I don't always post the good
The likes of Black and Timesplitters might have previously wrestled some form of obedience out of the notorious DualShock analogue sticks, but the weightless Resistance: Fall Of Man lacks either game's authority. At TGS, in a build of presumably near-final quality, that's where problems began, with a PS3 controller that still feels like poison to the FPS.
This early in PS3's game, no one's asking Insomniac's frenetic shooter to be stunning - just different. After so long in the doldrums, Sony just needs to prove that its machine is able to take back the FPS, if not necessarily poised. But Resistance, a supposedly harrowing slaughterhouse of real-world physics, keen to prove that aliens in 1950s Britain are a more troubling and exhilarating prospect than Germans in 1940s France, feels all too familiar. In its current form, it could actually be the last thing Sony needs: a predictable slog, with PS2 written all over it.
As you butt into its surfaces and characters with wild analogue thrusts, the game's world not only moves like that of a PS2 shooter before the eyes, but buckles further beneath the weight of expectation. Irrespective of who's been dropping the bombs, its blitzed streets and suburbs are commonly apocalyptic, with furniture such as buses, telephone boxes, bricks and window frames pummelled into stray piles. There's no suggestion of the cold and precise intellect that built City 17, nor that the barricaded shells of houses were ever actually homes. All it's taken to build this universe is gunpowder, which wouldn't be a problem were there better guns to use it in.
Criticism of the game's weapons seems unfair when you consider the effort behind their construction, and almost unfathomable if you consider Ratchet & Clank. But maybe it's the lack of rumble support, the overly buoyant controls and the comparative lack of movement in this world that costs them their impact. The current application of a supposedly sophisticated physics engine dwells too much on details and never on the whole, with car doors flapping about and dirt conjured around grenade blasts, but little damage that's worthy of your fire. Resistance at times fells like a theme park adventure, full of rigid props and smoke machines.
In what sounds like a sci-fi plot twist, a black hole seems to be sucking all the energy out of Insomniac's shooter. Either that or the four-level demo at TGS, kept to a one-per-session limit by unskippable, text-heavy cutscenes, simply failed to make its point. This is the 22GB poster child of Blu-ray, yet it's hard to appreciate the detail. Its weapons are made for strategic play, yet when you're carrying them all at once it's hard to care. Its Chimeran enemies are cunning and cruel, yet demonstrate little of the AI that Cell is supposed to empower. So we're crossing our fingers with a heavy heart, waiting for proof of how little we actually know.
I'm kind of sad about this review/preview but whatever.
:
I used to think that this game didn't look so bad but over the past week it really lost my interest. The only thing I still like are the neato guns. 
)
