Some Initial Musings On Resistance: Fall Of Man

Well, I played about an hour last night, in Single Player Mode, and then did another 45 minutes or so with Vicki in Coop Mode going through the same maps. While I wait for the HD Component PS/3 cable that I ordered, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the SD graphics, but that's to be expected. I've seen the game in all its HD glory elsewhere, and expect that that's what I'll see on my HD TV soon.

As far as gameplay, I was surprised how challenging the first part was to get through. I'm playing, as usual, on Medium difficulty. I find both Easy and Hard to be less-than-fun, the former because there's so little skill required, and the latter for the opposite reason! Medium always seems about the right speed for me. Of all the parts I've played so far, the very start was by far the hardest: it probably took me 10 tries to get through it! First, there didn't seem to be much health around, which is always bad for a gung-ho run-and-gunner like me. So then I had to play more cautiously, in order to preserve my precious bodily fluids. Also, the enemy AI was surprisingly smart, doing things like coming at me from different directions each time through, as well as leaving their original position at random points. That's a great feature of any video game, but last night I was cursing them for their original thinking! And, just to compound my difficulties, I'd gotten well into the game before I figured out that the O button was the way to throw grenades! That would've been really handy to have known as I kept dying over and over at the hands of crowds of bad guys who were ripe for some mass damage!

I've only picked up 3 weapons so far, but they're all pretty good. I'm a sucker for a good shotgun in a video game, and the double-barreled version offered up in Resistance works just fine for me! The bullseye has a secondary fire that's unique in my experience: it fires a tracer (if you have any left) at a target, and then primary fire will find the target, even going around corners! I really need to experiment more with that cool feature! I've already run out of ammo on one or another of the guns, telling me that I'm not mixing up my selection enough. I'll have to work on that, since the last thing I want is to end up playing a level with extremely limited ammunition (I'm not nearly good enough at video games to survive that experience, without going to God mode!)

Overall, my first impressions have been very positive. There's a great Science Fiction, alternate history story behind it that would make a nice movie, and a variety of threat types, all of which add to the experience. Now I just need to get it into HD mode!