Resistance: Fall of Man

Learning how to make best use of a new tool is the best part of game, and the challenges arranged in front of you test different elements of each at different times: running through a field with your new Auger, you'll camp behind concrete walls and use its burrowing projectiles to dispatch turret gunners; later, you'll come across mines that throw hedgehog grenades into the air with nowhere to run, and you'll realise that the Auger's alternate function, a sort of riot-shield force-field, is crucial to withstanding their impact. With lessons learned from the successes of Ratchet on both sides of the conflict, Resistance messes with your expectations; duck out of a room full of Chimera to seek respite and you'll still have to watch out for sparks on the wall - the telltale sign of those burrowing Auger rounds working their way towards you instead.

There are over a dozen weapons in the game, and some are unlocked upon completion; like Ratchet, Resistance compels you to play it again by funnelling its strongest attributes into the variables, and rewarding you for exploring. The suggestion that you will use and love all of the weapons equally is a bit optimistic though - the Bullseye, the Auger and the Fareye sniper rifle with its slow-motion L1 modifier are enormously useful and capable, but certain others slide towards novelty. The Hailstorm, for example - lauded in our preview - may have perfectly measured bouncing projectiles, and lead you to do clever things like shoot people around corners, but it's a bit like playing projectile snooker, and you'll achieve a much higher success rate by popping out, tagging with the Bullseye, and firing up and over instead. There is lots of mileage in what succeeds, though, while skill-point awards ask you to perform certain feats multiple times, and scraps of intelligence clue you into more of the back-story. While never as strong a game in every area as some of its competitors past and present, there's much outside the loadout that satisfies.

It's rife with set-piece battles and although sometimes it lapses toward formulaic challenges, for the most part it avoids becoming repetitive. A section where you drive a jeep around Cheddar Gorge, stopping to clear out a pair of identikit outposts every so often so that you can open the next gate, is certainly a bit on the dull side, but it's one anomalous section in nearly two-dozen levels. The more memorable levels, like the battle up a hill in Nottingham, or storming across trenches into the heart of a Chimeran installation, or a huge conflict in a town square with dozens of humans and Chimera perishing opposite one another, are more than adequate recompense for the occasional weakness in structure. Most notably, these sections consistently boast large-scale involvement on both sides of the battle - something that's handled better the further into the game you go.

In almost every technical respect Resistance is well considered. Controls are as fluid and adjustable as any recent shooter's have been (although, once again, those in love with the old-days GoldenEye analogue behaviour are left wanting), while the health system is a bit like Halo's, but perhaps a bit better. After an early Chimeran attack, Hale starts to manifest some of the enemy's characteristics, including their regenerative capacity, and this is used as justification for a four-part health bar that allows you to recover to the nearest quarter if you can find a few seconds of cover. And you never get lost: there's always a clear route ahead, and the only backtracking you'll do is for health packs - something we can forgive as easily here as we did in Halo, Half-Life and countless others.

As you make progress, Resistance uses a checkpointing system to save your position, and but for a few aberrations (mostly late on when things heat up considerably) it's a fairly friendly companion. Elsewhere the co-operative take on the campaign - although sadly limited to offline play - splits the screen vertically, and adjusts the view slightly so neither player feels stifled by the lack of screen-space.

And when the single-player's out of the way, you're led, much as we now are, inexorably toward those much-heralded 40-player online battles. In a game that's solid and sometimes spectacular played alone, largely on account of its best weapons, these battles more than anything are going to determine the game's long-term fate.

The first, positive news is that the game doesn't over-reach technically with its 40-player limits. More than likely you'll find it hard to locate a posse that fits the profile for large-scale team games until you've built up a decent-sized buddy list, but everyone-for-himself modes are predictably chaotic in the meantime. If you struggle to make sense out of the mayhem, you can always opt for levels designed for smaller player-counts.

Customisation options allow you to specify which weapons are available among other things, while individual game modes see you fighting for control of nodes and trying to assault the enemy base. Initially you're given a choice of human or Chimera, with humans able to see enemies on a mini-map, while the Chimera can use a temporary rage mode to strengthen attacks and locate enemy heat signatures - the trade-off being that incoming strikes will hurt more. But in team games it's the specific strengths of the weapons that make for a sort of impromptu class structure - Bullseyes and Carbines carving up the frontlines, with Augers, the rebounding fire of the Hailstorm and the pointed strikes of the LAARK missile launcher providing indirect support. It's fairly well balanced too.

Whether it will sustain you for a great deal of time is harder to predict, but it does throw up impressive thrills - like the panic of being hit by a Bullseye tag, the masochistic pleasure of watching people leap this way and that as a hedgehog grenade announces itself, or the satisfaction of securing a final kill in last-man-standing by guiding a LAARK shot across the map into a hapless pursuer. Again though it feels over-reliant on the weapons you preferred in the single-player game, and on top of that there are no single levels that force their way into your thoughts like a Longest Yard, de_dust or Claustrophobopolis. Hopefully Insomniac can build on what's offered with downloadable content, which should start to appear soon.

And so we conclude where we teasingly began: Insomniac's doom. Speaking to Eurogamer this month, Ted Price said that his team wanted to get a new series ready for the console's launch because that's the best time to establish one. Well, it's appropriate that they opted for a warring theme, because anybody who buys into Resistance will be left fighting off mutant mentalists on two fronts: in the game, and on the Internet, where the Xbox Jugend will never let it lie. However the game does critically, it simply will not be allowed to be good. It won't matter that this is nearly an excellent first-person shooter; it will just matter that it doesn't quite get there.