Resistance 3 Member Review for the PS3

Resistance 2 was a good game but left us with a drastic cliffhanger.  Resistance 3 finishes the series (well at least for Insomniac games) but will it hold up good compared to its prequels? 

In Resistance 3 you play as Joseph Capelli who has just settled down in a small hideout with his new wife and child to hide from the Chimera death squads who are trying to extinguish the last of mankind.  In a turn of events, Malikov arrives proclaiming that a Chimera tower in New York is creating a worm hole that is causing the temperatures to drop drastically and unless Joseph helps him, humanity will be extinct in a year from the temperatures.  The story is pretty deep and focuses on the ordinary people who are left struggling to survive, Joseph's exhaustion from fighting and more about the Chimera.  The story is dramatic and there is quite a few sudden twists in fate for the characters.  The ending did leave a lot of questions that will probably never be answered.

Resistance 3 feels a lot more unique than Resistance 2 and returns to a lot of it's roots in the first game of the series.  One problem with Resistance 2 is that it felt like it was trying to clone some of the popular blockbuster shooters.  In Resistance 3 you get to have all your weapons on you again using a quick select which is very nice considering a lot of the weapons are very interesting to use so you get to keep them all (Insomniac is best known for their unique crazy weapons).  The guns also look a lot different and each look absolutely fantastic.  There are some new weapons in Resistance 3 as well but I won't spoil them because that is half the fun of the game.  The game does suffer from a lot of repetition though in the gameplay, you fight through waves of different Chimera that are practically all the same.  Then there is the problem with getting lost as there wasn't a single hour of gameplay that I would not have gotten lost at least twice, there are pointers that appear after a while of wandering but they should be there all the time.  The game also loses it's health system for a health meter one where you have to pick up health packs to survive, so you have to be a lot more careful with your moves and not pull a Leeroy Jenkins in the middle of the battlefield and expect to be healed five seconds after getting to cover.  There are a few types of boss chimera which are fun to fight but in my opinion there should have been a few more.  The game was a fun ride but I had a few minor gripes with it.

When playing Resistance 3 you can really imagine what it would be like for the people that are left.  The environment looks bleak, casualties of war leaves many buildings severely damaged and some cities are completely dead.  There are colours but the whole world looks like a barren post-apolyptic world.  Chimera structures are very interesting to see.  You can see a lot of weather effects in this game like fog and wind which really adds a lot of visual candy.  But this game looks drastically different from the first two Resistance games which makes the game (along with it's unique gameplay) feel like it can sometimes be another developer's imagination of what the game could possibly be.  It's not a problem it looks and plays better than the first two but it didn't necessarily feel like a Resistance title, if there wasn't any Chimera it could be a completely different series.

The game consists of a co-op mode and multiplayer mode which I won't look at in the review.  But I will mention that compared to Resistance 2 (which the multiplayer wasn't that good in anyways) it took a lot of steps backwards multiplayer wise.

Every time you kill an enemy you will hear the same noise to notify you that you killed an enemy but it also gets quite annoying.  The music is very epic in some of the more intense situations and the voice acting is stellar.

Overall the game is a great game but it doesn't necessarily feel like a Resistance title.  It is a great way for Insomniac to finish its last Resistance game though.  It has a few minor gripes especially with repetition but overall it's a great game.  If you only care about multiplayer then you should probably pass on this game though.