Resistance Fall of Man - PS3
Headlining the releases for the Sony Playstation 3 was Resistance Fall of Man. My initial thoughts were that RFoM looked nice but seemed to be just another clone of many other (bigger and better) games released for other platforms. Call of Duty 2 springs to mind as well as Gears of War. That said, Resistance Fall of Man is very much its own game, even if parts of it look and feel like they were cloned from something else.
Aliens (called ‘Chimera’) have landed on earth and are slowly working their way across Europe. This is the basis for the game but there’s a small hitch: although RFoM appears like it’s based during World War II, it’s not. RFoM is about an alternate reality where WW2 never happened. Although you’re still killing ‘aliens’ of a sort, they don’t look like any Germans or Russians you’ve ever seen. They’re in fact humans who have been infected with a virus and now they’re the enemy.
With plenty of targets to shoot at (and there’s hundreds of them), Resistance Fall of Man is your classic FPS slug-fest. Various intervals in the game (mainly the cut scenes) provide a brief reprieve from the fighting but basically, the single player game is all about killing your way through to the cut scenes and therefore, slowly piecing the bits of the storyline together (which is great, by the way).
What I liked most about the storyline is that there are two main characters (protagonists if you will); the first is Captain Rachel Parker who is narrating the story and the other character (whom you play) is Sergeant Nathan Hale who is suspected by Rachel Parker of being ‘not entirely human’. This sets things up for what I thought was a neat little sub-story arc in the game.The weapons in RFoM are in a word, awesome – especially the ‘alien’ weapons. There is a particularly nasty alien bomb that explodes upon impact and shoots out what looks like needles of some description. Whatever it is, it does the trick, especially when dealing with groups of Chimera. Of course, being able to commandeer a tank will do an even better job of ridding the immediate area of the enemy, and you get to do that too.
You’re not given ‘missions’ as such but after each cut scene you find yourself transported to a different area with a whole new environment (map) that you must eventually fight your way through. The basic structure of the game revolves around weapons, ammunition and health packs.
The normal equation applies; if your health gets low, you need to find more health packs, if your ammo gets low, you need to acquire more etc, etc. You will spend most of the game keeping an eye on your health bar. That much is inevitable.
The deeper you delve into the game the more difficult everything becomes. The ‘aliens’ themselves even change and become more difficult to kill but luckily, you also get to pick up better weapons to even up the score a little. Phew. I could probably dedicate an entire paragraph to the weapons alone.
Solid characters, engaging storyline and lots and lots of weapons – is there any other recipe for a great first person shooter? If you’re a PS3 owner and a shooter fan, you’d be stark raving mad not to want to play this.
“Resistance is futile” - I just couldn’t resist.
