Review: Resistance Fall of Man (PS3)

Resistance Fall of Man plays, looks and feels like a run of the mill Half Life meets Timesplitters hybrid.

Pros: Set in England; good weapons; 40 player online!; uses PS Network (friends list)
Cons: Derivative; mediocre graphics; missing some "magic"

Resistance Fall of Man is one of two PS3 only launch titles, and as such is an important game for Sony. First generation games on a new console are always troublesome and often never achieve players' high expectations; it is often a couple of years before a platform gets it's "Gears". This was never truer than of the PS3 and Resistance - Fall of Man.

Resistance plays very much like Timesplitters in that the controls are ultra responsive and twitchy, whilst the environments and textures are clearly optimised for a very high framerate rather than sheer beauty. This can make the game feel "plastic" and the streets of York, in particular, look very angular and flat.

The run and gun gameplay is good fun and the array of weapons is very interesting; there are some whacky ideas explored. The problem is that, with the exception of the weapons, you have played "this" game many times before; Resistance borrows too much from the likes of Half Life and FEAR and ends up feeling very stale, very early.

The saving grace is the brilliant, lag free (dedicated servers, no peer-to-peer), 40 player online which is just _awesome_. It made made better for the fact that very few people have headsets (none packaged with PS3, although any bluetooth headset will work), so annoying "septics" are at a minimum.

There is quite a lot of game for the money and the investment in Resistance is worth it for the multiplayer alone. It is just a shame that Resistance Fall of Man in single player, looks and feels like a run of the mill Half Life meets Timesplitters hybrid.

3/5