• Game: Resistance 3
• Platform: PS3 (with optional Move support)
• Publisher: Sony
• Developer: Insomniac Games
• ESRB: M
• Genre: Action, Shooter
• Players: 1-16



• What's Hot: Inventive weapons; polished graphics; decent pacing; provides 2-player campaign co-op



• What's Not: An almost by the numbers design; safe; weak audio effects and cutscenes; multiplayer modes fairly standard and scaled back to 16 players

Review by: Justin Amirkhani

Resistance is a game that despite all its advanced design and processor-pounding graphical fidelity still faithfully follows the Carmack/Romero design handbook. Sure, there are plenty of things in the game that would be generally inconceivable 20 years ago but it feels very much like a classic shooter – in the best and worst ways.

Above and beyond all things, the Resistance games have always been about really cool weapons spicing up otherwise bland gameplay. With its selection of alien weapons offering strange new tricks from the ability to detonate pistol shots to automatically sink bullets into a marked target, even without aiming at them, there has always been plenty of gimmicks in the Resistance guns and this version is no different..

With the last two Resistance games these were the hot sauce on top of otherwise bland gameplay. Big boxy rooms, filled with enemies lying in wait to be destroyed before you move on to the next set of patient bad guys. Thankfully this style of boring and predictable level design has been eradicated completely from the third installment, favoring a more varied experience that – while still very linear – offers a lot more in terms of pacing.

Maybe it has something to do with the series taking a step back from its hybrid World War II / space marine trappings and crafting something fresh by showing a broken, captured world where humanity is on the run. It’s a startling shift in tone, but an incredibly welcome one; even when mixed, the tired old genres Resistance has tried to embody never amounted to anything more than tired old tropes that were sometimes asynchronous.

With the internal struggle of John Hale out of the picture, we’re reintroduced to Joe Capelli; a much more relatable character who fights on the fringe but only when he has to. He’s not a character that’s instantly likable, or even understood, but his desire to live quietly with his family – even under Chimeran occupation – is much more human than his predecessor ever managed In fact there’s a lot more humanity in this game than predicted. In the savage barbarism of the Walking Dead-inspired prison scene, we get to experience many facets of humanity living under a dominating thumb. It isn’t always pretty, but neither is humanity and thus it’s fitting that the most disturbing scenes in the game aren’t from Chimeran hostility, but people falling on their old animalistic tendencies – a sight that’s always haunted me in post-apocalyptic settings, and one Resistance 3 understands.

In contrast, the commune and family Joe fights to protect represent the softer, more docile side of humanity that would rather cower away than fight. Many times the game calls Joe’s resolve into question and he considers the prospect of living his few remaining days in fearful peace of an inevitable end. It’s poetic but only as long as we believe in the Capelli family unit, but that doesn’t last long.