By far, the game I spent the most time with was Insomniac's Resistance: Fall of Man. They recognized me from Kotaku and wanted to make sure I had some time to really dig into the game, especially after Jean Snow and others sorta went off on the game at the Tokyo Game Show.
While Jean said he had problems aiming, that wasn't something I ran into at all and my guide through the game pointed out that the game's controls are very adjustable.
The Sixaxis' triggers control firing and alt firing, while other buttons let you zoom in, change weapons, lob grenades and duck and such.
As I mentioned earlier, the controller's total lack of force feedback was a bit jarring at first but I adjusted. That doesn't mean I prefer it that way, just that I got used to it. While rumble isn't a make-it or break-it feature in a shooter for me, it certainly adds to the experience.
But the lack of rumble wasn't the first thing I noticed about the game. The first thing I noticed was how damn hard it is. I don't mean hard as in, hard to control or hard to figure out, I just mean get shot in the head or torn to pieces in the first few seconds hard.
This is not a game that you can just run through. It also isn't, by any means, a stop-and-pop shooter either. Instead it's just a challenging game that requires you to think about your moves and weapon selection ahead of time and not just go barreling through a swarm of enemies.
And there are a lot of swarms. The game is just crawling with bad guys and with ambient animation. Startled doves fly from railings and rooftops (Insomniac joke that they have some of the best dove animation around. I'd have to agree.) swarms of troops fight it out nearby and in the distance and nasty looking creatures float through the sky, their tentacles dangling down in search of corpses to reap.
Speaking of corpses, the game is filled with them, literally. Unlike with most games, the corpses don't disappear; they just pile up where ever they fall. I'm told those floating creatures actually come down and grab up the bodies, though I'm not sure if this is something you ever see or if it's simply part of the game's mythos.
Another cool little graphic detail is that you can actually shoot the little hoses sprouting from the back of the enemies' heads. When you shoot them, the hoses snake about for a few second before falling limply to the side of the critters body. This doesn't do any sort of damage to the creature, in fact, besides the cool visual effect, it does absolutely nothing. But it really adds to the overall experience, especially when you're in a gun fight and you accidentally nick one.
There's plenty of other cool little detail graphics as well, like the tracers from gun shots, the splashes of muck onto the screen, and the nearly constant battling that is going on all around you.
One of the neat things about this constant ebb and flow of battles that occur in the game is that none of it is pre-scripted. Instead it's just enemy and friendly AI trying to win the war, with or without you. If you feel like it you can get involved, or you can just ignore what's going on and concentrate on your particular objective.
The developers even built in these "heroic moments" moments in time where your intervention can save the life of a comrade. What I really loved about these is that they aren't really highlighted in any way. The first one happened in my game without me even seeing it, because I was ducking for cover. Apparently some big ass creature came out and grabbed up a comrade and just squeezed the juice out of him. Had I been standing and seen the grab, I could have gunned down the hulking beast and saved a life. But it didn't happen and the only reason I knew I even missed it was because my Insomniac guide told me about it.
I played through chunks of two of, I believe three levels, in the demo. This bit of gameplay, I was told, represented the free demo that will be available to PS3 owners the day the system launches. You'll just have to download it from their online network.
The first level snippet, part of which is seen in the video I posted on Friday, plops you down in the middle of a raging battle and gives you a number of cool weapons to use.
One of the weapons lets you fire through objects and can produce a shield, which you can sit behind and fire through.
Another weapon lets you tag an enemy and then fire and forget bullets that will seek the enemy out. Another cool way to use this is to tag the air and the fire a swarm of swirling weapons into the tag and then direct the tag into an enemy. It's a very cool visual effect.
There are plenty of other interesting weapons in the game, as well as a collection of more normal weapons, like a shotgun and sniper rifle.
Weapon selection in the game seems to be much more important than in other shooters I've played. While there are plenty of areas where you can use anything, there are places where you simply need to have one particular weapon, and if you've wasted your ammo needlessly, you're sorta screwed.
After making it through the first demo level, I moved onto the second, which was a much more elaborate level that had me climbing up an alien structure and taking out machinegun nests and battling much larger creatures. What I found most interesting in this level was the amount of action taking place far below me while I worked my way up the structure. At one point I just sat on a catwalk and sniped enemies engaged in a raging battle far below me, and it made a difference to the outcome down there. Pretty neat.
On its surface Resistance may seem like just another shooter, a Call of Duty with aliens, but I think it's the game's attention to detail and required strategic weapon use that will set it apart.
We plan to spend a lot more time with the game in the near future, but from what I've seen of it, it appears to be surprisingly deep and, I believe, worth picking up at launch.
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