Retro spotlight: Resistance: Fall of Man

Insomniac's return to the world of first-person shooters has its moments, but is as plagued by pacing issues and sameness as it is browns and grays.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Resistance: Fall of Man was Insomniac Games’ first foray into the realm of first-person shooters, given they built their reputation on Spyro the Dragon as well as Ratchet & Clank. The studio’s debut game was an FPS, however: Disruptor, being a shooter from 1996, was considered a “DOOM clone,” and while the game was enjoyed by critics, it didn’t sell like Insomniac thought it would. Disruptor wouldn’t receive a sequel because of that, and the company’s focus shifted to the purple dragon that 90s kids remember.

After years of honing their shooter skills with Ratchet & Clank, however, Insomniac went back to the FPS well for the Playstation 3’s launch, funded by Sony. Resistance wasn’t necessarily meant to be Sony’s answer to Microsoft’s Halo — after all, Killzone debuted on the Playstation 2 in 2004 and featured online multiplayer — but, because of its subject matter and release date, is tied much more closely to a different Microsoft series: Gears of War. Sure, Gears is a third-person shooter, but both games featured alien-esque invasions where body snatching and emergence from the ground were heavily featured, inventive weapons, and also released just 10 days apart at a time when it was now clear that Microsoft was here to cut into Sonys market share — and could do so thanks to new franchises like Gears. The sequels for both series, by the way, released three days apart, and 14 days separated their third entries. It’s difficult not to compare them, even if, genre-wise, they’re cousins rather than siblings.

Gears had the better game at the outset, and, as a franchise, has found far more success, too. Resistance never put up much of a fight in either regard: while all three games in the series are at least solid, the ceiling for them was far lower than what Epic managed with their original trilogy, before Microsoft handed the development reins off. That they did at all, while Insomniac swore off of future Resistance games and Sony hasn’t bothered reviving the franchise after the disappointing sales of a third entry that deserved better, should tell you a lot about how this particular battle played out. Some publishers will keep a series going even if it just appeals to a smaller, dedicated audience, but that’s not really how Sony operates.

Image credit: Glitchwave

There’s nothing incredibly wrong with Fall of Man, but it lacks the major spark that Gears had, that helped to make both the game and the franchise into what it was. The original Resistance actually reviewed very well at the time of its release, and while I wasn’t reviewing games at the time, college-age me tended to agree with much of the praise. It might have mostly just been because I had missed out on quite a bit of the still-growing FPS genre, though (I wouldn’t play Half-Life 2 for a few years yet, I didn’t have an original Xbox, etc.) that I didn’t notice some of the flaws that would make it age comparatively poorly, the kind of stuff that wasn’t future proof. The New York Times was one of the outlets that was critical of the game at the time, and as I’ve played more and more games in a genre whose popularity exploded even further in the era of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, I’ve come to agree with it more and more:

"In spite of rave reviews it’s a fairly pedestrian humans-versus-aliens first-person shooter that brings nothing new to the genre. The artificial intelligence of combatants is lackluster, and the semi-sepia-toned graphics are surprisingly unimpressive, no better than what you would see on the five-year-old Xbox."

The PS3’s horsepower did allow for quite a few baddies to be on screen at once, sure, but the environments weren’t particularly impressive, the browns and grays incredibly drab even for that moment in time before everyone was tired of them, and Insomniac didn’t really utilize the new hardware to do anything major and new. And there might have been a lot of enemies on screen at once at times, but they were usually just the same ones, over and over again, with the same limited arsenal of weapons and tactics at their disposal. Resistance: Fall of Man isn’t a bad game, by any means, but it is very by the numbers, checking off first-person boxes until what you end up with is something like Medal of Honor: Now With Aliens. No offense to Medal of Honor, of course, but the “Now With Aliens” and newer hardware combined with Insomniac’s imagination should have meant more.

The pacing of Fall of Man is off — the game wants to slowly introduce you to the horrors of what the world, and your American protagonist, Nathan Hale, are up against in Britain, so it takes its time unveiling anything beyond the most basic kinds of foes. The problem is that even when it does eventually reveal the scope of the invasion and the kind of science experiments gone wrong that have invaded the world, it still moves a little too slow, and the escalation of difficulty has more to do with just feeding you even more drones at a time than anything. Bosses are limited, nearly nonexistent, as missing as the memorable set pieces a game like this requires: you hear (and read) a lot about the “Angel” Chimera that controls the larger forces, and when you finally meet one halfway through the game, Hale just kills it in a cutscene, following a ho-hum firefight with drones that plays out like a hundred other firefights in the game.

