Resistance Redemption
Who would've thunk all our issues with the Resistance mythos could've been fixed by... a portable game? Yep, Resistance: Retribution does all that and it's a damn fine game to boot.
Published: March 17, 2009
Taken as strict PSP experience, though, Resistance: Retribution is a significant, weighty-feeling little third-person shooter. It stretches well into double-digit hour length (especially if you delve into the online play, which I'll get to in a second), and tells a solid story. The CG cutscenes that are shown can feel a little rushed at times, but they don't pull away from the storytelling so much that you lose anything important, and at times they serve their intended purpose well: giving the major narrative moments plenty of impact and scale that wouldn't be possible in-game.
Maybe I loved the bulk of my time with Retribution because it didn't really deviate that much from the first Resistance, which I loved so very, very much. In stark contrast to the sequel, you've still got a weapon wheel, allowing you to square off against enemies with the "right" weapon through a bit of trial and error, but still allowing the flexibility to drop back to something with more ammo if need be. The betweem-level cutscenes, narrated by the silken-voiced Rachel Parker from the first game (who also appears in the game and fights alongside Grayson) do a great job of pushing the story along without sidelining it too much, and the intel found by Grayson is actually told from his perspective.
All this means is that the game is different enough to feel new, yet retains some of the best parts of the first game's approach to telling a story and giving the player options to shoot it out, which you'll do plenty of. The game's intelligent cover system works remarkably well, rarely -- if ever -- sticking you to something you don't want to hide behind, yet not being so loose that impulse will help you take cover. Cover is absolutely crucial, too, as just a few shots with "normal" uninfected Grayson will result in him taking a long dirt nap.
If you choose to infect him by way of Resistance cross-talk, then there's some added bonuses. The difficulty goes up just a bit, but he can regenerate health like Hale, and the cutscenes are ever so slightly different, as the characters he deals with recognize that he's no longer entirely human. I would have loved to see this build up more into something beyond just a few dialogue changes, but it's still different enough that it warrants a second playthrough (might I suggest with a DualShock 3 attached for maximum variety?).
The game does have some serious issues with difficulty spikes, though. About every quarter or so through the game, there are parts that are just inexplicably more difficult than the rest. They're not boss battles (well, not all of them), so I don't think it was intentional, but it does have a way of derailing the momentum that the game otherwise keeps up quite nicely. The final hour or so of the game is an absolute trudge, with a particular segment suddenly throwing an endless chain of enemies at you, which is counter to everything that the game was leading up to that point. That segment then rolls into the final boss sequence where the precious cover the game was based around is removed entirely, leading to a ton of cheap deaths and an overly-lengthy tussle. Eventually I found the magic combo (Bullseye and Rocket Launcher; learn it, love it, live it), and the encounter was actually fairly easy, but figuring that all out was way too frustrating.
Luckily, the rest of the game mixes things up nicely. There's little in the way of new weapons here; you'll still use a bullseye (that can charge up whatever's left in your clip into an enemy-seeking, wall-caroming homing shot that's awesome), an auger, the trusty ol' carbine and so on, but you'll also pilfer newer weapons like the chain gun (with portable shield, very nice), so there's some nice variety. Not quite the level of creativity that Insomniac has become known for, but then they largely threw out that variety with Resistance 2 anyway.
