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dkirschner's Resistance 2 (PS3)

[March 18, 2014 11:01:57 AM]

Resistance 2: Better than Resistance 1: Hopefully not as good as Resistance 3: The Game: The Movie: Based on the Best-selling Novel

Hooray! Resistance 2 was pretty great, highly highly action-packed and with more juicy story bits. In this game, as compared with Resistance 1:

- Nathan Hale, the main character, is no longer a silent protagonist. Now he is a gruff military type who yells at people over the radio and occasionally punches squadmates for insubordination. He does what he wants, with no inhibitors, and damn the Chimera virus inside of him turning him slowly into a monster.

- There are many new enemy types, and several good boss fights. Except the last boss fight, which is beyond boring. My favorite new enemy is the Chameleon. These things, which remind me of the Demons from Doom, are completely invisible until they get about 8 feet from you. You can sort of hear them breathing and then bounding from somewhere, and then they materialize and leap at you, giving you…literally…a fraction of a second to react and kill it. Chameleons are terrifying creatures. Luckily, they are very fragile and it only takes a couple bullets to kill them, although they also kill you in one hit. I hated them for a while because I felt my deaths to them were cheap since I couldn’t see them. I’d make some progress through a level, and then all of a sudden “huff huff huff [running noises getting closer] rooooooar” and I’d be swinging around wildly trying to figure out which direction it was coming from, and it’d pounce and kill me. Once you die to a couple of them, you learn where they are and then they are real easy to handle. I also learned to move through areas where Chameleons seemed likely with my back or side to a wall, minimizing the directions they could attack me from.

- This game has super scary moments. The horror elements in Resistance 1 fell flat, but they nailed some stuff here. Alongside the above-mentioned Chameleons, there were also zombie-like Chimera in pods that these giant spider-like enemies (Webbers, I think) encased. In Resistance 1, there were some pod-encased creatures, but all the pods always opened if you walked by, so it was predictable. These pods are scripted to open and they don’t all open. So there are a few areas that are just damn full of pods and you never know when and where they will open. These areas are often dark, so you’ve got out your flashlight. Then you’ll start to hear the bursting of some pods and the zombie-screams of the creatures sprinting toward you (they are very fast) and it’s freakin scary.

- Perhaps the best scary moments and best boss fight come from this weird energy mass enemy. It's like a swarm of bad vibes that looks sort of like tomb beetles from The Mummy, and you see it throughout its level moving and pulsing through corridors, killing people. Super creepy. It's smart too, and it realizes where you have to go to escape its facility, so it starts blocking your exits, forcing you into some kind of power generator room. Fortunately for you, electricity hurts it, so you have to lure it into these generators and this scientist NPC with you will cut the power on and hurt it. So to lure it, you have to let it get almost right next to you, then at the last minute dive into the generator and run out the other side. If it touches you, you die, and it won't follow you into the generator unless it's riiiight beside you. That part was extremely intense and my favorite boss battle of them all.

- There are some updated guns and alt firing modes. My favorite new addition is to the Auger, which is that gun that fires through walls. It’s back, but you can now SEE enemies through walls, in addition to just firing through them. It makes the gun much more useful. It sometimes feels sort of cheap to just shoot enemies through walls, but with the difficulty of the game, if you have an Auger, you need to use the Auger! I also figured out how to use the Chimeran pulse rifle’s homing beacon. Never really figured it out in Resistance 1, but it’s pretty useful. You tag an enemy with alt fire, then for 5 seconds or so, all your shots just zoom around obstacles and hit the tagged enemy, useful for taking out tough bad guys behind cover.

- Hale’s life now regenerates like a standard FPS, no partial regen and no health packs. There’s also far less ammo scattered around, which makes the environments much less cluttered with crap to pick up. Also, improved checkpoint system with checkpoints after pretty much every big firefight. The last game would kill you and you’d have to play through big chunks of the level again.

That’s about all that’s different. The difficulty is still higher than average. There are a lot of cool set fights with big enemies that feel amazing to win. There was one in particular that I remember where you and some squadmates were holed up in a bombed out building and around the perimeter of this town square, which you had to clear for a landing zone. There were like 5 Stalkers, big huge spidery mechs. Once you killed one, then about 5 Drones came out too, flying heavy machine gun turrets. You have to kill that entire missile-launching, machine gun firing horde with limited ammo, first from behind cover, and eventually out in the open to get the remaining Stalkers on the far side of the landing zone. Tough stuff. There were also more than a few parts with multiple of those big giant fireball-launching enemies. Those parts could be damn hard too, especially when you were like on a ramp or some narrow place where it was hard to find cover or dodge the fireballs. There was also an Armored Drone enemy, which was so hard to kill. One level had two of those, with two of the fireball-launching dudes in the background. Hard hard hard, but very cool setups.

Finally, let me bitch about that lame final boss battle, because it really did suck. You have to run through a series of domes. Once you get inside each dome, the doors will seal, and the boss will start ripping off the ceiling and slashing into the room to hit you. You just shoot him and stay out of his way. I can’t convey how simple this was. It’s easy not to get hit, and actually I’m unsure if you even have to shoot him at all, because he moves around until he rips the whole roof off, then the door opens and you can run to the next one. In between domes, there are a handful of enemies to kill, and the boss will fling ripped out ceiling tiles at you. Easy enough to stay behind cover. Though if you do die, which I did a couple times, once by falling off the edge (oops) and once by getting smashed with flying ceiling tiles (that’s how I learned to stay behind cover), you have to sit through the whole boring part of the boss ripping up tiles from every dome you go into again. There were 3 domes I think, and it took like 3 minutes per dome of you just standing there watching the boss go through the motions of ripping off ceiling tiles and futilely swiping at you.

You eventually reach the center power core, where the boss is tethered to some power conduit. Around the core there are a bunch of electric nodes, and electricity will extend from the core to the boss to one of the nodes. You have to shoot the node to damage the boss. Then the electricity will move to another node and you shoot that node, and on and on until he’s dead. It takes FOREVER. You just run around in a circle with the boss chasing you, shooting nodes. He will every now and then stop to swipe at you, but like the domes, unless you are literally right in front of him, he won’t hit you, and staying away from him is super easy. You just have to wait and wait and wait and repeat the same actions, running around the circle with the boss trailing you, shooting at electric nodes, until he dies. It look like 10 minutes and sooo boring and took no skill. I think it was so lame because in general the game plays on a high difficulty level with lots of tough encounters. I expected something epic at the end and it was a big letdown.

No worries though, bad boss battle didn’t mar the experience. Looking forward to Resistance 3 after I finish Folklore.

This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Mar 18th, 2014 at 11:10:45.