Resistance 2 - enough reason to get a PS3

If first person shooters are kind of games, Sony's exclusive Resistance 2, out this Friday, is reason alone to justify the expense of a PS3 for Christmas.

It's a fast-paced and somewhat gory epic that has more than ten hours of play and is simply hard to fault as a shooter.

Created by the highly reputable Insomniac Studio, this sequel picks up immediately from the developer's launch PS3 title Resistance: Fall of Man. The moment you load the game, the action is full-on against a dramatic San Francisco landscape with alien ships hovering and the orange glow from fires reflecting in the steel machinery of the Chimeran Goliaths.

This time the battles are bigger, the pace ramped up a notch and the graphic quality and environment far grander and there's even a new eight-player co-op just to keep everyone happy.

More urgent than ever is mankind's fight against the alien Chimera and to thwart their attempts at taking over the US. You are charged with madly defending cities of millions of survivors as you become a ticking time bomb with your biological clock set to expire. If you're new to the series, get the

background here

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Before you know it, hours have passed as you do battle amidst urban cityscapes that must be modelled off real places in the States, as well as the odd trip into the countryside. There is no time to relax as you switch from one threat to another.

The game feels smooth, plays fast, everything feels big. The boss battles are epic. You have more action and teamwork is a must over the original. Combatting hordes of newly-hatched Chimera and invisible beasts it's best to use nice new weapons like the splicer to carve up the fiends. Bigger monsters require a LARK.

See screenshots

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below for the ridiculous 300-ft monster you take on:

It took me - in the highly impressive single-player campaign - about 12 hours to finish and in the process I travelled all over the ravaged landscapes of the country, fighting various types of the cunning aliens who show no mercy until they take you down.

The plot thickens in the Chimeran story, describing the birth of the Chimera anew, but takes a backseat to the action. There is no narrator but voice acting and sound are most impressive.

The somewhat glorified weapons include the overhauled carbine and bullseye as the main weapons, while there are new effective tools that include a rifle that has an electric pulse which drains health and the Spider Grenade that sets alight a wide area, plus larger weapons like Gatling guns. Every weapon has an alternate fire.

If you want online, there's great news. Co-op will be a big attraction for many gamers with the mode enabling up to 60 players. There's Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Core Control (think capture the flag). In Skirmish, you are part of a squad with changing objectives leading to smaller confrontations,

Myresistance.net

is an FPS community with skill-based match-ups, dedicated gaming / community / stats servers, using social networking tools and an open invite system.

MadGamer rating: 9.5 / 10

So many good games all at once. What are you playing?