Annoying problems plague ‘Resistance 3’

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.