Resistance: Burning Skies

Resistance: Burning Skies is a hard game to review. It’s the first and (at present) only first-person shooter available on the Vita, which automatically makes it both the best and worst FPS on the platform. It also makes it difficult to compare. Is it fair to compare it to the PS3 Resistance games, with all the extra grunt that the PS3 has?

The story, such as it is, throws you into the role of a fireman attending a fire, wielding little more than your trusty fire axe. Of course, it soon turns out that the fire was started by crash landing Chimeran pods, and the burning factory is overrun with critters. Quick as a  flash, the humble fireman nails a Chimera with his axe, grabs its alien weapon and before you can say “Gordon Freeman” is wielding it and several others expertly. There’s a bit more to it than that, but primarily you go from location to location with getting back to the family you are parted from at the start as your motivation.

Of course, playing most first-person shooters for the story is like watching porn movies for the dialogue, so how does the shooting work on the PS Vita’s twin stickettes? Surprisingly well, actually. Moving and shooting in different directions feels good, and the touch screen is used as a way of activating secondary fire, grenades and the “I keep this handy for close encounters” fire axe. There’s a decent covering mechanism which works well, and everything is solid.

There in lies the problem with Resistance: Burning Skies. It is decent, but not exceptional. Everything works, and it would be a lie to say it was a bad game, but it just doesn’t feel all that special. In terms of graphics, it compares unfavourably to Vita versions of other PS3 games (Wipeout 2048, Uncharted Golden Abyss). Again, it doesn’t look terrible, just OK. There’s also a bit of a lack of “boss” monsters. I think there were only two that were bigger than a van (which is officially the size a boss must be, or bigger) and one was super easy, while the other, the final boss, was a near-invincible cheap bastard that kills you with one hit. That wouldn’t be so bad if you then didn’t go back to before 20 seconds of dialogue and running down a pointlessly long corridor every time it happened.

Like all the Resistance games, the weapons are one of the big highlights here, with a range of interesting ones. New for this title is an explosive crossbow mounted on top of a shotgun and a rocket launcher that you lock on to enemies with the touchscreen. Other guns returning from previous games also work well with the touchscreen, such as dragging two thumbs to drop a shield from the cover-penetrating Auger weapon, or tapping a target to tag it with the homing Bullseye rifle.

There’s also a complement of multiplayer modes, which feels incredibly novel on a handheld machine, but appeared to lack the X factor that all great first person shooters somehow have. I also found that, although fine in single player, the sticks didn’t seem to be responsive enough for the twitch gaming of the multiplayer. That comment, however, comes with a huge caveat, which is that everyone else seem to have no problem at all killing me, so perhaps I was just being a noob.