Resistance: Fall of Man – Quick Impressions

I have to admit to always being more of a Crash Bandicoot guy (before he was pimped out), I always found Insomniac’s Spyro series of games just a little too cute and cuddly, (maybe I’ll pick ’em up on PSP) that trend continued into the 128 bit era and the launching of Naughty Dog and Insomniac’s Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank series’ respectively. I’ve since picked up the first three Ratchet games and am playing my way through them and enjoying every minute, so it was with some excitement that I stepped up to the Sony booth for a piece of Insomniac’s latest; Resistance: Fall of Man.

Read my impressions of Resistance: Fall of Man after the jump!

I have to admit to always being more of a Crash Bandicoot guy (before he was pimped out), I always found Insomniac’s Spyro series of games just a little too cute and cuddly, (maybe I’ll pick ’em up on PSP) that trend continued into the 128 bit era and the launching of Naughty Dog and Insomniac’s Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank series’ respectively. I’ve since picked up the first three Ratchet games and am playing my way through them and enjoying every minute, so it was with some excitement that I stepped up to the Sony booth for a piece of Insomniac’s latest; Resistance: Fall of Man.

Imagine if you will that there was no World War 2, imagine that hostile aliens came out of the blue to crush the human race utterly and totally, and imagine that these hostile aliens attack in hordes of hundreds, in unstoppable waves of mindless death and destruction, washing over the last vestiges of human civilisation… England.

So I grab a hold of the controls, and first thing I notice is how smooth and intuitive the are. Don’t know how early this code is, but it seems they’ve got the game pretty much locked at 60fps, and unlike a lot the the games shown at E3 this year (PS3 or otherwise) the game really does look as sharp as the screens you see on this page. Everything was crisp, sharp and detailed. If there was one problem I’d have to point out it’s that there’s almost too much happening on screen too quickly, and that the game’s perhaps a little too sharp. Stopping to have a look at the scenery quickly proved a fatal exercise, and it would probably help to get some subtle HDR in there to blur or soften the edges on objects. During the demonstration it almost seemed as though I had no time to assess my surroundings and think tactically, I just never let off the trigger and mowed down wave after wave of the suckers. Granted it was fun and there were explosions going off all around me, but I would have liked to take a minute to figure out what was going on.

If you can imagine the lovechild of Half Life 2 and Black, you’ve probably got a fair idea of what it’s like to play Resistance. I’m hoping the presentation of the storyline skews more toward the former than the latter, we’ve yet to really see anything but gameplay segments from Resistance (odd to be complaining about that eh?). For what it’s worth I generally don’t like controlling first person shooters with a controller, but getting into the hang of Fall of Man took no time whatsoever, part of that’s probably due to the silky smooth frame rate, but credit also has to go to the addition of trigger buttons on the L2 and R2 buttons on the new Dual Shock controller.