Archive for April, 2009

Recently I bought Resistance 2 because Insomniac finally fixed the problem with player two’s progress not being saved. So now my friend Steve and I can play co-op splitscreen, and his progress will be saved to his PSN account. That’s pretty cool. Well, except for the fact that our characters aren’t actually leveling up. We’ve leveled up from level 2 to level 2 several times already. Grrrrr.

That’s not the point of these rambling words, though.

Yesterday I tried the online multiplayer mode again, which I haven’t played since I originally rented the game. I played for quite a bit on the Chicago level. But man, I can’t believe people play 10 rounds of this at a time! It took forever! So much so that I didn’t have the time to finish the game. I have to remember to filter out these long games next time. I forget what the mode was called, but our team had to control certain nodes on the map.

There’s one overarching problem with this game, or maybe just this mode in particular. I have no idea what’s going on. Sure, I can see which nodes we control and which nodes we don’t control by looking at the map. But beyond that, it was total confusion.

I think that I have a lot to learn about how R2 works. I had played R1, and thought that this would prepare me for R2, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I was left in the dark about a lot of things, and maybe it’s just a steeper learning curve. Here are some examples:

1. At one point we lost a node and therefore I spawned at a different node the next time. This was confusing, because I don’t remember being informed of the lost node.
2. Supposedly I was placed in a squad of five people, with whom I would work to achieve an objective? Is that so? Because it pointed out my squadmates when I first entered the game. But after that, I had no indication of being in a squad at all.
3. This is one of the most frustrating one I encountered: I would often die for no discernible reason. Obviously someone was shooting me, or I was on fire, or something. But situational awareness in this game is terrible. Sometimes I was hiding in what I thought was a very good spot to give my health a chance to recover, but someone obviously still saw me and shot me, and I had no idea who. Then afterward it would show the enemy wandering around, but of course that doesn’t help any. It might as well have been a randomly chosen enemy for all the context of the kill that it gave me.
4. Eventually the game told me that the enemy was 50 points away from winning. Okay. I had no idea why. Were they accumulating points per second for every node they owned? I didn’t notice any indication of the enemy’s progress versus our team’s. There probably is an indicator on screen. I just didn’t see it. I’ll have to look next time.
5. At the end of one round it gave me some stats. Including the fact that I earned NO experience points for that round. There were several stats, actually. I forget what all the stats were for, but they were all zero. Why am I playing my heart out killing all these enemies only to get zero points?

I’ll give this game another chance, but it’s tough. Frankly, I’ve always hated snipers, and this game is infested with them. My preferred method of play is a straight shootout between two enemies. Not some dude perched on a roof a mile away picking you off as you spawn.

I was fifth out of 20 on my team (16th overall, which tells you how bad our team was doing). So I wasn’t bad at killing people that I actually saw. It was those roof snipers (I guess) and air fuel grenades (I guess) that kept catching me unawares.

So there’s a little bit of frustration off my chest. Maybe I’ll go back to some KZ2, which I like a lot better, before giving R2 another chance.