GC 2008: Resistance 2 Updated Impressions

If reputations are to be believed, everything is bigger in America. So with Resistance 2 moving from the Chimera-infested streets of England to the Chimera-infested streets of the United States, Insomniac is taking the opportunity to get a little more ambitious in scope with everything from the campaign to the community Web site. Here at the Games Convention in Leipzig, community director Ryan Schneider just led us through a presentation on some of these new enhancements planned for this alternate-history shooter.

First, a minor caveat: Resistance 2 doesn't actually begin in America. It picks up immediately after the first game, with Nathan Hale being airlifted out of London to an American military base in Iceland. He's been brought there to undergo testing to make sure he's OK after that hard-fought battle against the Chimera. Without giving too much away, a few things go wrong and the first level begins there on Iceland. But after that, the game moves on to the States, with levels including Chicago, the Bay Area, and the redwood forests of Northern California.

But this is just the single-player campaign. There's an entirely different campaign for co-op, which will support up to eight players. Details on the plot are scarce right now, but we do know that co-op will support stat tracking, XP building, and a class system. In fact, the stats gained in co-op are shared with the ones gained in both the single-player campaign and competitive multiplayer.

For as interesting as the co-op sounds, eight is a much smaller number than 60. That's the number of players that will be supported in Resistance 2's competitive multiplayer matches. We were shown clips of one of the new levels, the streets and subways of 1950s Chicago. It's definitely a departure from some of those rural and woodsy multiplayer maps from the first game, but the map looked interesting with its divide between above and below ground urban combat.

One of the bigger multiplayer enhancements will be the Berserk system, which is a temporary buff you can activate when you've gathered enough XP. Some of the powers gained from these boosts include such obvious choices as enhanced speed and more powerful attacks, but a few other promising ones exist, such as the Chimeran Rage, which lets you see enemy silhouettes through buildings and walls. There's an even more interesting one called the Leadership Aura. This boost was described by Schneider as "taking one for the team" and essentially provides increased XP gain for your teammates over a temporary duration of time--not anything that boosts your abilities, per se.

Resistance 2 will be a much bloodier game than the original. To help demonstrate this, Schneider showed off a brand new weapon: the Splicer. This weapon allows you to shoot 15 saw blades per round, but it also supports an alternate fire where you can charge it up for a superpowered attack that lodges the blade in an enemy and simply continues to spin until he dies. The gun was demonstrated against a Chimera Ravenger, a hulking brute of an enemy not seen in the original game.

Because Schneider is Insomniac's community director, he made sure to talk about some of Resistance 2's community features. The main hub for all your Resistance 2 needs will be found at MyResistance.net, the official community Web site. Among many other things, it's being designed to allow you to build combat badges, which were described as "digital baseball cards" for your character that display icons unlocked both in the game and from your Web site use (think of a headshot medal and a popular blogger medal side by side under an image of your soldier). You can also read the Facebook-like Ticker and pursue a host of other community options to help make sure you don't feel lost in those huge 60-person battles.

Resistance 2 has a lot of ambitious ideas working for it at this point. We're hoping to check it out in further detail soon so we can see if all those great ideas can coalesce into something really special. In the meantime, you can expect it to arrive on November 4.