Resistance: Fall of Man (Sort of) Review and The First Person Shooter

I purchased Resistance: The Fall of Man this past weekend mainly because it was relatively cheap and I wanted to kill some time. Resistance was a PS3 launch title, and carries the weight as one of the console's titular releases. A console defining FPS (first person shooter) franchise seems to be a prerequisite these days, and Sony sort of siphoned some of the creative energy and fervor from the Call of Duty franchise. With the exception of 4, Call of Duty is a series of FPS games taking place during WW2.

Resistance, as if taking a queue from Harry Turtledove, places the player in a WW-esque setting, except a number of historical oddities prevented WW2 from happening. Czarist Russia shut itself off from the rest of the world. It went dark for a year. Apparently these creatures known as the Chimera took over. They were at first thought to be biological experiments gone wrong, but their advanced technology proves them otherwise. Long story short. It's taken over the East and all of Europe save for a small patch of land in England.

You play as an American solider part of a squad sent to aid the Brits in repelling the ugly bastards back to Hell...or France.

Using the theatre of WW2 intruiged me. I love the concept. The execution, however, leaves much to be desired.

To be honest, I'm not much into FPS games. Most of the games, Halo, especially, are bloated overrated games that get universal praise from non-gamer gamers (ie frat boys, the casual college hall gamer, and the 15 year old) despite the fact that most of them seep in a shared repetitive mediocrity. They all play the same for me. Same game with a different skin.

Don't get me wrong, I played Doom II when I was a kid. But FPS's weren't a dime-a-dozen back then, and I often just played with my friend Luke. This was back when your computer had to call your friend's home. So you had to hope to god that your friend's mother didn't pick up so that the other computer could answer and link the two of you up. It also had a chat system set up, so we also used that as a sort of chat room as well when we were bored of playing.

By and large, FPS games offer little else than haphazardly tossing your character into Integral Story Point A, throwing hundreds of variations on the same villain design with a small selection of weapons in the way of said character to keep him from Integral Story Point B.

This formula remains the same, only the placement of environmental obstacles and baddies change. And few of them tell a solid enough story to encourage you to find out what happens next. Some of these begin strongly enough, but by the climax of the game it descends into massacre after massacre, with the story rewards being so sparse that it hardly deserves completing.

A handful of variations on this formula prove successful, generally in the a third person format. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Gears of War come to mind, but both are wisely self-aware. In Uncharted, when your character is once more ambushed in the middle of the story, he audibly sighs and mutters to himself "Shit, not this again." It's a humorous moment that puts player and character in the same shoes. Resistance, despite it's initially promising premise, unfortunately is not among these titles. Not a terrible game, really. The graphics are crisp and the environmental textures remain particularly bold, but the game just runs out of steam after a while.

Certainly worth the weekend rental, but nothing more unless you find it in a bargain bin.