my mini review.

First off, it did online multiplayer very very right.

The co-op is rewarding, fairly deep, a blast to play, and like games such as diablo and Phantasy star online, it's addicting as hell. Grinding by yourself=boring, grinding against seven strangers yelling profanity in languages you aren't sure exist=a good way to spend a saturday night. It's frantic, it's tactical, it's fun.

The competetive is also fantastic. While the capture the flag and deathmatch aren't anything breathtaking (they are fun though), the skirmish mode is a stroke of genius. It takes what would be a chaotic death/respawn fest involving 60 players, into a tight goal oriented, intense play mode. You really feel like you're part of a squad participating in a larger conflict, and it's a blast to play. I only wish I could find more skirmish matches online.

What it didn't do right (see also:What it did wrong)

It turned the single player campaign into COD4 with aliens. The original resistance had refreshing and intelligent mechanics. They changed two very important aspects that ruined the single player campaign. And a couple of smaller things that really should've stayed.

Big thing 1: Instead of what had become the standard "two gun system" seen in Halo, COD and alot of other FPSs, you could actually hold every gun you found ala older FPS games such as Turok and Quake. This made new weapons an event, and you became very close to your guns. Further more it gave you a reason to search every corner of a stage for ammo and new weapons you might find early. It also provided ALOT more freedom, thought and strategy when approaching a tricky situation. You fall into a situation where there are 20 chimera and you think "Ok, I've got 3 shots in my far eye, I'll take out those on the bridge. I've got plenty of ammo for my bullseye but no tags, so I'll skip it. Do I want to really use a rocket for this? No, I've only got two...Auger...definately going with auger", you got to choose how you would respond to different situations. Now it's the standard two gun system. They give you whatever gun they think you need, and if you want to keep it, too bad you'll run out of ammo as soon as you finish the situation you used it in and pick up a different gun. No thought necessary, no choice needed, no reason to explore they will hand you what you need moments before you need it. You also used to earned new weapons by playing through the game more than once...you can forget that incentive too.

Big thing 2: The first resistance took a new staple and improved it. The shield system. In Resistance 1 you had a health bar divided into 4 segments. If a segment wasn't depleted, it would regenerate, but if your health fell below that segment and into the next, you would need a health pack to heal it (yet another reason to explore, get those health packs). It was a brilliant stroke, and the best of both worlds and then some. Cover was still a necessity to use to it's fullest, but you could take enough abuse for run and gun encounters with large enemies, or taking a chance in crazy situations. Your goal was always to minimize the damage taken, and made each mistake count while being forgiving enough that you didn't die in 4 hits so you could experiment, and also you had to manage your health pack count and always keep an eye out for them.

 The new standard is no health bar, no health packs, and waaay less health. 4-5 shots from a bullseye mark 2 and you're dead. 3 shots from one of the big guys with a green shield and your dead, 1-2 hits from a titan and you're dead. Full health recovery and very low health. It slows down the pace of the game drastically as you have to stop and heal, then pop you head up, shoot somebody, stop and heal, ad naseum. You are often stuck trying desperately just to hide and let the other sentinals clear out some of the mess until you can actually stand up for two seconds without dying. It also turns alot of it into trial and error. Proceed forward, 2 guys with shields bust out of some rocks, you turn and run and are promptly gunned down before you can get to cover. Try again, this time proceed slowly, and run to cover as soon as the rock explosion animation begins. Enter new room, get shot to death before you can find cover. Enter again, head straight for cover, kill the guys, next wave of guys comes from behind you, die before you realize what's going on, start again. And forget about going man to man with Titans, or shielded drones or other large foes. R1, you can actually circle around them, take some hits, work them with a shotgun, hide for a second, get behind them, and duke it out. Now you die so quickly it turns fights like that into trial and error too. Learning when and where they come from, where you can hide, where do you run next after they walk right up to your hiding place, how do you get to that hiding place without getting killed by his buddies, so on and so forth. And after four or five deaths you'll figure it out the exact route and pattern to defeat the big guy and it's alot less satisfying when you do.

The lack of vehicular parts is forgivable, but still feels like they took something away when they should have been adding. Which really seems like the name of the game with the single player. It is less than the first game in just about every way except graphics. They stripped the single player mode of everything that made the first one stand out in the crowd. The fight with the leviathan in chicago is the only part that I can think of being worth the price of admission in the single player, and that too is a matter of trial and error gameplay, it could've been handled alot better.

Luckily it is rescued by an incredible online multiplayer. I would give it a numerical score, but that seems so arbitrary and unnecessary. Besides I'm sure I've given people enough to bitch at without the need of decimal places. It's a great game, but it's marred by the butchering of it's single player campaign into something barely recognizable as Resistance. Still definately worth a purchase, but you might not even feel like finishing the lackluster campaign when you could be spending your time in the awesome multiplayer modes.

yup i agree with you about the two weapon system, and health thingy. Its a bit of a bummer they added that. But i guess the health bar change had to do with Hale being more powerfull this time around (or enhanced, something like that)

Anyway i'll be getting this game when it releases.

Resistance sucked holy balls, so this is actually good new to me. The more shooters like cod4, the better.

Hahahaha!!!

The The_Vagabond 7 dude wrote his 500 words OP and you just understood this?

Holy hell... Are you doing this constantly? I guess so. That's a fact that I should have in mind from now on when I see you flooding the threads...

On topic. Played the R2 single player campaign ONLY.

Boring. And the boss fights? Better off non existent.

Did amazing: Multilplayer

Did good: Campaign

Did wrong: nothing

Just because the campaign isn't amongst the greatest ever, doesn't mean the game itself isn't great. For those who focus on multiplayer, this game is probably a little better than Gears 2, in that respect. :P