Resistance: Fall of Man (PlayStation 3) review "Resistance doesn’t waste time showing you the way. There's a war to win, and you should already know how to fight."

Corrugated steel barricades topped with barbed wire block roads. Debris from decrepit buildings litters walkways, just plentiful enough to trip over. Gunshots and mortar blasts boom in the distance followed by cries of pain and screams of death. Hostile soldiers greet you with a storm of bullets as you rush forward. Ducking behind an abandoned army truck, you retaliate in kind. As your enemies dwindle in number, the suppressive fire keeping you from moving begins to recede. But just as you’re about to move on, the vehicle in front of you explodes. The resulting backlash severely wounds and disorients you, assuming you’re still alive. You have made your first mistake. You became complacent.

Resistance: Fall of Man throws you into chaos of war from the very beginning. England has become a battleground as humanity struggles against the Chimaeran invasion of Europe. Discovered by the Soviets with the intention of using it as a biological weapon, the Chimaeran virus quickly spread out of control, turning people into highly intelligent, technologically advanced aliens. Hybrids make up the bulk of this monstrous army. Specifically bred for war, these reptilian-human crossbreeds know strategy. They rarely attack head-on, instead preferring to strafe erratically so as to disperse the concentration of fire on them. They will flank you, send in smaller teams as a distraction, and toss grenades at your feet to flush you out of hiding. They use cover effectively, never exposing themselves for too long. When faced with grenades of your own, they quickly try to flee. Their unpredictability guarantees that no two encounters will be the same.

The more bestial members of the Chimaeran army lose a little in the way of intelligence, but compensate through speed, strength and force of numbers. Indeed, some of the most intense fighting consists of a brilliant blend of hybrid and monstrous foes. Crawling through an abandoned underground medical facility proves much more frightening when you’re unsure of what lie ahead. Fending off a swarm of face-hugging insectoid leapers may be easy by itself, but the squad of hybrids skulking around the corner will keep you on your toes. In the courtyard of Manchester Cathedral, thick-skinned howlers charge upon sight, slashing at you with razor-like claws. By the time you put the dogs down, the rest of the Chimaera’s elite squad has surrounded you, trapping you in a hail of crossfire.

In the face of such odds, Resistance has provided an extensive arsenal with which to repel the alien invasion. Along with traditional mainstays of the genre, such as the shotgun, RPG launcher and military assault rifle, you’ll experiment with confiscated and modified enemy technology. The Bullseye rapidly discharges a stream of bullets into any foe, which home in on targets tagged with a tracking dart. Shots fired from the Augur eat through walls to reach opponents, rendering cover useless. The weapon also erects an energy barrier in front of you, penetrable only by the Augur’s own ammunition. You’ll also acquire a sniper rifle that slows down time, a railgun that turns entire clips into turrets, and grenades that blast six-inch nails in every direction.



Playing through the campaign a second time yields even more goodies. A set of dual pistols that can lock-on to two separate enemies at once, a flamethrower with a time-sensitive napalm setting that’s great for cutting off escape routes, and a grenade that reflects every shot back at the assailant make for a good romp. Using a more volatile compound than that of the flamethrower, the splitter delivers an explosive burst of plasma concentrated on a single target. Dividing each round into smaller bombs increases their potency, but also makes them unpredictable. They’ll take down menacing, acid-spitting three-story spiders in a flash, but they can just as easily destroy the truck you’re crouching behind, or detonate some flammable barrels next to your squad mates.

The sheer mayhem hurled at you at every turn makes for an incredibly fast-paced and exciting adventure, but in spite of this, you’ll never fail to notice the depth put into your surroundings. Brief respites involving clearing minefields or scouring vast tunnels will give you pause as you examine the wreckage of an old neighborhood, plow through the remnants of a mortuary or root out the heavily guarded gun emplacements overlooking hastily dug trenches. Even in Chimaeran headquarters, where decrepitude turns into science-fiction, you’ll wander around with a sense of foreboding. Towering pylons holding a key objective feel strangely empty despite the swarms of hybrids floating around. Overcast skies and the unrelenting sounds of battle constantly remind you of your purpose.

Every step is a struggle, a struggle to preserve humanity. And Resistance begrudges nothing in giving it to you.

Community review by wolfqueen001 (May 22, 2015) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.