I finished "Mirror's Edge" this weekend and played most of the single-player campaign of "Resistance 2."
The former was a breath of fresh air. It is as much a success as "flOw" in training players to control a game in a smooth meditative move-chaining state. It just ended a bit abruptly.
The latter game, "Resistance 2," is much more fun than I expected, given the thrashing I heard its campaign receive a couple of 1upyours podcasts ago. I was expecting the campaign to be disappointing. It's not. While it's not sparkling with new ideas, it is, like many games from development studio Insomniac, a triumph of artwork and engineering. Visually, it's a stunner and it plays smoothly, a first-person shooter with an unending horde of impressive enemies through which to shoot and crunch.
There is plenty that Insomniac can do better with a third game, but I was struck when starting "Resistance 2" this weekend by how much they, like most development studios, are victims to comparisons they cannot control. New games must suffer from the fact that they are released alongside other new games. This issue afflicts "Resistance 2." For me, that made "Grand Theft Auto IV" seem a little less free-wheeling and fun because I happened to be wrapping up the free-wheeling and fun "Super Mario Galaxy" when I started Rockstar's drama. In the case of "Resistance 2," the fact that I came to it just after finishing "Mirror's Edge" made the standard FPS control of my character in Insomniac's game feel sluggish.
In a post "Mirror's Edge" world I now want my FPS characters to be able to really run. I want them to make a leap at a chain link fence and clamber over it. I want to push forward on the left analog stick and feel momentum take over. "Resistance" hero Nathan Hale may not be a free-runner, but a soldier should have better agility than he exhibits. I want my character's eyeline to turn before their body turns, rather than the whole thing swivel like a robot torso. And in a post "Gears of War 2" world, I don't want to have to take cover without being able to snap to it and duck out to pick my shots.
It's unfair to compare a new game to the other new games that were being made at the same time. The developers of holiday game A can't really be expected to have absorbed the lessons already from holiday games B and C. But these comparisons are the easiest and most likely ones for me and other gamers to make. It's a bitter lesson all studios must have absorbed by now, that a team can spend its energy improving the model it previously made while never quite knowing what the competition is about to unveil elsewhere on the showroom floor.
All that said, team Insomniac has got to know that their "Resistance" Bullseye gun still isn't as cool or functional as the "Perfect Dark" CMP150, which is now eight years old. Laster-tagging and auto-shooting multiple targets beats tagging and shooting just one. Where's the progress there?
Next: I expect to finish "R2" tonight and then give "Spider-Man: Web of Shadows" a try. Is it worth it?
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