Resistance: Fall of Man (Playstation 3, 2006)

 

I wanted to revisit something from the late 2000's, early-HD, Brown AF, Playstation 3 Generation. I mentioned this game a few times as being Sony's answer to Halo, so it immediately sprang to mind. It really doesn't have that much in common with Halo besides that they're both first-person shooters against an alien foe. Rather than a futuristic game with laser weapons and so forth, this is an alternate-history 1950 story, with era-appropriate weaponry. It posits the question: What if WW2 never happened, and everyone had to band together to repel an alien invasion instead?

It's an interesting game, and covers my PS3 era nostalgia well enough.

LET THE BROWN BEGIN.

THIS...is Playstation 3!

This game transpires over eleven levels, and each one is broken up into a few sections. This is the robust single-player campaign - something a lot of modern shooters don't even bother with - and it's the meat of the game. As one can surmise here, the whole campaign is set over locations in England.

It also has multiplayer for up to four players on couch co-op (there's deathmatch, and you might be able to play the campaign like that too). Finally there's online multiplayer where up to 40 players can battle in team-based wars. One side (up to 20 players) are the humans and the other side are the aliens.

So yeah, they went balls to the wall with this game. Doubt the online multiplayer is still functional, and I'm just here for the campaign, so let's get it done.

The alien threat first appeared in Russia in the 1930's. It's firmly implied that rather than an alien landing/takeover, it was actually a plague developed by the Soviets that slowly infected people and turned them into feral "Chimeras", intelligent monsters hellbent on taking over land and turning more people into Chimeras. They're pretty much the Borg from Star Trek.

Given that it took years for the Chimera to even take over Russia, and it was more of a plague than an invasion, I'm definitely leaning towards the "escaped Soviet lab experiment" origin for the alien menace. Puts a different spin on it.

WW2 never happened in this universe, and in the meantime the Chimera totally took over the USSR after a while. It took a long time and they stayed within the USSR's borders, which is weird. By 1949 they had consolidated power and were ready to move out beyond that, though.

They then ran over the entirety of mainland Europe in one year.

I'm pretty sure this whole thing is just a metaphor for the spread of Bolshevism, and what would have happened if unchecked authoritarian communism had been free to take over Europe (aka if Germany hadn't decided to take over first). In an alternate universe where Germany never grew into a threat to world peace, chances are the USSR would have moved into Europe instead. World War 2 would have probably happened no matter what, and been potentially even bloodier, in this scenario. The West fighting the USSR, in Europe, would have been a complete mess. More of a mess than what we got in our world, where the mess itself was mostly confined to Russian territory and the Eastern Front.

Oh yeah, back to the game. So anyway, the UK was safe for a little bit because of their giant moat (RIP Doggerland). However, after consolidating control over Europe, the Soviets Chimera launched a massive attack on the UK and it didn't take long for them to completely invade the place. However, the battle wasn't over yet...

...the American military sprung into action, going into England to join the UK's military in attempting to resist/repel the Chimera.

So the US just sat by and let Europe get run over, but once the Chimera landed in the UK, that was TOO FAR. It's sort of like how the US sat by for four years while Germany and the USSR beat each other's asses, finally jumping in once the USSR started winning. Can't let them grab too much of Europe!

So here we are, the game starts. You play as this one American soldier who ends up being a notable figure of the conflict.

It's a fairly basic shooter, with fairly basic weapons. The technology is a combination of 1950's technology and more-advanced Chimera technology like highly-maneuverable VTOL aircraft and spider-mechs straight out of the Terminator 2 concept art Centurion designs.

Seriously, that's a HK-Centurion. A weird early design version, but it's totally ripped from the Terminator sketchbook.

We finally see the Chimera up-close, and...they're basically orcs with mechanical parts.

Yep, there they are. The Borg / Commie Menace. Better dead than red!

The first level is the hardest level in the game, by far. Why? Because you have no health regeneration and no way to heal, for some reason. So you just die a lot, bouncing back to the checkpoints while everything respawns. A huge amount of people gave up on this game in the first level because they thought the whole game would be like this.

Reapers are my favorite weapon, dual submachine guns made by Chimera. They can be fired indepently, and can also track two different enemies onscreen at once with their autoaim.

There's also this beastly Chimera machinegun, which is significantly stronger than the 1950's army rifle you default to.

As the troops traverse various English terrain to try and liberate the place, we actually see some colors in the wilderness. Not many colors, but I see some green.

At the end of this hellish level, the squad gets ambushed by a horde of bugs. These bugs apparently infect people with the Chimera condition, and gank the entire squad.

However, the guy you're playing as...doesn't transform or die, he wakes up. Now he's a weird Chimera hybrid.

The good news is that now you can regenerate your health, and the rest of the game is actually playable!

Whoa, is that a tank? I need that.

Oh hell yeah, you can run down and commandeer the tank. The vehicle controls are really good, probably better than Halo, and the tank is a lot of fun to drive and shoot with.

