“Do you want to review Resistance 2 this month?” was the message I received from Lewis. “Yes I do. After playing MySims, I need a proper game to play, with guns and blood and viruses in it. If I don't, I may end up wearing cardigans,” should have been my reply.

Resistance 2 follows on from pretty much the exact point that the last game finished. The aliens are still invading, you’re still infected with the alien virus and things are generally not looking good for the human race at all. But what you do have to help you out of this tricky situation are guns. Loads of guns.

And boy, are they fun to use. Each weapon comes with a helpful secondary function. These range from shields, to a detonator for your explosive rounds, to homing bullets. It’s all very exciting. Then there's the bosses. And they're fantastic. Giant fish with vaginas for mouths that spray poison breath at you; monsters that are so huge, they tower above the surrounding skyscrapers... it just makes you giddy to see what the game is going to throw at you next.



I think I can safely say that this is the finest looking game I've seen on the PS3 so far. There's a point in Resistance 2 where you emerge from an underground base in San Francisco and see the full extent of the alien invasion for the first time. It’s breathtaking. The attention to detail makes you stop playing for a moment, just to take in the view. I cant remember the last time I was so taken in by the visuals in a video game (actually, the last time that happened was the first time I played Halo and noticed the grass actually resembled real grass. Don't let that take anything away from the previous statement though – it’s very impressive). With the mix of the 1950s setting and alien technology, there's almost a feel of BioShock in some of the areas.

It's not all mouth and no trousers either – the main one-player campaign is great to play through, and you do end up getting quite involved with what's going on. There are more than enough moments to get you thinking ‘Shit... something’s gonna happen now, and it’s gonna be really, really bad,’ causing you to sit up in your chair, and prepare for a seemingly never- ending swarm of aliens. Or another fish/vagina hybrid.

Insomniac did drop a bit of an average-sized bollock, though, by not including a two-player split-screen co-op campaign, like the original Resistance had. What you get instead, however, is the on-line co-op mode. Here, players choose one of three classes (special op, soldier or medic) and join up with seven other people to complete objectives and generally blow the crap out of everything. I'm still saddened by the removal of the split screen mode, though, and although the online co-op works very well, I would have liked to see both included.



So the campaign modes all look good. How about the competitive multiplayer? Well, there are some nice little surprises in here too. Along with the usual deathmatch and capture the flag, we have skirmish, where the entire server is split into teams of five and given objectives to complete, which may clash with the other team’s objectives. Bearing in mind that up to 60 players can be connected to the same server - a first for any PS3 game - this can prove to be very interesting indeed.

So then, given all that, you may think that Resistance 2 could become one of the PS3’s flagship games. Well, not entirely. See, as good as the game is, there's something missing, that certain (I hate to use this next phrase) ‘X-factor’ that turns a good game into an amazing one. Once you finish the single-player campaign and all the twists in the story have been revealed, there's no real urge to go back and start again on a higher difficulty level. And yes, the multiplayer works very well, and having 30-a-side wars is very impressive. But it just isn't done as well as, say, Call of Duty, which has more or less become the benchmark series for multiplayer first-person shooting on next-gen consoles. Maybe I'm being a little bit harsh, but I wanted Resistance 2 to be amazing. I'll just have to settle for ‘very good’.

Oh, and don't believe any 360 fanboy that tells you that Resistance 2 is rubbish. They’re just jealous it’s better than Gears of War 2 (Oooooh! Martin won't be pleased... – Lewis).