TGS 06: Resistance: Fall of Man Multiplayer Hands-On

TOKYO--You have to look around a bit or you just might miss Resistance: Fall of Man at Tokyo Game Show 2006. The game is hiding on the back side of Sony's booth, and it's broken up into a single-player section and a multiplayer section. We hopped in line and waited our turn to get into an online battle, and so far, it looks like the game's multiplayer mode could be pretty exciting.

Much like the single-player mode, the mode we played pit the insidious alien creatures against human soldiers. Our kiosk dropped us in with the alien team. The alien soldiers have a time-limited ability that lets you move more quickly and see opponents through walls. Other than that, you can jump, execute a melee attack, fire, toss grenades--all of the stuff you'd expect to see in a first-person shooter.

The multiplayer match supports up to 40 players, and the mode we played was a 10-minute team mode that uses Battlefield-like control points to manage spawning. The control points are large columns with smaller colored cylinders inside that correspond to the color of your team. If you control the point, you can spawn there when you die. If you roll up on an enemy point, you can shoot out all of the colored cylinders to take control.

The multiplayer game moves pretty quickly, and things speed up even more when you're using the alien's fast-moving ability, which can be handy if you want to sneak up and bash a human in the skull with the back end of your shotgun. Despite having a large 40-player limit, the size of the map we played in wasn't huge. This kept things moving and kept the level of action pretty high.

Overall, the multiplayer component of Resistance seems cool--even though our alien team lost the battle to those pesky humans. Resistance: Fall of Man is scheduled to be released alongside the PS3 in both Japan and the US.