Resistance 2

There's no doubting the scale of this sequel, but does Insomniac's opus get everything right?

	Version PlayStation 3	Developer Insomniac	Publisher SCE	Genre FPS

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But the best place to fool around with Resistance 2's cabinet of oddities is online. Insomniac certainly hasn't skimped on the features, rolling out entirely separate cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes with their own experience systems, level-specific rewards and modes. Of course, most readers will want to hear about the new 60-player Skirmish matches, a hefty step up from the original's already monstrous engagements. The good news is that the team-based system Insomniac has evolved to keep things from devolving into a maelstrom is a success: on signing in, you're split into pairs of five to eight man squads with rival objectives - capturing or defending a beacon, killing a particular player on the other side, and so on.

Completing these objectives and slotting rival team members as opposed to firing willy-nilly gets you additional experience points. The downside of this team structure is that it reduces those colossal engagements, in effect, to a parallel series of discreet, 16-strong matches, making the new technological watermark in player support a tad throwaway. On the whole, though, this is a minor disappointment. Old standbys like deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture-the-control-point modes round out the competitive offering.

The single player loadout is complimented online by "Berserks," special abilities similar to those of Call of Duty 4, which charge up as you take damage and are activated via the D-pad. Some Berserks, like Adrenaline Boost and Ironheart, favour those who like to rush in and single-handedly decimate entire regiments; others, like Leadership and Prototype Ammo, bestow their benefits on nearby team-members. Exciting new varieties become available as you level up, which should keep the majority of players champing at the bit well into the two hundred hours Insomniac estimates it will take you to max out your progression tree. As is de rigueur for online shooting nowadays, you can swap Berserks and weapons when you respawn.

The three to eight player online cooperative campaign tosses out its own distinctive offerings in the form of a trio of upgradeable classes - medic, heavy gun and special ops - and levels with randomised objectives. Certain classes feel a bit insipid at first: the medic, inevitably, gets the short straw with a wishy-washy all-purpose beam weapon which siphons health from the Chimera and piles it onto your partners. But again, each class has multiple upgrades which lend some decent tactical variance. Experience earned with one can be applied to all: you won't have to chug away at a class you dislike to unlock the good stuff.

Resistance 2 co-op is a little untidy, more akin to a top-down party experience like Monster Madness than Bad Company and the like, but easy to get into and very definitely moreish, despite a relatively modest selection of levels and objectives. There are times when you wish Insomniac had thrown in a traditional cooperative mode for the story campaign, but we suspect differentiating the two has allowed them to get the most out of each, both from a technological perspective - there are noticeably more passive environmental animations in the story mode - and in terms of balancing the two templates.

Like the Chimera themselves, Insomniac's second shot at FPS stardom is an odd, at times paradoxical hybrid. It's a mixture of tones and textures, cheery Looney Tunes highlights settling uneasily onto a solemn apocalyptic canvas. Its components (Insomniac's "four Cs" - competitive, cooperative, community and campaign) are practically standalone games in their own right, yoked together only by the backstory and an inventive roster of weapons.

Get over the slight awkwardness of these conjunctions, however, and there's a lot to love. Bullet by bullet, Resistance 2 can teach Halo 3 little about dynamic action and balance, nor does it rival Gears of War for cinematic integrity. But it offers enough variety and subtlety to stand out in an exceptionally crowded field of action game releases, and few titles indeed pack such value for money - there are, if you're determined, hundreds of hours' enjoyment to be had here. In short, it's a tribute to its heritage and the PlayStation 3's finest contribution to the art of first-person gunnery so far.

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