696th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: Playstation 3
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Some of the games I’ve picked randomly on this list were very much “Yeah, that’s a game I should just check off”. Reistance 2 feels like an FPS, hailed for its large number of weapons in the book, as well as other places where it goes big (in numbers). Is it worth it? I’ll see if I can be convinced. So far, these modern shooters tend to feel boring and samey to me, and really need something special to stand out.

Our Thoughts

I can’t say that Resistance 2 wowed me at any point, or gave me a feeling that I wanted to keep playing. I suppose there were some vaguely memorable moments, but I doubt that’ll last for a year. Let’s split this critique in two parts, as I feel both have their flaws and good sides.

Starting with the tutorial, it felt bad to play through. I didn’t get many choices – fair enough for a tutorial, and indicating how the rest of the game is mostly a single path – but I felt I had several unfair deaths along the way. There were some unexpected instakills that required me to replay sections – sometimes several times – because I didn’t see why it was. Add to that several surprise monster appearances that made it all feel unnatural. I felt like I wasn’t in control, which felt jarring, I just had to hope I hit the right points even when the game wasn’t great at telling me what I needed to do.

That disappears a bit when the tutorial is over. Sure, you still don’t get a lot of choice on where to go, but you get some side areas to explore, some more options on how to approach things and generally more ways to prepare for what’s to come. This leads to a bunch of set pieces, stealth sections and big FPS areas which feel a lot more fun to play through. There are still downsides – first person platforming isn’t great, especially when hitting the water can be instant death even early on or in dark environments. A bunch of monster fights feel like they’re just infinite battles, where you wait for the timer to run it without it actually being fun to do.

The game stands out in the weapons it provides. There’s a lot of variety and it makes good use of secondary fire. One that stood out was the magnum, which fired detonatable gel when you use seocndary fire. This is used for both progression and mayhem and it’s one of those things that feels fun to pull out from time to time.

Final Thoughts

The things this game wants to do, it does well: Big action pieces, lots of weapons and lots of enemies. The bits in between can get frustrating though, and even the fighting got to me. When I first saw daylight again after the first level, I felt exhausting reaching it, and that feeling never quite went away. I can see how you can really get into this if it’s your thing, but here it just did not connect.