Resistance 2 picks up right after the events of Resistance: Fall of Man. Sergeant Nathan Hale, after destroying the tower and saving London from the Chimeran threat, is found by a group of soldiers. These soldiers work for SRPA. It's not long before Hale becomes the Lieutenant of Team Echo, a group of Sentinels. The men under his command are just like him - infected with the Chimeran virus, slowly turning into monsters. On the inside and outside. Hale hasn't got much time left until he turns into one himself… but first he has to defeat Daedalus at all cost.
The story in this game is really mysterious and if you won't investigate and think about it yourself, you will call it blank. That is the wrong way to look at it. You HAVE to investigate to understand the story of the game. There is a prologue and seven chapters in the game. These are like missions. In every one of these chapters (and the prologue), there is Intel to collect. Unlike in the first game, these documents don't give you more knowledge on the Chimera and their technology, but fill you in on the parts of the story which aren't told through gameplay and cutscenes. It is up to you if you want to collect all the Intel and read it, but if you do, then playing this game will be an overall better experience and the story will be easier to understand. This is in my opinion a very good thing. An unusual thing, rarely seen in many games, but it just gives you more things to think about it and makes the game much more complex than it appears to be at first.
Overall, the story of Resistance 2 is surprisingly mysterious, clouded, dark and just great. It will be much easier for you to understand more of it, if you complete Resistance: FOM first, and like I mentioned before, find and read all of the hidden Intel documents. Gamers who like to explore stories of games will love this, if they're smart enough to do a bit of thinking themselves. But people who just like to get straight into the action will not be disappointed at all either.
When it comes to gameplay, Resistance 2 just owns! The controls are very similar to what they were like in the first game. They are still simple, easy to use and quick to learn - just what a shooter's controls should be like. There is no health bar like in Fall of Man, but when you are shot at, the screen will go red around the edges and you will hear Hale's heartbeats at a faster rate. The faster his heart beats and the more red you see around the edges of your screen, the closer you are to death. Your health regenerates at a quite fast rate, but you have to stay in cover and not receive any damage. The AI of your squad mates is surprisingly advanced. Unlike in the first game, your allies will now actually kill enemies and not just fire a few shots and die. Of course, the same goes for your enemies. The Chimera have a good AI, though not an incredible one.
The difficulty of Resistance 2 depends on what difficulty you choose. You can choose from three difficulties every time you start a new game. These are: Casual, Normal and Difficult. Once you complete the game on Difficult, you will unlock Superhuman difficulty. Overall, if you could mix all those together, I'd say the game is pretty hard. In my opinion, Normal would be a good choice on your first play-through. While Casual is good for beginners, it didn't prove to be challenging enough for me. But Difficult kicked my butt more than once, so I'd go with Normal. Also, I find it astonishing that a second play-through of Resistance 2 on "difficult" difficulty level can be as much fun as your very first play-through of the game, even if frustrating at times.
There are many weapons that you will find while playing. All of those vary quite a lot, some of them are crazy for a shooter which isn't surprising because after all, this game is developed by Insomniac Games who are known for their great Ratchet & Clank platformer series. So there is quite a lot of cool weapons to choose from, a lot of new ones and some known from the first Resistance but upgraded to work even better. In total there is 14 awesome guns to choose from, such as: the M5A2 Carbine, your standard machine gun type of weapon with an attached grenade launcher; the Auger, an automatic weapon that can shoot through walls and create shields for you; the V7 Splicer, a weapon that fires circular saw blades which bounce off of all surfaces until they hit a soft target (cutting off your enemy's limbs is quite fun) and my personal favourite, the Marksman. The Marksman is a scoped weapon that is very accurate and powerful. It fires in short, three round bursts. On top of those 14 cool weapons, you also get three types of grenades: a frag grenade, a hedgehog grenade and an air-fuel grenade. With so many creative weapons to use, I'd say that Resistance 2 is an innovative game, for a shooter at least.
The characters in the game are a lot more developed than in Resistance: Fall of Man. In Resistance, I didn't really get an idea of what Hale was actually like; he barely ever said anything. But in Resistance 2, I actually found out more about Hale's personality and had a rough idea of what his team mates are like as well. While these characters aren't anywhere near as deeply developed as those you would find in a game like Mass Effect 2 - but they do their job well and they are interesting enough for a shooter.
I loved the enemies of Resistance: FOM and I'm happy to say that I still love them in Resistance 2. There is a lot of new types of Chimera, even crazier than the ones you saw before. Not to mention the massive boss fights… literally MASSIVE. There is a lot of twisted types of enemies, you won't be disappointed.
If for some impossible reason, the epic, awesome, incredible and amazing single player campaign doesn't satisfy you enough, there are nearly just as awesome multiplayer options waiting for you. Yes, shooter fanatics, this is the game you've been waiting for to show off your skills against other players. There are two main types of multiplayer - Cooperative and Competitive.
In Competitive, you can customize your look - whether you want to play as the Chimera or the Human, you get an equal amount of customization options. You will get the usual death match, team death match etc. game modes. These are really fun to play, but the thing that's so different about them than in all other multiplayer games is that you can play with up to fifty-nine other players!!! Including you, that's a total of sixty players in one match, blasting thousands of bullets against each other. Yes, it's epic… but with those sixty players, the game still works very fast and doesn't lag at all. Who knows how Insomniac Games managed to do this, but it works.
Yeah, competitive sounds awesome (and it is). But there is also Cooperative which is just as great and is another innovative element of Resistance 2. You will have to team up with other players to form your own squad of soldiers and complete various missions to help in the fight against the Chimera. Cooperative can also be played offline with a second player on the same console. It is really good to see how they managed to keep this mode balanced, because if you want to survive, you will have to work together. If you're a medic, you will have to make sure that you are there for your team when they need healing. The things you will have to do will depend on the class you choose to play as. Also, as you level up, enemies will get tougher. If there is more people in your team than usual, you will notice a change in the numbers of the Chimera as well.
There is of course a multiplayer community. I really like the idea of creating your own clans, inviting your friends to them and starting clan wars against others. Also, the more you play, the more medals and ribbons you will earn. There are also ranks. The more enemies you kill, the more experience you will earn and you raise in rank, unlocking new stuff.
The visuals in this game are beautiful. The graphics are great, they're fantastic. They are really smooth but it is really the environments created with those graphics that make Resistance 2 so beautiful. I mean, I just loved the forest in Chapter 2, it was breath-taking. And of course it's not the environments only, they just stand out the most. The characters are beautifully designed, especially their faces. The weapons are well done too. Yes, you will see a few low-res textures but really only a few and they are hard to spot so they won't stop you from playing.
Resistance 2 is a quite unusual game. It is mysterious, dark and clouded but fantastic, action-packed, epic and a bit innovative at the same time. There are few bad things about it, as well as some that could have been done in different ways, but not necessarily improved. It is not unlike some shooters but so different than so many other games at the same time. It's unique, yet unoriginal at the same time. Resistance 2 belongs to one of those few games which will actually make you think about what you've played through and will make you wonder what the hell just happened after finishing your first play-through. But it's a good thing in my opinion and like I said before, rarely seen in games, especially shooters. Shooters tend to have weak, straight-forward stories. Well this isn't the case with Resistance 2. I have no other choice, than to give this great game a rating of 8.5/10.
OVERALL RATING – 8.5/10 (Great)
NEW GS RATING – 8/10