Resistance: Burning Skies

Game Info

 We know that the nature of a first-person shooter is to constantly heap endless waves of enemies on top of you but Resistance Burning Skies is already showing some of the ‘powerful’ Vita’s limitations by leaving you with little more than an underwhelming lack of excitement. It’s not quite the showcase you were hoping for on the Vita.

Players take charge of Tom Riley, a firefighter from 1951 that is converted into a Chimera killer when the aliens invade his local town – Staten Island. It’s not long before his family is abducted and leaves him on a mission to rescue his wife and daughter. It’s not like you’ve never encountered this scenario before…

Colour us surprised: It is possible to use the touchscreen effectively in a FPS. In Resistance’s case this means tapping on enemies to lock the Cluster Fire Gun’s homing missiles onto their targets, as well as aiming grenade-throwing arcs with your fingers and unleashing more ‘nades from the carbine’s under-slung launcher. When it comes to weapons it’s quite obvious that Insomniac Games is nowhere to be found as there is nothing new in this department. Sadly the lack of new weapons means that we’re left with a meagre eight weapons: the M5A2 Folsom Carbine, Bullseye, Mauler, Sw.A.R.M, SixEYe, Hunter, Auger and Mule.

The weapon wheel returns as do the upgrades. Rather than have your weapons earn experience as they did in Resistance 3 you can improve your gear by gathering up blue crystals cubes called Grey Tech. This instantly morphs your tools like the chaingun into pulsating gibbing machines. You can increase the magazine capacity, range and each weapon comes with some attributes specially designed with its strengths in mind.

This brings us to the biggest positive – the dual analogue sticks. It’s the first handheld first-person shooter to make use of dual analogue sticks (the 3DS Circle Pad Pro has not yet seen an FPS that utilises it). It works rather well and brings the original console experience to life on the small screen. You will find that you miss the L3 button (clicking the left analogue stick in) to sprint. Instead this function has been moved to the rear touchpad. Double tap it anywhere with one of your fingers and watch Tom bolt out of harm’s way.

One of the problems that plagues Resistance: Burning Skies is the fact that it’s a pretty bland looking game. If the liberal use of a brown and grey palette isn’t enough to leave you in a sombre mood then the fact that it does not look all that much better than what we saw in Resistance Retribution on the PSP will drive the disappointment home. You’ll find certain areas where the textures genuinely do look like something from a PSP game.

Unfortunately the online multiplayer servers were down at the time of writing, so we can’t comment on that aspect of the game. We hope there is enough multiplayer goodness to bring ‘Resistance Retribution+’ from crashing and burning. Somehow though, we doubt it.