Rainbird

User Score
8.7

Presentation - 8.0
Gameplay - 8.5
Value - 9.5

Resistance 2 carries on immediatly after Resistance: Fall of Man let go. A fundamental difference between the two games, and also one you will notice immediatly, is the story telling. Our hero and main character, Nathan Hale, now speaks during cutscenes, and the game is no longer narrated as the first one was.

You are taken to a facility on Iceland, which is very quickly overrun by chimera, and you have to escape to America. You then catch up with Nathan and Echo Squad of the group of elite soldiers known as the Sentinels.

The story isn't really anything out of the ordinary, and follows the style set by the first game pretty well, though there are some noteworthy twists and turns.

One place where Resistance 2 is trying to differentiate itself from Resistance 1, is through boss fights. Resistance 2 will have you playing massive bosses throughout its campaign, but these fight sequences are so heavily linear, that most of the time they aren't fun to play. There is little challenge or freedom in fighting these bosses, there is only the way the game tells you to use which can be used to defeat these bosses.

Having said that, the rest of the singleplayer campaign is in fact a decent challenge of its own. You will spend a lot of time running around frantically, trying to avoid getting shot when you have very little HP left, or just avoiding getting shot at because there are so many enemies that walking directly into their line of fire will have you respawning very fast.

The AI acts weird in the SP as well. Apparently, they are in no doubt that you should be their highest priority target, and so no matter how many soldiers you have at your side or who they are, the enemies will be coming to kill YOU. Of course, in order to prevent them from doing that, the game provides some awesome weapons to kill the enemies with.

Overall, the SP is fun, though nothing special and a little bland and unpolished, but a decent experience none the less. One thing that should strike everyone about it though, is the scale. There are many massive things in the game. Bosses are huge, sequences with a lot of stuff going on, some times you can't help but be amazed.

The place where this game shines though, is in the coop mode. You can no longer play coop through the story mode, which is a shame, but since there is now a dedicated coop mode in the game, I can forgive Insomniac for it.

This coop mode allows for 2-8 players to connect online (splitscreen is an option) to play various missions that vary across maps, and are randomized for every time you play a mission. There are also three different character classes, the Special Obs (who deal out ammunition to the team, as well as providing accurate spike damage), the Soldier (who is the tank of the group and has a shield and minigun) and the Medic (who sucks energy from the enemies to be recycled as healing for your team).

Coop games will be scaled according to your group size, so you never face insurmountable odds, but always a challenge none the less. You also earn XP and level up your classes, from level 1 through 30, where you learn new skills and buy new equipment along the way. Like the SP, the coop sports some scenarios with a lot of stuff going on. A full 8-man party will see a lot of enemies crop up on screen when they are in combat, it really gives off a sense of huge scale.

The coop games has provided me with one of the most awesome gaming experiences this generation, as I for my 18th year birthday, gathered 4 PS3s, 4 HDTVs and 4 copies of Resistance 2 and me and some friends played that on our first console-based LAN event. It was awesome fun!

To top things off, we have the competetive multiplayer, which allows for up to 30vs30 battles online. To make this work, the game uses a squad system, and gives squads objectives to accomplish. Unless you just want to play a regular deathmatch, in which case you do that. I was never big on competetive multiplayer, so I haven't engaged myself a lot in it.

But overall, it's a good game, and definitely worth a purchase if you like a good coop game. At the time of writing, the online is packed with activity, you can have an 8-man coop game going in seconds, same for regular multiplayer.