December 5, 2006 - Insomniac is best known for the original Spyro the Dragon and the Ratchet and Clank series. Ratchet and Clank in particular, brings a lot of first person shooter elements and blends them with a classic platforming approach. But the real highlights of that series are the weapons that players wield during the game. The wacky functionality of the weapons is exactly what made Ratchet and Clank such a fun game to play. With the PlayStation 3 out the door, Insomniac is trying to draw upon those resources to make a more mature first person shooter and the end result is Resistance: Fall of Man. The game rises above the general conception of launch titles and is a great showcase of what the PS3 can do.

The story for Resistance revolves around the war between humanity and a new type of enemy called the Chimera. The events for the game take place right around the time of World War II and in this alternate timeline, said event never happened. Instead, the Chimera have taken advantage of the political turmoil between nations and captured most of Asia and Europe. The United Kingdom still stands as Europe’s last line of defense and the United States deploys troops to stop the Chimera menace from ever reaching the West. Nathan Hale is a member of these troops, but instead of dying like the rest of his team, he actually develops a sort of immunity to the alien virus. The infection gives him special Chimeran abilities for use in combat. With the help of some local allies, Nathan must take down the Chimeran menace and take back earth for humanity. The premise is certainly interesting enough but not much is done with the story elements. Most of the plot points are told through some still images and impressive in-game cutscenes. The story isn’t the best to ever grace an FPS, but it certainly gets the job done.

The Chimeran infection within Nathan gives him great abilities for combat. The first one is auto-healing which works a bit like the shield in Halo. If you avoid damage for long enough it will replenish, but there is a catch. There are four health bars on the screen and depending on how much damage you’ve taken, auto-healing may only replenish three, two, or even just one health bar. There are yellow containers around levels that will replenish those other bars but the trick is to avoid fire and keep the health bars for as long as you can. It all depends on the amount of damage taken at once. If the amount of damage taken goes down to the third bar, the player can only auto-heal until the third bar.

Keeping those bars is certainly a challenge with the amount of deadly enemies thrown at you throughout the game. But having a great arsenal of weapons goes a long way towards killing monsters. Almost every weapon has an interesting alternate fire mode and the weapons themselves are very useful. The original rifle for example, happens to have a grenade launcher as the alternate fire. Yet another cool weapon is the Bullseye, which has Chimeran origin and shoots energy bullets at the enemy though it lacks the same amount of accuracy of as the rifle. But the alternate fire for the Bulleye attaches a tag at the enemy. Once a tag is placed, players can shoot at the Chimera even from behind cover as the bullets will track the enemy. This is especially useful in multiplayer games and adds plenty of thrills to online. Another useful idea is to shoot the tag near an enemy path and then shoot a couple of bullets that will keep spinning around the tag. Eventually the tag explodes and deals some good damage to the enemy. There are many other weapons that can shoot through walls, ricochet off the environment, mine launchers, and even the standard weapons like sniper rifles and shotguns. Without spoiling too much of the game, the weapons really make Resistance one of the best FPS games out there, let alone the best on the PlayStation 3. These tools really add a lot of different gameplay strategies to an ailing genre that craves innovation.