Aesthetically there is a marked improvement over the original game. Insomniac did a sterling job with the original game, a release title for a new technology many developers were apparently claiming was too difficult to work with. In the two years since that, it's turned around a game that looks very much better with a lot more going on - basically, bigger, better-looking battles in larger battlefields.
Things can start off hectically; say a dozen soldiers versus a couple of dozen Hybrids. In come some advanced Hybrids, then the airborne Hunter drones followed by several Stalkers. Mayhem doesn't begin to describe things.
When the shit hits the fan in
Resistance 2, it's thick, fast and in lustrous high detail. From afar you get wide, open vistas; the sky dominated by huge Chimera battle ships; the land by gargantuan Goliaths and dozens of opposing infantry. Get down to the level of extreme close-up and zoom in on an enemy corpse, the texture detail is right down to the pores on the Chimeran skin.
In the many wet areas, the water not only looks right - clear sea or murky swamp; submerged objects convincingly distort and become more obscured by depth - but it behaves right, as well; a swimming creature will leave a subtle wake, not a huge bow wave.
The nitpickers in the office complained about the lack of spume when something huge, such as the vast Kraken, emerges or dives. They do have a point, but frankly I was too busy sharing some pulse cannon love to notice.
The scale and detail is at times quite literally breath taking, and the polish remains consistently high. Importantly, no matter how much is going on, there's never any noticeable drop in frame-rate or screen-tearing. There's a touch of pop-up in some of the "dressing", such as foliage, but I noticed this only when I was stood within a metre of a 50-inch screen.
Having completed the single-player campaign it in just under 12 hours,
Resistance 2 is probably going to take a battering from some quarters for being too short.
There is a little replay value in the single-player mode - in addition to the not-so-compelling search for any missed intel or playing at a higher difficulty, completion unlocks 'Arcade Mode'. In this you're challenged to play the game with a limited number of lives, and kills now earn you experience points.
