, and with two players you can employ quite sophisticated tactics with the broad range of weapons to get the edge on the Chimera in new and inventive ways. In some respects, it is a better game when played cooperatively, you get surrounded much less, and having a second person with you to experience the exciting and cinematic parts of the game really adds to the experience.

Conclusion

Resistance 3 is a good game. But it hasn't really broken any new ground, it had the potential to be so much more, more epic, more polished and altogether more appealing. The first two Resistance titles felt like they were setting up for something grand and impressive, a huge and electrifying finale, but what we have received is just another game in the series, with none of the final flare and flash that we were expecting.

That being said the gameplay is solid and enjoyable, keeping you interested all the way through and always providing you with something new as you go along, and some of the scenes are indeed vast and exciting, but inconsistent. The multiplayer and co-op modes are very good too, giving the game a lot of replay value and good value for money...

But in the end, I can't help feeling that this game could, and should have been five stars, but the disappointing finale and story unquestionably take it down to four. And there it should have remained, but the graphics and presentation of Resistance 3 make it look dated and a little shabby compared to other four star titles that were only held back by minor flaws. So I'm afraid the score falls to a disappointing three out of five. This seems like a pretty low score to be giving a game that I did actually enjoy, but there were a lot of expectations on this game, and in the end, it simply did not deliver.

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