Well, finally got around to trying this. An interesting idea. A third person shooter on the PSP, fun. But what I really wondered is how they were going to do it without a second analog stick.

I’m not really a big Resistance fan… Actually, only played around an hour of Resistance: Fall of Man, and just a few matches on the Resistance 2 beta. So I’m basically going at this with no previous knowledge of the series.

Is this a good game? Does it suck? Well it’s my job to tell you that!

Read on!

Looks and Sounds
There’s 2 areas to grade the graphics on: Cinematics and Gameplay. The graphics during cinematics are smooth and surprisingly nice. The character models are very nicely done and the animations are well done and pretty much lifelike. The one problem here is that the PSP produces a lot of ghosting during cutscenes, so some parts look very screwy.
The gameplay graphics are quite a few notches below the graphics in the cinematics, but make no mistake, they’re quite high-quality for a PSP game. The characters are still recognizable compared to their cinematics counterparts. The animations are well done. There’s a few graphical bugs here and there (like chimera’s walking through obstacles and floating in the air), but it’s pretty good-looking stuff. If I’d have to complain about something, I’d say that the game looks incredibly bland and boring, with an incredibly boring color palette (mostly consisting of grey and brown). Also, it’s hard to see some things when you’re far from them.
Character design is a bit lame and cliché, but it works. Enemy designs are… well, just taken from the PS3 games, and they look just as good as in those PS3 games. Level design is… as linear as it gets, and there’s not much more to say about it. The areas look okay if you don’t mind the fact that there’s only 2 colors used in the game (minor exaggeration).

As for the sounds… Well the music is normal shooter fare. Relatively epic, but not memorable. The voice acting is pretty good, especially James Grayson’s. There’s some weird voices here and there, but overall it’s pretty solid work.

Story
This game takes place between the two PS3 games, though I have no idea about the timeline, since, as mentioned before, I didn’t really play the other 2 games.
This game starts with main character James Grayson finding his brother in a Chimera Conversion Center undergoing conversion, so Grayson does the hard thing and ends his misery. Afterwards, he leaves the military and goes to destroy a load of conversion centers on his own (doing better than the military on his own…. pretty lame military you got there). Eventually he gets captured by the military and is put on Death Row just because he deserted the military. That makes little sense… You have this incredibly badass one-man army that’s on the same side as you and you kill him? Gotta love lame justice systems… Well anyways, he’s taken out of Death Row to help some military group of some sort (I have no clue) and has to help them out to fight a big chimera base. That’s about it really. You go to various bases, different towns and kill a bunch of chimera.

There’s some interesting plot points here and there, but to me it’s not a really fun story. Might just be because I don’t know the story of the other games, but I’m guessing that if you’re not a Resistance fan, you won’t give a shit about this story.

What’s really carrying the story for me is James Grayson. He’s surprisingly quite an interesting character. He gets the fun one-liners sometimes, and his motivations and goals are really fun. He’s really the only character that I care about here.

Gameplay
Controls
This is a third-person shooter that doesn’t have a second analog stick for aiming. Solution: use the face buttons for aiming. You know what this reminds me of? Third-person games on the Nintendo 64. The controls are pretty much the same. Move with the analog stick, aim with the “camera” buttons.
This game works just about as well as those N64 games. The face buttons change your aim, but you have no need to be precise. To make things easier (WAY easier) James locks-on to enemies in a certain area of the screen…. THAT COVERS MOST OF THE SCREEN. Yeah, it’s majorly lame on that aspect. There’s just a centimeter or two on each side of the screen that you don’t lock-on to normally (though if you’re already locking-on to stuff you can continue locking-on to enemies when they leave the screen). But that’s ALMOST fine since the face button aiming is really not precise.

The other controls are simple enough.The R button shoots, the L button does the secondary shot on each gun. The Right button changes guns(if the gun you want is the one just before the one you’re on, you’ll have to cycle through all your other guns to get it, REALLY annoying), the Left button reloads , the Up button goes to manual aiming and the down button picks up stuff and handles all the context-sensitive stuff.
Manual aiming is very imprecise and hardly usable if you need to use it fast (which is especially lame when you have to go to manual fast to shoot a load of oncoming exploding female chimeras).

The gameplay itself
Well, it’s a third-person shooter with a cover system. It doesn’t try to do anything different. Except for 1 minor element: No regenerating health! Yeah, this time you have to get some health pickups to get your health back up. The only time when that’s not true is when you’re driving those walkers (explain that to me… are there nanomachines repairing those walkers or something?).

The cover system is okay… It’s actually all automatic. Getting close enough to a low wall will make you duck. There you can “aim” and when you shoot you’ll get out of cover. For high walls and such, you have to get close to the corner of the thing you want to take cover on and HOPE that it works. Not very well done, but at least it works.

Other than shooting, there’s… let’s be generous and call them puzzles. Basically, to advance through stages, you can press buttons and throw switches to open the next areas. There’s really no… puzzle. At all. The game is completely linear, with no exploration to be done. There are some areas where there’s another “path”, but they just bring you to a piece of intel that, unless you care about the story, you won’t read. And those “paths” are really small and really don’t take any time to do.

There’s some good enemy variety. Flying drones, normal chimeras, exploding bitches (you need to use manual aiming to shoot their heads off before they get too close to you), psychic-power bitches (manual aiming too), leapers, giant chimeras, walkers, and various bosses. Each has a slightly different way of getting killed. So gunfights, as repetitive as they are, can always be a bit different because they can change the enemies that spawn during each confrontation.

The one big problem is that the game is not challenging. You’d think that it would be harder since health doesn’t regenerate. You’d think the non-precise aiming would make it harder. But it’s a VERY easy game. For one, DYING IS ACTUALLY GOOD(sometimes). You might get to a gunfight with almost no health. Well, just get killed, you’ll just have to restart that gunfight, but this time with full health! You have literally no drawback for dying. Heck, even all the health items and ammo re-appear when you die, so it’s putting you in an even better situation. There’s also respawning ammo, so some sections you just don’t have to care about ammo at all. And the aiming? Well, your auto-aim covers almost all the screen, there’s no way you won’t be hitting anything. The only things that might kill you at undesirable times are the exploding female chimeras, since the manual aiming sucks.

Overall
This game isn’t bad at all. The graphics are nice, the story is okay, the controls work relatively well.
But it’s not all good. It’s not challenging at all. It’s very repetitive. It’s incredibly linear and requires no thinking at all.

Overall, it’s an okay game. A Resistance fan will definitely want to try it out, if just to get a bit more of the story. Someone who isn’t a Resistance fan might want to check it out if they want an average Third-Person Shooter. Otherwise, it’s fine to pass on it. It’s not great, but it’s okay. And if you end up liking the online, there’s a bit of replay value there…

jobocan Console, Games, Review, psp