In March 2007, the PS3 made it to the UK. Even with an eye-watering retail price of £425, it was an immediate success. 165,000 PS3s sold outdid any other console launch ever bar the PSP. Of course, the PSP didn’t turn that initial success into a lasting top position, and neither would the PS3. That’s something that I’m going to cover the reasons for the next time we get to a PS3 game to top the charts which, in rather a sign of the issue, is not until an entire year later. For now, let’s focus on the fact that it had games people wanted to play at launch, and just ahead of Motorstorm as the biggest of all was Resistance: Fall of Man, a first-person shooter from Insomniac Games, creators of Spyro the Dragon.
Resistance starts off from an incredible high concept. The most popular trends in shooters over the past five years had been World War II games and sci-fi alien invasions. Insomniac looked at that and asked the simple but effective question: why not both at once? And so they came up with a historic military shooter with aliens in. Resistance isn’t actually quite a World War II game, since it neatly sidesteps that and accompanying questions of taste to give itself an alternate history with aliens throughout the ‘40s and an invasion of the UK in 1951. It’s clearly playing with a lot of the basic imagery of Medal of Honor and company though.
It matches the different elements of its concept in a very clever approach. You play a US army sergeant named Hale, airdropped into York with little idea of what’s going on, and immediately come up against big spiky aliens with powerful weapons in an extremely hard first level. There is a big hit of novelty which can overcome even the greys and browns it’s painted in. Taking cover and moving carefully is very important to make your way through, not least because you have a health meter which only ever heads in one direction, downwards. At the end of the first mission, Hale and fellows get ambushed by a swarm of alien insects. It’s fatal for most, but our star has some kind of resistance (get it?) and instead remains human and in control, but with new hybrid powers.
The powers that Sergeant Hale gains are very familiar ones to players of Medal of Honor and its genre. He can carry as many weapons at once as he likes. He moves, as another character notes at one point, with the same “unnatural quickness” as the aliens. And he gains the enemies’ ability to regenerate health, both instantly via neon yellow collectibles and, to a point, just by waiting around for a while. In other words, he has been infected with a strong case of FPS Protagonist Syndrome. Just as in Lost Planet, the mechanical subtext of the game is turned into text.
Narratively, this is handled in a very deliberate way. The framing device of the game is a reminiscence told by British intelligence officer Rachel Parker, piecing together the mystery of Hale and his actions. The fact that he is an almost silent hero fits with the void he is cast as, as does your freedom in how you make him make his way through the game. It’s very clever without spending too long making its cleverness the point, and doesn’t just neutralise potential narrative weaknesses but turns them into strengths.
Once you have the powers, the gameplay is in its own way as much of a hybrid as the setting, though it’s less the recent pack of World War II shooters it looks back to than much older shooters. The frenetic bursts of action enabled by its weaponry and speed mean it plays more like Doom than most of its contemporaries. Being able to get away with losing a quarter of your health at a time and recover it right away gives added incentive to take up an offensive strategy. Some of the weapons get very inventive, too, once you start picking up those of the enemy. There is the one that lets you tag someone and then shoot homing bullets at them. There is the one that doesn’t just let you shoot through walls, but is only particularly effective when you do so. Even on the human side, the sniper rifle slows down time. It brings a lot of new energy into the familiar acts.
For all of that invention, grounding the setting in something vaguely perceptible as reality helps too. The stereotypical Brits shouting “Oi! Mate!” are all the better for being explicitly that. The forlorn fish and chips menus and abandoned snooker tables jar with the alien elements in a way that Gears of War’s more generic setting utterly failed to. The thrill of the novelty from the beginning turns a little darker rather than ever completely going away.
Resistance is a quick game, both in how fast it moves and in being very short by the standards of the time, and doesn’t offer that much to come back to after making it through the final showdown in London (when you get to blow up Tower Bridge). I don’t see that quickness is even a negative, though. As a vision of how to make an entertaining blockbuster from this type of gameplay material, it works better than anything since Timesplitters 2.
Top of the charts for week ending 24 March 2007:
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