The Playstation Move/Sharpshooter/Resistance 3—A Review in Progress

Well, we can’t just talk about my litigation all the time and I like to put up something frivolous on a Friday, so... how about a game controller and game review?  After all, let’s face it, I did have a need for stress relief...  And after I post this, I will get to work on the exhibits post. 

Now first, let me get out of the way that this is not the case of anyone sending me anything for free to review.  I had to spend my hard earned money on this, just like anyone else.

As you saw in a prior post, I got the Playstation Move Mayhem Bundle, which came with two first person shooters, a full kit for the Playstation Move (more or less their version of Wii controls), and the sharpshooter.  The sharpshooter was what got me excited.  I had tried a number of gun-shaped toys for the Wii, but bluntly none of them worked right.  All they typically did was pull the trigger, forcing you to reach up to the top of the “gun” in order to do anything else.  So when playing Metriod Prime Trilogy I was stuck using the normal Wii set up.

But the sharpshooter is a little more bad-@$$ed than that.  Watch this video to get an idea of it:

So I got the bundle and I am a one-game at a time kinda guy, so I settled into Resistance 3.  I had followed this series from the beginning, considering the original to be the best of the series, with the second being a bit of a stumble as they tried to be too much like Halo and other shooters.  For instance, in one of the most criminal acts of the series, Insomniac, which is known for creating awesome and insane weapons, limited you to two weapons at a time.  Yes, I guess that is more realistic (like as if any first person shooter was realistic), but what is the fun of creating about 20 awesome weapons if you only can carry two at a time?

I think then it was the very awesome Resistance: Retribution on the PSP that taught the series to be itself again.  While they did transform the game from a first person shooter to a third-person, cover-based shooter, back were several elements I loved from the original—the ridiculously massive amount of guns carried on you at all times, the faux-documentary style and so on—that they captured, all while giving you a more likeable main character.  While there is not attempt to revive the faux-documentary element, is it just me, or does the new hero of the story, Joseph Capelli, look an awful lot like James Grayson?

Here’s Capelli:

And here’s Grayson:

And not only does it invoke in some ways this PSP game, but they manage to make the character more relatable.  Nathan Hale started off as a pretty normal soldier, so there was some connection, but by the second game he is a bad-assed super soldier who is solely losing his mind to the Chimera (the villains of this series), which is kind of hard to relate to.  Capelli, by comparison, after being somewhat unlikeable as a side character in Resistance 2, wins you over with the depiction of a family man who is forced to fight once more.

And yes, the gameplay gives you back all your weapons at once, which is nice.  And they even add, for an insane extra element, the ability to level up your weapons.  This is a direct rip off of a mechanic in most of the Ratchet and Clank games, and while it makes absolutely no scientific sense...  it still rocks.  Basically your guns get better the more you shoot them, which is kind of the opposite of reality.

Which is all well and interesting, I hear you say, but how does it play with the sharpshooter.

Very well, actually.

Now, first get out of your head the idea that you are going to just point at the screen like as if it is a gun and what is in your sights you will hit.  Nope, that ain’t gonna happen.  It just doesn’t line up your shot all that well.  I always find it pulls a little to the right.

But still if you think of it as a way to control the cross hairs of the gun...  yes, it works really well.  You ain’t going to aim down the sight of the gun like a real gun, but you can use it as a convenient way to control the crosshairs, and for that, it works extremely well.  I found myself running out from behind cover, zooming in with a sniper rifle and shooting an enemy sniper before he could take a shot at me, in no time—something that was always difficult when using a traditional controller.

And it all feels pretty dang good.  When you want to reload, for instance, you pull back on the slider holding the navigation controller.  Your zoom button is well placed, so you can easily and constantly zoom in on your targets.

Some things did not work so well.  For instance, its awkward trying to change different grenade types, making it hard to really use grenades.  By comparison in the original, I was tossing them left and right.  And jumping, was just plain hard.  The jump button was underneath the joystick on the navigation controller which controlled your character’s movement, making it almost impossible to make your character jump as he or she moved, without taking your hand off the trigger.  Fortunately, having gotten pretty far into the single-player game, I have never had to jump in any pressured situation, so I don’t mind it very much.

More serious is the fact that in the trade off it is just harder to turn your character’s body.  It might in part be a matter of getting used to things, but I find I can never get the camera to point exactly where you want it to be.  And if you have a creature smacking you from behind, it can be a challenge to wheel around quickly enough to deal with it.  But the designers of the game were smart enough not to make that happen too often.

Still, on balance, I am really enjoying it.  Will this render me spoiled for controller-based FPS’s?  I doubt it.  But it is a much better experience and if Microsoft was smart, they would be ripping them off, as soon as possible.

Of course I haven’t even finished the game yet, and have not yet ventured onto multi-player.  So this review is not yet complete.  But so far, I am liking all of it, and genuinely addicted.

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