Dom Robinson reviews

Distributed by
Sony

Price: £24.99 Players: 1-online Widescreen: Yes Vote and comment on this game: View Comments In Resistance: Retribution, which is set inbetween PS3 titles Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2, neither of which I've played as I don't have a PS3, you play the role of ex-British marine, James Grayson, whose brother becomes infected by something nasty at the Chimera conversion centre, leaving you with no choice but to kill him and then desert your troops. Ergo, you're thrown in jail for a few months. Then along comes Raine Bouchard, requesting your help with the resistance, since you have a history for destroying many of these conversion centres. She has a serum which stops the conversion process of good guys turning into gross baddies and, thus, you are now working for Operation Overstrike. Well, it beat sitting in chokey for the rest of your life. The basic premise is for you to go over to Paris to topple their tower, via Luxembourg. Well, that was the plan until your plan is turned into chunks of flaming metal and you have to parachute out. Your mission is about to get infinitely more difficult from the enemy... Well, that's the idea, but the truth is that with liberal sprinklings of ammo and health, this game is just a case of "hold down your fire button, reload automatically when empty, continue firing without having taken finger off fire button, watch baddies fall over and die". Zzzzz.... It's a royal pain that you haven't got a second thumbstick as you need one to both move about and also one to turn and aim. As a result, you rely on the auto-aim function to get you through each level and then it becomes too easy, especially when the baddies just stand and let you pump a zillion bullets into them. This is a great shame, as the PSP could really do with a class shooter, but due to the constraints of what it needs to do, this one won't be it. If I could make some good points about Resistance: Retribution, it would be that your torch automatically comes on in darkness, and that the game gets a bit more tolerable as you progress, but it's still not great. In fact, Grayson's bang on the money when he curses, "Just shoot yourself and save some time"

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.