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Review ~ Resistance: Fall of Man

Introduction:

Resistance: Fall of Man is a first person shooter, designed by Insomniac, and set in an alternate reality. The era is the early 1950’s and the setting is the United Kingdom. The introduction to the game explains that the Russians are believed to be developing biological weaponry, and that at some unknown point they have either created or stumbled upon beings known as the Chimera (pronounced Kie-mare-eh). For unknown reasons the Chimera then decide to invade and, very effectively, conquer the entirity of Europe, save for the pesky old island of Blighty*!

The British army sets up station to defend it’s coasts and encounters no attacks for months, seemingly safe from the horrors of Europe. Unfortunately it becomes apparent that during those months the Chimera have been busy excavating huge tunnels under the English channel, and the British forces are ill prepared to defend their country. As the game starts the highest populated cities have all fallen to the Chimera and you play Seargent Hale, who is flown in with a group of American soldiers to aid the scattered British resistance in the fight to reclaim their land.

*That’s britain to those of you who aren’t british.

Level Design, Gameplay and A.I:

Resistance: FoM is a strictly linear affair. Levels are designed to follow a single main route along which story elements are scripted, some of which appear in non playable cutscenes. The areas you travel through are typically old fashioned and English looking, some urban and some rural, with a few sci-fi looking areas to stop areas becoming too repetative. I personally quite like the look and feel of the majority of the levels, however I do feel that a little more colour would have given the environments a little more life.
On a side note I feel it is worth mentioning that Resistance: FoM has some of the best window smashing physics I’ve seen in a game, both before and since (at the time of writing). Whilst not something to warrent any gamer awards I still was very impressed with this small touch.

The campaign in Resistance: FoM can be played either single player or split-screen with a friend. No changes are made to the level design or number of enemies when playing co-op which makes the game drastically less difficult. In a rather poor show from Insomniac the story makes no mention of the second character who aids Sargeant Hale in the co-op and even with two of you playing Hale is often said to be acting alone.
The game also offers up some online(40 players) and offline(4 players) fun with deathmatch, team deathmatch and team objective modes.

In terms of gameplay Resistance: FoM offers a good mixture of long range and enclosed environments, allowing for a mix up of play styles. On hard mode the close range environments can prove very difficult and personally led to regular heart racing, tight knuckle play due to the sparse checkpoints (A big plus for gamers looking for a real challenge on the harder difficulty settings).
Weapons available for use are varied and I quite enjoyed most of them, however a few weapons such as the Sapper feel a little underpowered. Unlike many recent console shooters, Resistance: Fall of Man allows you to hold several weapons at once and a plethera of different ammunitions giving you quite a lot of freedom in tactics. My personal favourite weapon is the bullseye and I used it for about 75% of all my kills.
Controls are quick and precise and are one of the biggest plus points on Resistance: FoM’s side. I very rarely felt as if the controls were frustrating me or causing me to fail to achieve my aim, and the pace and fluidity of these controls have quite an old school feel to them.

The Enemies react in a fairly bog standard, and dare I say it, old-fashioned way. They draw a bead on you very quickly (and sometimes from an irritatingly long range) but aren’t perfectly accurate allowing you to run and gun to a certain degree, jinking from cover to cover. Staying out in the open for long periods, particularly on hard, is certain to get you perforated quickly. All of these points are good.
Unfortunatley the Chimeran infantry, on any difficulty, seem to have a suicidal approach to combat, milling about in the open. Sure, they move but not very far and typically back and forth across the same patch of ground, and if you retreat far enough they will fail to continue to give chase.

Allied AI, apart from the single story character who aids you at certain points, is relatively pointless, serving up as cannon fodder, mostly only helpful in redirecting fire from you for a few short moments.
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Graphics and sound:

Both character and environment textures are smooth and the game is capable of some quite pleasing draw distance in certain open areas. The amount of detail given to each character model and more noticably to the environments is rather low for a game that has some quite realistic art direction. The game is still pleasing to the eye but it doesn’t really give a wow factor. Animations of the characters in co-op and online mode are a little basic but again, not enough to cause complaint.

The music in the game isn’t particularly ear catching or memorable and I feel that a little bit of atmosphere may have been lost here. Voice acting is bad in places and fair in places, most often bad for the common allied infantry. I get a very strong impression that the “British” voice acting is in fact American voice acting but there have been worse attempts at copying the accent, at least for the story characters (I’m sorry but there’s not a single English person I know who sounds like the English infantry in this game).

Verdict:

Fun fast paced action, particularly during the co-op campaign, makes up for many of this games flaws, but not all of them. Quite obviously a release title with the PS3 it shows a good starting point for the sequal which is currently in production. At time of writing this game has been released for a fairly long period of time and is well worth picking up at its now much reduced price, even if it’s only to get up to speed ready for Resistance 2.

Seven mutated skulls out of ten