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Resistance 2 Goes Berserk

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Insomniac Games' Ryan Schneider walked us through an extremely informative PowerPoint presentation on the developer's next game Resistance 2 at the Leipzig Games Convention. While we had foreknowledge of the majority of what Mr. Schneider talked about at the Con — 60-person multiplayer, 8-player coop, Resistance 2's campaign storyline and its focus on bigger, badder battles — he also touched on some of the first-person shooter's finer details. A deep-dive, if we're going for hip PowerPoint lingo. Most interesting was the new Berserk features that Insomniac will be integrating into multiplayer. If you've played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the new system is similar to that game's "Perks" feature.Insomniac is ensuring that your progression through Resistance 2, whether it be in competitive multiplayer or coop, will provide constant reward. You'll be racking up experience points for just about everything you do in game. Fire a bullet, get some XP. Kill an opponent get some XP. Get enough in a round of multiplayer and you'll be able to initiate one of your Berserks. These special attributes include things like invisibility, the ability to see through walls or a defensive aura that looks somewhat like the bubble shield from Halo 3 on a team-based scale. Schneider showed all these Berserks in action, giving us over the top examples of each being used. In one, we watched a pre-taped attack on a group of human soldiers, each of whom had a Chimeran enemy sneak up behind them, then eliminate them while cloaked in a Predator-like invisibility shield. In another, we saw team member take advantage of the X-ray vision, firing sticky bomb rounds via the Magnum's secondary fire and blowing up his opponent without ever having actually seen him in person. Pretty snazzy. The XP feed will also bring with in non-playable perks, as Insomniac is planning to bring over 160 medals, Trophies and ribbons to players of Resistance 2, maximizing bragging rights. Finally, Schneider showed us R2's newest weapon reveal, the Splicer. Similar in style to a gun we saw in Dead Space, it uses a guided buzzsaw to rip enemies apart. Its primary firing mode delivers ricocheting saw blades, but its alt-fire gives one maximum goring potential, as the hovering blade can be moved around a body for extreme gibbage. We're definitely looking forward to trying all this stuff out for ourselves, hopefully when that private Resistance 2 beta goes public and an entry key magically shows up in our inbox. It's to the left of every page on Kotaku, my good Insomniac friends, in case you lost the e-mail.