It takes a good 11-12 hours to complete Fall of Man, and these days, you feel every one of those hours.

The game does get better as you go, which it owes to the increasing variety of weaponry that you receive, as well as some missions that change up the formula a bit — winding hallways in underground bases where windows can be shot out by you or the Chimera at any time, actually welcome vehicle levels since they change both the scale of the game and how you’re interacting with it, the occasional large-scale battle where you are one of many soldiers in the midst of a less personal conflict. The weapons never get quite as imaginative as you’d like them to be, given Insomniac’s history as one of the best in the business in this regard: there are a few winners, like the gun that lets you fire off an entire magazine at once in order to shoot out a ball that will unleash ricocheting bullets in the middle of a group of enemies, the Auger, which fires tunneling rounds that travel through obstructions and, as a secondary skill, lets you set up a defensive wall that only Auger rounds can get through, or the hedgehog grenade that, rather than killing with explosive force, embeds enormous needles within a significant radius at fatal speeds.

Most of the weapons are more boring than that, though, which is how the game ends up feeling so much like a standard military shooter, only with non-standard enemies who still act in standard ways. Yeah, the Chimera’s Bullseye rifle is acquired early, but its special skill — homing shots if you tag an enemy with the secondary fire — was something that games like Perfect Dark explored six years earlier. The sniper rifle lets you do a little bullet-time kind of thing, all the rage at the time, owing to you “concentrating” very hard on what you’re aiming at by pressing the secondary fire button. The basic rifle is useful, sure, but it’s just a World War II era rifle with an explosive secondary fire option. Meanwhile, Gears of War had a chainsaw bayonet, sticky grenades, a torque bow that fired off explosive arrows or skull-splitting headshots, and felt exceedingly different than the competition thanks to its emphasis on cover and station-to-station play. And, of course, some tremendous, and numerous, boss encounters that showed off the real diversity and terrifying nature of the opposition.

The world Resistance is set in is intriguing, at least, but there’s a lot more tell than show going on in its building, between interstitial, narrated scenes that recount Hale’s journey, and collected intel you need to read, if you even manage to find it: folders that don’t stand out and look quite a bit like plenty of files and papers lying around the environment that you can’t interact with was the opposite of an inspired choice. Still, you find yourself wanting to know where the Chimera came from, why they’re converting humans into foot soldiers, why they are able to unearth structures that already existed on Earth, and what’s going to happen to Hale, who has been infected by the Chimera, and should be converting into one of them, but instead just has their super healing powers now and a mission to complete. This, at least, helps separate Resistance from the games it too heavily drew inspiration from.

I have to reiterate that Resistance: Fall of Man isn’t a bad game. It’s just aggressively mediocre at this point. It has its high points — kudos to Insomniac for enabling local co-op, anyway, in a game whose story centers around a single soldier — but most are balanced out by repetitiveness and pacing problems. Insomniac knew something was amiss even amidst the praise, as they changed things up quite a bit in Resistance 2, which actually drew a ton of criticism from people who were plenty happy with what Fall of Man had provided. With hindsight, though, Resistance 2 would probably fare better critically than it did in the moment, given it added more variety, bosses, weapons, and — I hope you’re sitting down — color into the game world. Basically, much of what the original was missing.

The template for a great first-person shooter was here, but Insomniac mostly provided a previous-gen offering on new-gen hardware, and muddied much of the graphical improvements in drab colorization that would plague the era in the same way the Chimera plagued Fall of Man’s Britain. Which is to say, things that looked all too samey appeared in great numbers. My instinct is — and I’ll certainly subject myself to this at some point to find out — is that some of the more promising-looking but inevitably significantly criticized titles of the day hold up better than Resistance does, as they at least tried to do something interesting amid their flaws. Resistance does not try much of anything new, and it really sticks out that this was the case 15 years later. It can still be worth playing, especially as a lead-in to its superior sequels, but it lacks that hook, that reason to go back again and again regardless of the year on the calendar, that’s needed to make a once-successful game remain worth your time in the present.

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