Reviews// Resistance: Burning Skies

Out of all the different input controls that the PlayStation Vita has within its mighty frame, Sony is probably proudest of its second analogue stick. It allows for full control in a First-Person Shooter, a genre that has been dumbed down for handhelds in the past. When you add the ‘console quality’ power of the Vita, it’s easy to see why Sony is making a big deal out of Resistance: Burning Skies.

In terms of technical accomplishment and ticking boxes, Nihilistic has done its job exceptionally well. Burning Skies is essentially a console FPS in the palm of your hand. But when you start to compare with other console shooters - and even past Resistance titles - it’s a game that’s lacking in many areas.

The year is 1951, and in this alternate universe the world has been united against a single extra-terrestrial threat - the googly-eyed Chimera with a penchant for destroying the human race. World War II never happened in Resistance - as you would expect, everyone was kind of busy fighting these buggers off in vain.

In Burning Skies, Europe and Russia have completely fallen to the Chimera threat, and now the US is starting to take a battering. Set before Resistance 2 and 3, you play as everyman firefighter Tom Riley, who suddenly becomes very good at shooting weapons when the Chimera attack his town and he decides to protect his family.

Your journey begins with Tom responding to a fire alert in town. Shortly after shit kicks off - discovering that the fire was actually part of the Chimera’s initial US invasion - you escape the burning building and bump into a Resistance fighter. From there, the action almost completely stops and you have to run around a quiet town with her for a little bit, before you’re flung headfirst into more deadly explosions.

The game is full of stop-start, inconsistent pacing like this - you’ll be thrown from quiet corridor to massive gunfight and back again without much warning at all, instead of a slow build-up of increasingly worse scenarios that lead up to a big crescendo at the end. Rather than a captivating story of one man’s plight against an alien army, Burning Skies feels like you’re running through a sequence of isolated arcade shooter areas dressed as a fireman.

When you get to these mad shooting arenas, you’ll be thankful at least for the attention and care that’s been placed on the traditional controls. For the most part, it’s absolutely fine - what you would expect to see on a PlayStation 3 DualShock controller, in fact. L trigger aims, R trigger fires, Cross button jumps, Square reloads, Circle crouches and Triangle brings you the weapons wheel. And the weightiness of the weapons and Riley’s movement is perfect, too.

Where it all kind of falls apart is in the largely arbitrary touch controls. The front touch screen is used for the secondary fire on the eight weapons that can be found in the game, and some can be quite awkward to pull off effectively in the heat of battle. Drawing your thumbs outward from the centre of the screen, with one weapon, will drop a shield in front of you, but it just feels excessive when a button press would have sufficed.

Some of the touch controls do feel intuitive, however. It’s nice to press an axe button on the side of the screen to quickly execute a melee attack, and dragging your finger around the screen to chuck a grenade is better than having to compensate your aim. Double-tapping the rear touch panel will allow you to run, too, although this can be rather fiddly. I’d rather do that, though, than press Down on the D-pad.

The weapons are the real stars of Resistance: Burning Skies. Although in terms of primary fire they’re really not all that inspired - all but three of them are slightly-different types of rifles with varying recoil and rate of fire - their secondary functions really make the game stand out of the FPS pack. The SixEye sniper rifle can land an explosive on a faraway target, the Bullseye rifle can ‘tag’ any enemy and allow your bullets to home in on him, and the Hunter can launch a drone to attack overwhelming numbers of Chimera.

While you do get to enjoy the skirmishes you encounter, with this vast array of weaponry, it all ends far too quickly. Resistance: Burning Skies contains six levels, each about a half hour long (depending on how long you want to spend trundling from one corridor to the next). The levels themselves are of a satisfactory length - although plenty of it feels like filler before the midway point - but there aren’t enough of them and it’s all over once the story actually picks up and you start to care about it.

No doubt the brief nature of the game was down to the development of multiplayer. And although I understand why this is the case (if you’re going to have the first proper FPS ever on a handheld, you better make sure you have all the modes you’d expect to see in a console FPS), in practice multiplayer ironically feels like an afterthought. The usual suspects are here - Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and an ‘infection’ style Survival mode - but the environments are bland and I have had issues with players dropping out of lobbies, as well as lag.

It’s great to see a fully-fledged FPS on a handheld, and for that purpose Resistance: Burning Skies is a revolutionary step forward. But, as a game and an experience, Nihilistic just doesn’t go far enough to make it excite and engage on the same level as its PS3 predecessors.


Pros
+ A true First-Person Shooter on a handheld
+ Fantastic and unique weapons
+ Lovely traditional control scheme, some good touch controls

Cons
- Story isn’t great
- Uninspired Multiplayer
- Stop-start pacing and frustrating set-pieces

SPOnG Score: 6/10