The deadliest tool the Chimera have are these bugs. They'll drop a "spire" into a town, and it'll unleash hordes of bugs, which will get into every facet of the town and start biting people. Eventually, everyone starts turning into Chimeras, or at least enough people for them to get a majority and start forcing their will on the remaining un-infected people.

The un-infected are brought to these weird Conversion Facilities, where they get programmed by the Borg Chimera and turned into Chimera that way.

It takes a while compared to the bug bite virus, but it gets the job done.

Your protagonist now becomes a creepy weirdo who lurks around staring at people and blinking strangely. The Chimera DNA might have taken hold in his body, but for some reason he's still got his faculties and continues to fight against them.

They won't rest until everyone on Earth is either dead or one of them. That's right, there's no "live and let live" or tolerance of other beliefs with these bastards. Either you think like they do, or you're bad and worthless.

I finally get a shotgun, my favorite FPS weapon. Ammo is limited, but it does a ton of damage.

The next mission is to trash a Conversion Facility and get all the people here out of their pods.

The narrator of the story is this woman who serves in the British military, and she documents the story of Nathan Hale and his oddball half-Chimera-ness.

Despite that everyone knows he's infected, he's like a one-man army now, so they just sort of get out of his way and let him do his thing.

As it goes on, the game becomes less "enclosed FPS level" and more "open battlefield level", with these huge warzones. The difficulty goes up quite a bit for these since you can take fire from anywhere.

The game also starts to feel much more like a standard war game as it goes on. Since the Chimera start wearing helmets and other military gear more and more, in these open areas they're basically indistinguishable from fighting against human enemies anyway. This could easily be a game about fighting the USSR in an alternate 1950 WW2, though it wouldn't be as interesting without the aliens and plagues. They would lean much more heavily on those things in the sequels.

London Calling

This is a game that had massive potential to be a horror game with an alien plague, but it seems like they couldn't decide whether to go all-in with the virus horror or all-in with the alien invasion war game. So instead it's just a little bit of both painted over what could just be a WW2-era regular FPS. One could go through a lot of this game without even knowing the bad guys are aliens, unless you get close to one. They even wear army helmets half the time.

Some pretty nice scenery in this game at times, but even when it looks really good, it's still got that PS3 POOPY BROWN SHEEN.

Some of the environments get a bit complex. It's impressive, and would be far moreso if there were any color to anything.

Another fun-to-drive vehicle is the jeep with a swivel-mounted gun. You can steer it and fire at the same time and it controls super-well.

A lot of these areas look like assets from a modern Terminator war FPS that we never got and really should have. I mean a multiplayer one with teams and everything like this has. Terminator Resistance was an awesome game but it's strictly a single-player experience and it's over too soon.

Speaking of, you get to drive a Not-Centurion for a couple levels later on, and again, vehicles are super fun to pilot in this game.

The finished weapon wheel has everything, and I'm sad to report that this game has NO LASERS. Any game with futuristic tech and aliens should have laser beams...but most of the time they don't. Especially in the late 2000s, ballistic ammo was all the rage in futuristic sci-fi and lasers were borderline nonexistent. Even the Mass Effect trilogy didn't have any laser weapons!

Lategame levels have you fighting through the winter and strangely Russian-looking buildings. Kinda wondering if originally this game had you pushing the commie Chimera threat back into the USSR, and when they changed it to an alien invasion to protect the innocent, they just sorta had the game start and end in England.

Boss fight with a Centurion, finally. Been waiting to fight one of these. It takes a rocket launcher and a ton of strafing to bring down.

This is followed by another tank section, as we approach the local epicenter of Chimera power:

"The Tower", this odd Chimera pyramid that looks like the Fortress of Solitude. Apparently they built this after they gained control of the region, and all local efforts emanate from here.

The final chapter involves barreling towards The Tower, using various vehicles to clear the way.

More Centurion-driving through a ravine, and thicker snow than ever, leads to the Tower interior.

This place is full of Chimera technology and makes for a good final level. Finally, the game actually feels like an alien invasion game, after feeling like a WW2 game for 60% of the runtime and a Terminator game for the next 35%. The sequels, like I mentioned before, would do way more with the alien element and giving them technology.

The final boss is this flying...alien squid thing.

The game ends almost exactly like the Terminator Salvation movie (which was 3 years after this) by having a jet annihilate the enemy base with a high-yield bomb once all the AA defenses are down, then fly off into the foreground while the base explodes behind it.

Thus, the Chimera are repelled entirely from the UK, and rebuilding can begin. The De-Borgification of England.

However, they still control mainland Europe and Russia, and we still don't know what their ultimate goal is. Pretty sure it's just to turn everyone into more of them.

The protagonist was never found, and may have perished in the tower.

There's so much Terminator Salvation DNA in this game/ending

A post-credits scene shows that the hero is alive and well, and he's found out in the snow somewhere by a US Special Forces team.

So what happened? Well, this game got a couple of sequels, and they were pretty good too. And way less brown. They used more alien tech in those games, and they felt far more like "alien invasion" games. 80% of this first one felt like a pretty standard war game set in 1950.