Hands On: Resistance: Burning Skies (PS Vita)

I’m a big fan of the Resistance series – ever since the first game launched alongside the PS3 I’ve had a particular affinity with the Insomniac developed games; their scope, the concept of the invasion, the power and weight of the Chimera. Burning Skies, which is the PS Vita’s first true first person shooter offers up a neat side story to the occupation of the Earth, its story set in New York and focusing on one Tommy Riley, a fireman, husband and father.

Nihilistic’s take on the series doesn’t differ from what we’ve come to expect from a Resistance title, especially of late: character building, a massive range of weaponry and plenty of scripted moments that aim to provide a movie-like experience through the eyes of the main protagonist. In reality, this presents itself as a singular, linear path through the game’s single player mode that holds true to convention whilst splicing in a few touchscreen elements.

[drop]The plot starts off simply – it’s 1951 and a routine call-out to a fire introduces a few of the characters before predictably bringing in the aliens. Time-wise it’s between the first two PS3 games, so just as the US is starting to see the start of the Chimeran invasion, and the locale means that there’s plenty of old school Americana and radio propaganda to plough through as the story quickly gathers pace.

As the population of New York attempts to evacuate to safety, Riley stays behind to assist a rag-tag bunch of soldier-types as they try to hold back the enemy. The action scales up nicely, and although a poorly implemented diversion half way through the second level threatens to spoil the party, the third section improves things massively. Our preview code featured three of what looks like six or seven levels, so probably just under half the single player mode, and took around two hours to get through first time.

You could extrapolate that to roughly estimate a length for the full game, but it’s clear that – hopefully – this isn’t final code and so things might change around a fair bit before release. Although the build isn’t dated as such, there’s a few bugs: at least one rogue apostrophe in the subtitles, a constantly nagging ‘no Wi-Fi’ pop-up, one line of speech that suggested one area is still to be switched around and a serious lack of textures during one large scale cut-scene.

Likewise, although the visuals are much sharper than when we first got hands on time with the game the graphics aren’t up there with the likes of Uncharted: Golden Abyss – the frame rate dives whenever there’s more than a handful of Chimera on screen and some of the environments and characters are rather blocky and lifeless, sadly. Overall it’s not a bad looking game, but it’s not native resolution and it’s not going to blow you away.

The controls, though, work well enough. There’s an oddity where the horizontal aiming is about four times as quick as the vertical (and there’s only an overall sensitivity slider) but once you get used to it the twin stick setup is absolutely fine, confirming that the Vita will be great for this genre of game. Left trigger is used to aim, the right one to fire, down on the d-pad sprints, X is jump, Circle is crouch and Square reloads. The weapon wheel is back, too, which is triggered with Triangle.

Secondary fire is activated with the touch screen, and each weapon (including some cool new ones like the crossbow with napalm) has its own method of tapping, holding or swiping. The Carbine’s grenade launcher just needs a tap on the screen to aim the explosive, for example, but the Bullseye asks you to tap and hold over an enemy to tag and lock onto it. Time normally slows whilst you do this with most weapons, so it’s not really a big deal given the lack of dual triggers on the Vita.

[drop2]What’s cool, though, is the new way the Gray Tech element of the series’ storyline is used, which is introduced early on here via a cutscene and from there manifests as small cubes that you can collect. Each weapon can have two cubes integrated into it, and each augments the vital statistics of the gun, such as improving the reload time, increasing the range or upping the damage. It’s a neat feature and one that might promote repeated play as players experiment with the limited stock.

Burning Skies – as you’d expect – looks and feels like a Resistance game. The fact that it’s running on the Vita is less of a factor after we’ve seen what the system can do in the hands of other developers, but that’s not to take anything away from what Nihilistic have done here with the machine’s first such game. With a few tweaks to the aiming (and an option to use the gyro when zoomed in, please) it’ll be mostly a niggle-free experience with few bad qualities.

Sure, we’d have liked the game to look a little bit fancier and perhaps have found a way to dial up the scale of the invasion (you’re rarely fighting more than a smattering of Chimera at a time) but the action’s swift enough and there’s certainly no padding or boring bits in the fifty percent of the single player we’ve played. There’s a certain amount of promise in where the game’s going, too, and so we’re looking forward to seeing what happens to Riley down the line.

Our build appeared to have the full multiplayer portion, but it was locked behind an Online Pass key, which SCEE were unable to supply just now. We’ll hopefully be able to come back to the multiplayer before release, but Burning Skies features eight player online options across six maps (presumably one based on each of the single player areas) and three modes – deathmatch, team deathmatch and one more that Sony are going to reveal next week.

Resistance: Burning Skies is released on the 1st of June.