Masem’s Gaming Blog

Resistance: Retribution is a expansion game for the Resistance series (that made by Insomniac Games, of Ratchet and Clank fame) made by Sony Bend for the PSP which tells the story of what happened in Europe after the completion of the first game in the series, and dropping hints that lead into the second game.  The game is a shooter, which may be an immediate put-off when considering it on the PSP, but Sony Bend took a number of good steps to make sure that this shooter works with the limited PSP controls, and is actually quite playable and enjoyable. While it stays close to the source material from the other games, it doesn’t have much uniqueness about it, but is definitely a strong attempt.

Review Helpfulness: (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Story: B+

The game takes place after the first Resistance title and leads into elements introduced in its sequel.  Here, however, you play as Grayson, a former British marine that is forced to kill his brother at gunpoint after he was infected by the Chimera virus, and in revenge, abandoned his trooped and personally destroyed a large number of Chimera conversion centers across Europe.  After his capture by the British, he is sentence to a firing squad, but is saved by the European human resistance, called the Maquis, in particular by a woman named Bouchard who is working with her father to try to discover a serum to stop the Chimera.  With Grayson’s knowledge, the Maquis plan an attack to retake the European mainland by injecting this serum into the hive mind in the Paris Chimera tower, but they need Grayson to help them complete the virus by infiltrating a conversion center.  Of course, no plan goes off without a hitch, and Grayson finds the Maquis plan to be far from simple.

In terms of advancing the overall Resistance story, the game’s not that great – partially since we know how things turn out already – it’s like watching Revenge of the Sith but well aware of the original Star Wars trilogy as you know how it all comes out in the end.  But that doesn’t mean its all throwaway, as Grayson and Bouchard, along with a couple other characters, make this a decent character-driven story above your usual FPS/TPS.  It’s not deep by far, and seems more in line with the story instead of just providing a means to link the levels together.

Gameplay: A-

You may be thinking immediately: “A shooter on the PSP? Pass.”  And that’s what I thought initially. However, the developers realized that the PSP isn’t by default made for this and took some very ingenuous steps to keep the game interesting and playable on the unit.  Primarily, this is done by keeping the right face buttons (X, circle, etc.) clear of anything besides helping with movement or looking around, depending on which control scheme you prefer, thus making it act like a second analog stick.  Fire controls are put on the shoulder buttons, and everything else : reloading, zooming, weapon switching, and special actions, are done via the d-pad controls.  This actually works surprisingly well in conjunction with the other help the game gives you.  Yes, it’s not easy to necessarily move and manually reload, for one, but by far it’s better than other weird schemes that do weird things with the camera on some buttons.

The second piece that helps is the auto-aiming system (which can be turned off if you want); the game will generally focus your aiming point for most weapons in non-zoomed mode on the enemy closest to the center of the view and sticks with it until it’s dead, you manually swap to a different enemy, or you look elsewhere.  This makes moving and strafing rather easy to do.  You can lose some enemies if they go too high or low on your view even though they still may be partially visible.  Now, there are a few enemies where targeting becomes important (they die faster if you heat their weak spots) but fortunately you can zoom in to get a sights view that allows you to aim more precisely.

Finally, this is all put together by auto-cover and reloading systems that basically allow you to keep your thumbs on the critical move and look buttons and not have to fumble with anything else.  Get behind cover with enemies in sight and you’ll automatically duck, and when you go to fire, you’ll pop up and then back down.  Same with corners of walls.  This doesn’t make the game a piece of cake – you can’t stay behind the same piece of cover forever when enemies start advancing or they pull out the Augers that can go through cover – but it gives you a very good fighting chance against the game on the PSP.

It’s not perfect, of course – you can sometimes get blindsided and take a while to locate your foe. Weapons like grenades or the rocket launcher have to be aimed right, and if you default to the automatic aim, you may get caught in its blast range.  But for the most part, this is a very playable shooter on the PSP.

Now, in terms of the game itself, it does use some of the futuristic weapons from the other two games; you have an energy rifle as well as the aforementioned Auger which can shoot through walls.  Ammo for the guns is actually pretty generous, and turns the game less as an offensive challenge and more playing it safe behind cover and playing more defensive.  Health is handled in an old-school manner with no regeneration but instead plenty of health packs around.  And there’s two sections that get you behind a Chimera battle tank which are satisfyingly easy relative to the normal combat and a good break from the normal action.

There are some general problems, however, with the setup.  First, there’s a handful of escort / protection missions, and normally, the person you’re protecting is smart enough to move about, but one case had a person that would stay in the same spot and not even move out of a poison cloud when it was unleashed.  The game does have a few instances of teleporting-in enemies that come at you from behind in a few cases which is always annoying. But probably its worst fault is that is has a couple of sections where you a faced with an endless stream of enemies until you move up towards a point.  This isn’t necessarily as bad as Call of Duty, as they are predictable as they come at you, but you are limited by ammo in these.  What makes these areas difficult is that you get used to completely clearing out foes before moving on, so when you come to these, if you’re not expecting them, you’ll be sitting behind cover for a long time and waiting forever.  Getting through one was particularly tough as it involved several different types of enemies and required different strategies all along.  I don’t mind the Call of Duty approach but it should be done consistently through the game instead of being used selectively as it was here.

Challenge-wise, it’s not a hard game; there’s plenty of checkpoints in most areas (and possibly a few too many in the early game, seemingly to come after each block of alien encounters), and the action is mostly set along linear paths, so you won’t be blindsided or the like. No enemy is really difficult, having pretty standard AI and rarely working together to get you. But I think this is a fair balance in the game, instead of trying to make the game more difficult in addition to having to work over any issues the PSP controls give.

Value/Replayability: B+

The game clocked in for me about 8 hrs, which is a reasonable length, but is nicely consumable in small segments for the PSP.  Like the other Resistance games, there are additional secrets to find: intel scattered about levels, and skill points from the Ratchet & Clank series for completing certain tasks in given manners, which can then be spent to unlock special skins.  Like many PSP games with PS2/PS3 equivalents, you can hook the PSP up to Resistance 2 to unlock a mode where Greyson is infected with the Chimera virus and thus plays more like the first game, with regenerable health and the like.  There is a ad-hoc multiplayer mode for up to 8 players based on the other multiplayer Resistance gameplay modes.  There are a lot of extras here, but from the standpoint of the core game, the single player experience has only a little to go back and get excited about.

Graphics: B+

While certainly nowhere as close to good-looking as the PS3 versions of the games, Retribution certainly looks fine on the PSP and moves at a nice clip.  It still falls into those “brown-grey” games simply due to the source material, so the color palette is a bit drab.  It could have used a bit more spicy in terms of texture variety but not to the point of ruining the experience.

Audio: B+

Most of the game’s sounds and background music are about right, nothing too great, though one helpful aspect is that most of the Chimera you face emit a unique sound when they appear that allows you to prepare for their attack.  The voice work is a better than I’d have expected, as a number of usual video game voice actors have been employed here including Robin Atkin Downes as the voice for Grayson, giving that character some nice touches.

Overall: B+

You may be immediately hesitant of Resistance: Retribution when you think of it as a shooter on the PSP, but this game actually does make it work by moving as much that can be automated or less frequent actions off of the user, and instead trying to mimic a two analog stick approach.  It is a good extension of the Resistance series, capturing its flavor quite well, but not treading too far from its path in terms of gameplay, so it may come to be a bit too “been there, done that” after a while.  It’s still a good effort and worthy of more than a passing glance and gives hope that there’s more that the PSP can do for action-oriented games.

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