Wednesday, May 21, 2014

21 May 2014

Review: Resistance Burning Skies


Resistance: Burning Skies is the first FPS game on the Vita. It also is the first handheld FPS to take advantage of dual analog sticks. Burning Skies had a good bit of hype just because it was a full fledged FPS on handheld device. It features a full fledged single player mode and a couple multiplayer modes. Does Burning Skies live up to the hype though?

Being the first handheld FPS to take advantage of dual analog sticks, it feels pretty dang good. If you played an FPS before then you should be at home when put your grubby hands on this game. The analogs sticks were pretty precise. I had no problem keeping my sights on an enemy in the campaign and even multiplayer.

Since the Vita has less buttons than your average console controller, the game has to put some functions on to the touch screen and even the back touch pad. Resistance is known for it's crazy awesome weapons that have crazy secondary firing modes. This game has those crazy weapons new and old. To use the secondary fire you use the touch screen. It isn't as bad as you'd think it would be, it works surprisingly well.


Other uses of the touch screen is for melee and grenades. The button for melee is conveniently placed by the analog stick so it makes it easy to access. The grenade button is right above the melee icon. Cool thing about the grenades are that you can just tap the icon to quickly throw a grenade or you can drag the icon to any part of the screen and you'll throw the grenade to where you left the grenade reticule. The controls are great; unfortunately everything else in the game is sub-par.

The Chimera AI is not that great, they can be good at times. A bit of them seem to just stand there and let you shoot them. Some of the Chimera seem to enjoy running into the wall. When the Chimeran leaders don't release the stupid ones upon you; The firefights becomes more fun.

There are different types of Chimera that spruce up the gameplay. There are the average assault gunners, snipers, and etc. Some of the Chimera can jump around and hang on walls giving you a harder time. There are also bosses. Though they are not challenging. Strategy for defeating most them consists of strafing around them while shooting.

The story is not that good and it's really short (Like 3-4 hours long.). You play as fireman, Tom Riley. One day the Chimera invades and you must stop them. That's it really. Tom Riley has a family that he's trying to look for but it never really goes into detail about it. Tom is a flat character and so is all the people that he meets along the way so you never really care what happens to anybody in the game. At one point in the game; the story tries to be emotional. I never really cared what happened though since I never really cared about Tom or his motivation.


You have a companion named Ellie that fights with you during the lackluster firefights. She's probably the most interesting character in the game. Not because of her cardboard personality. I think she's interesting because of her unique magical abilities. Through out the game she splits up with you to find another way. The problem is the levels are design to be so linear that visually there is no other path to take. Once you reach your destination she's there. How did she get there? Witchcraft. I'm calling it now. She's a witch that can teleport. It happens often too. Sometimes she doesn't even split up with you. You can go into a tunnel and look behind you; she's there. Go little farther and turn around; She's gone. Get out of the tunnel and she's there waiting for you. Witchcraft I tell you!

Visually the game is okay looking, the character models and environments look very bland, animations for the Chimera and your human buddies are very robotic looking; and the cutscenes are very compressed oddly, which result in a very noisy video quality and sound that is very low in volume. I guess even the developers didn't think they were all that great either as this is the only PS Vita game that disables the screen capturing tool that's built in the Vita's OS. The lighting is impressive though, I can give them that.

The soundtrack is an orchestral score that is great but the problem is that the game glitches up and never plays the music. I figured this out by playing through most of this one section and I died, there was no music playing at all. The game spawned me at my latest checkpoint and I went through the section again, but this time epic music was playing. Throughout the game the soundtrack is literally your footsteps and gunfire (No matter how close or far you are, the gunfire is always the same volume.). I should also mention the gunfire sounds like popcorn popping, Mmmm popcorn.

Resistance has a competitive 8 player online mode that features 3 deathmatch modes. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Survival ( Two players start out Chimeran and must turn the human players into a Chimera by killing them.). There aren't much maps to play in so the multiplayer becomes very dull quickly especially with having only 3 game modes of the same game type. You can unlock different weapons to use as you level up. Once you unlock the shotgun you need no other weapon though. That is what majority of the online community uses. Any other weapon will not rack up as much kills as the shotgun.



Being the first handheld game to take advantage of dual analog sticks, Burning Skies is an mediocre experience that could have been so much more. It proves that an FPS can control fine on the Vita but it falls flat in everything else. If you're a hardcore FPS fan that really wants to shoot stuff and wants another FPS to play besides Killzone: Mercenary, go ahead and buy it. For everyone else, just stick with Killzone: Mercenary.



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