Resistance: Fall of Man (2006)

Outside of a few really strange button-mapping choices, this is a pretty timeless shooter. Some of the scenarios are still genuinely exciting, the enemy AI is competent, and the campaign is longer than I remember.

I absolutely cannot stand the way the reload works when you're aiming down the sights, though. The extra second it takes to automatically snap back into the zoomed-in view leaves me open to so much additional gunfire, I just stopped using it altogether. I forget if the second game is the same way, but I certainly hope not.

Got in the mood to play this for whatever reason, and it hooked me again. The graphics are nothing to brag about anymore like they were when it first came out, but the enemy designs and AI hold up really well. I just played through the section where you're going through the streets, and suddenly the Hybrid comes crashing through the shop window. It may not have been intentional, but it took me right back to that moment in the original Resident Evil when the dog comes crashing through the mansion window. Good stuff.

To HELL with those pulse mines though.

Resistance: Fall of Man definitely shows its age. The control mapping is very reminiscent of the PS2 and Killzone days. Switching to iron sights triggers a clunky camera snap and there's no toggle crouch. But hey, it's 17 years old!

I love that this game is from a generation where games had that no nonsense kind of attitude and instead of giving you copious amounts of back story and build up through various missions, it throws you straight into the heat of the action right from the get go. What's going on? who knows... I'm sure we'll find out at some point.

What really impressed me were the physics - meleeing objects can cause crates to break open, bodies move around, and can we please talk about the glass shattering? Shooting a window makes it crack and chip off in places , meleeing the window pits a hole in the glass with cracks running throughout the rest of the window... I don't know why but the glass stole the show for me haha