Annoying problems plague ‘Resistance 3’
The major release "Resistance 3" has so many problems I have to categorize them all.
Problem No. 1: The plot is a dud, a "Red Dawn" retread set in mid-'50s America, when 90 percent of humans have been killed or been body-snatched by an alien virus.
Your job, in this cookie-cutter first-person shooter, is to portray a guy who travels tunnels, buildings, fields and such while shooting humans-turned-aliens.
Problem No. 2: The game doesn't give you a good defensive posture.
Aliens frequently shoot at you from many angles. Usually in a game with such frantic shooting, a game will give you: A) self-rejuvenating health; and/or B) a cover system so you can hide behind walls to avoid bullets.
"Resistance 3" gives you neither. Even on the easiest "casual" setting, I die constantly because of the game's crummy defense.
Problem No. 3: Boring.
We begin with a fight against a terrible, giant mechanized spider. We fired a machine gun at it for five tedious minutes until it finally died. Things don't get much zippier from there, as we basically followed a track of arcade-ish levels henceforth.
The boredom is compounded by reused battlefields. The moment I killed a swarm of aliens in a backyard lot, suddenly another batch of aliens came to trap me in the same lot! That's lazy overuse of battlefields.
Also, load times in between battlefields can be a molasses of 15-second waits.
Problem No. 4: The online multiplayer took forever just to work, for me.
At first, "Resistance 3" told me I needed to download a 30-minute software patch. I did.
Then the game told me to click approval of an online contract, which I did, but that only encouraged the game to tell me to download a second update!
Then the game told me to quit the game, go to the online settings and type in an "online pass" -- without telling me where I could find my pass.
So I flipped through the game's 24-page instruction manual until I found the 12-digit online pass -- on the last page.
So I went to my PS 3's online settings and typed in the pass.
Then the game downloaded a third piece of software!
Then I actually got the online game running. But Sony servers couldn't find any real people for me to game against.
I fell asleep while the multiplayer spun, fruitlessly. I woke an hour later to the sound of a session starting at last. The online game was ... average.
There's more! When I quit that multiplayer session, this froze my PS 3, and I had to reboot the system.
A few days later, I tried playing the game again and it told me to download a fourth update!
Look, all I wanted was a fun alien shoot-'em-up. Instead, I played an average and defenseless offline campaign, then got mired in online hell.
Sony: What in the world?!
("Resistance 3" by Sony retails for $60 for PS 3 -- Plays average and half-tedious. Looks OK. Challenging. Rated "M" for blood, gore, intense violence, strong language. Two stars out of four.)
Contact Doug Elfman at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.
NEW IN STORES
"Pro Evolution Soccer 2012" (Konami) and "FIFA Soccer 12" (EA) come out on the same day and compete for soccer fans.
This year's "PES 2012" adds a big new feature while tweaking features from last year. "PES" adds the ability for you to control two offensive players at the same time. What this means is, while you control a player with the ball, you can click a button to control any other player on your team and make him run into an open space to receive a pass or shoot the ball.
"PES" has also made buttons respond faster when you're controlling the ball in one-on-one situations against defenders, so you can do upper-body fakes and stopovers quicker.
The offense has been tweaked so your teammates are better at anticipating where you're going to pass to them for open shots.
Teammates also do a better job of drawing opposing defenders away from the net.
But the defense has also been tweaked, so the computer gangs up against you in tighter formations.
Dead-ball situations, such as corner kicks, now offer more active controls.
Meanwhile, soccer rival "FIFA 12" has a new software engine, said to be two years in the making, designed to make motions more realistic. That means more realistic moments when players smash into each other, or dribble around each other, or kick balls off of shins accidentally.
"FIFA," of course, also comes with career mode, scouting, an online profile, and some tweaks of its own concerning dribbling, passing, defending and scoring.
Normally, I suggest fans of soccer video games to play both "FIFA" and "PES" to see which one they prefer, whether that means renting them both or playing them in a video game store if possible.
--DOUG ELFMAN
