Resistance: Fall of Man
It’s a shame the PS3 was a $599 USD joke at launch, otherwise Resistance: Fall of Man might have gotten more of the respect it probably deserves. It’s roughly as good as the average installment of Insomniac’s previous two trilogies. I also find it fascinating from a historical point of view, as a middle ground between its entertainingly unreal forebears and the incoming Brown Era of shooters. So while it has an unrelentingly bleak atmosphere, it also lets you carry 10+ weapons at once, and those weapons are allowed to be weird shit like an energy rifle whose shots get more powerful as they pass through solid objects. It’s certainly better than Gears of War, its rival 2006 alien-invasion-with-an-asterisk Brown Era vanguard. While both games are slower-paced than most of their contemporaries, Gears of War was designed that way to justify its genre-derailing cover system, whereas Resistance comes across as more deliberate than slow.
There’s a vein of horror running through this game. Firefights are intense and will drain your health very quickly if you’re not aware of your surroundings. Unfortunately, Insomniac’s game design instincts clash with this tone. Absurd weaponry worked in Ratchet & Clank because they weren’t really challenge-focused games. In a life-and-death scenario, however, you’re likely to gravitate to the most straightforward damage-dealing armaments. Similarly, while the visuals and sparse music request to be taken very seriously, the voice acting often betrays the studio’s cartoonish existing catalogue. The dour presentation thankfully reigned in their habit of stuffing their games with unpolished genre tangents, which were replaced with functional but by-the-numbers vehicle sections instead. And then there’s the idiotic decision to have aiming sensitivity differ between axes, whose underlying logic continues to elude me.
I think if I had to summarize Resistance in a single sentence, I’d describe it as Half-Life 2 as made by a good developer instead of a transcendent one. It’s astonishing just how many one-to-one analogues there are between the two games. Sometimes this leads to strokes of brilliance, like how the protagonist’s partially-regenerating health is integrated into the narrative. Other times, it leads to off-brand versions of Half-Life worldbuilding that just don’t make sense in-universe. Most egregiously, the developers seem to have looked at the overarching mystery of Half-Life’s G-Man character and decided to apply that logic to everything, creating a plot that’s at least 50% sequel hook. On a final note, the game’s online multiplayer – unrivaled in its scope at the time – is no longer available, but its solid local co-op and competitive modes remain intact.