If you were one of the (supposedly) few people who decided to queue up for your brand new PlayStation 3 console this past Friday morning, chances are that you’ll have enjoyed some friendly banter with anyone else present about your choice of launch titles. In the unlikely event that you were able to afford more than a few given the weighty price tag of the machine itself, general press mumblings and feedback from the gaming community over the large pond just west of Ireland seemed to settle on two games that every new PS3 owner should take home with them on day one: MotorStorm and Resistance: Fall Of Man.

Unlike MotorStorm, Resistance’s position as a must-have title always seemed a little off to me. Early experiences with the game at the back end of last year gave me the impression that, despite being enjoyable and well presented, it was nothing more than a reasonably good shooter. Was a prolonged session spent running through the game’s PAL release enough to change my mind? In all honesty, no it wasn’t. Sorry to have ruined the suspense a half-dozen paragraphs early, but let me explain myself.

Fall Of Man is set in an alternate portion of history, with a brutal alien race known as the Chimera sweeping across Europe at the turn of the 1950s. Despite Britain’s best efforts it is finally overrun too, which is the trigger for America to once again (sigh) come to the rescue, all guns blazing and the like. The player is given the part of Nathan Hale, an otherwise normal American army recruit who is suddenly thrown to the very forefront of a war on the very brink of being lost.

The story and presentation aren’t the game’s problem. In fact, the plot is really quite interesting and the gentle twists and turns as Hale rampages across the midlands are genuinely worth playing through to see. The voice acting and music score generally back the whole thing up very well indeed and you’ll even probably forgive the fact that once again the Brits are supposed to always say ‘bloody hell!’ and talk as if we’ve just got back from a tea and scones party on the village green.

The main problem that Resistance has is that the sections between storytelling - i.e. the actual game - struggles to ever become anything other than a by-the-numbers first-person shooter. The first level promises much when you are thrown into battle with no health drops and no recharging energy bars, leaving you to employ some stealthy old-school FPS tactics to progress, but soon enough and without any sort of explanation at all the health packs and recharging energy bars come back, and along with it the same run, shoot and hide-whilst-recharging method of progress.

It’s made all the more of a shame by the fact that the enemy AI has actually been given plenty of variables to give you a run for your money on even the easier difficulties. Even the basic Chimera grunts dodge for cover and wait for you to show yourself before coming out with their guns firing, leaving you to dodge for scattered debris and scenery to save yourself an early death. It’s certainly no Rainbow Six: Vegas, but it’ll still give you more than a bit to think about at various points.
All this takes place amongst the shattered ruins of English towns. If you ever wondered what Nottingham, Manchester or Grimsby (!) would look like if they had been trashed by marauding packs of beasties (or in Bristol’s case more trashed) then Resistance ably answers your questions, with typically British architecture dotted around in various stages of disrepair. One thing you can’t level at Resistance is the attention to detail and the graphical prowess it displays.

Sadly, the way in which you weave through these crumbling cityscapes is vastly linear, leaving little room for exploration. Early levels in particular see you progressing through what are in effect long, narrow sections of town scattered with enemies. There’s even a tank section chucked into proceedings for good measure, although again it only consists of travelling along a pretty defined route to the end of the level.

Now, linearity is obviously not always a bad thing. Gears of War chucked the player at the start of a level and then allowed him to progress through a pretty narrow network of choice from start to finish. What Gears managed that Resistance doesn’t, though, were all those satisfying set pieces and epic fire fights that made you forget you had been funnelled along the level to that point. Whilst Fall Of Man certainly does have its moments, many times you are left expecting some kind of epic gun battle with a whole host of enemies, only to find the screen blurring and the level ending.

As with any game of this ilk, it’s the multiplayer modes that will extend the lifespan far beyond the end of the main quest. There’s the option to play through the single player mode with a friend via co-operative splitscreen, although unfortunately the mode hasn’t made it online. Thankfully, what is available online is a selection of deathmatch maps of various size to keep you and up to 39 other people fragging to your heart’s content. The action is particularly frantic in the classic deathmatch modes, although a couple of territorial modes similar to Battlefield have been chucked into the mix for a hefty slice of team-based fun.

Despite all this, you can’t help but feel that Fall Of Man falls below the hype that surrounds it. It’s that expectation of more that’s probably Resistance’s biggest problem. The feeling that the game is about to properly kick into life persists pretty much right the way through the quest, and despite some rather more epic moments you are left with the feeling that it never really hits its stride. It’s not that there’s anything vastly wrong with it; rather, it’s the impression that it’s a game that has borrowed a few bits from a number of other first-person shooters and does a reasonable yet unspectacular job of putting them together. If this is as good a reason to buy a PS3 as people can come up with, it’s hard not to recommend that perhaps people save their money.