Resistance 2

Resistance had its fair share of critics. Consider the following statement: “Few knew who this Sergeant Nathan Hale was, why the American soldier with an impossibly generic face had muscled into Britain’s fight for survival against the Chimera menace. Or why it was thought a workable idea for him to be described in the third-person throughout a first-person game.”

No, that’s not a quote from Captain Rachel Parker, the distancing voice of exposition from Resistance: Fall of Man. It’s just our way to point out how lame her inclusion was and why, in Resistance 2, her absence is just one of many brilliant changes that are set to make the sequel stand head and shoulders above the original. It’s going to be bigger to the point of qualifying as ‘vast’, deeper than a French poet drunk on laudanum and more social than an STD. And at last, the cookie-cutter hero, the infected American soldier Hale, will finally get to defend his own country after being overpaid and over-sexed (well, probed by aliens).

Resistance 2 starts just after the original ended. Nathan Hale, a man seemingly named by machines designed to grind out action movie hero monikers, had fought through the Chimera invasion of Britain. He’d rescued Parker, been abducted and tested on, and had escaped from an alien processing facility after being tainted with an alien infection that enabled him to recharge his health. The single-player campaign ended with him surrounded by sinister masked agents who abducted him by helicopter and flew him to a secret base in Iceland.

Thankfully a plot device has been used in which Hale’s chopper is shot down, enabling him to make his way back to the United States where he joins up with the American resistance and settles into a special unit of hard nuts known as The Sentinels. The game is set in a past where World War II never happened, since mankind has been too busy dealing with aliens to beat on each other. Without Hitler’s rise to power there was no Union-free country for an America ravaged by the great depression to invest in either. Consequently, the Fifties’ USA that Hale returns to isn’t the opulent, future-looking postcard from history you’d expect, but rather one that has never recovered from financial ruin.Two years after Britain falls, it’s invaded from the East and West coasts by massive alien airships packed with otherworldly firepower and a seemingly incessant horde of Chimera.

Middle America is going to get a taste. America’s geography offers some notable differences to Britain’s. It features expansive areas of woodland, mountain ranges and deserts as well as gargantuan cities - and Resistance 2 sees Hale battling through a gamut of them with his first bout of homeland action taking place in San Francisco.