A thrilling spin-off to Sony’s premier home console FPS franchise that smartly adapts the experience to a handheld format, with some minor late-game issues souring the experience.
| Developer | |
| Publisher | |
| Franchise | Resistance |
| Genre | |
| PSTV | Yes |
| PSN | EU/NA |
World-building & Story
The Resistance series has always taken pride in its brilliant portrayal of an alternate version of the 1950’s world where an alien race called the Chimera have invaded and converted large amounts of the human population to their ranks by brutal and bloody means. While the first game focused on the invasion in England, the second and third entries explored the Chimeran forces in North America – thankfully, this PSP spin-off returns the series to its roots in examining the fallout from the events of the Resistance: Fall of Man in the rest of Europe.
Retribution follows James Grayson, a British Marine who witnesses his brother converted to a Chimera and suffers a nervous breakdown as a result that causes him to go on a rampage destroying Chimeran conversion centres. Captured and sentenced to death by British forces, he is given a final chance from a mysterious woman named Raine Bouchard to participate in a mission named “Operation Overstrike” in mainland Europe as part of the Maquis resistance.
There are lots of familiar faces brought back in Retribution for fans of the series, including Stephen Cartwright and Rachel Parker from Fall of Man. While having knowledge of previous events is a plus, it’s not essential for understanding the characters and their motivations here – each cast member is given enough screen time and layers to their personalities to feel like true individuals rather than simply additions to help pad out the roster.
Obviously, the largest amount of character development is given to Grayson who sadly comes across as an unlikable douche. He’s presented as a combination of rude, entitled and yet is full of one-liners and quips like he’s out of a James Bond movie, which is an odd disconnect. The writers at Sony Bend attempt to soften him up in the final chapters, but it’s not enough to prevent the damage done early on meaning it’s difficult to empathise with his cause.
The actual story itself is more interesting – an epic tale of a foreign invasion and the resistance forces fighting to stop global extinction. It manages to straddle a mix of the more personal tale told in Fall of Man (and Resistance 3) and the more bombastic second entry, which is works better as a balance than I expected. Travelling all over continental Europe to stop the Chimeran conversion centres is as thrilling as I’d have hoped and it slots nicely into the overall narrative too, feeling like another essential chapter in the story rather than an un-necessary addition.
Where the game shines the most is in its world-building, though. The dark, dystopian, claustrophobic feel of a world invaded by a strange alien race and completely repressed is captured perfectly here – you’ll find yourself running down narrow sewers and through trenches desperately trying to escape detection by a force much stronger than yourself, while in open areas you’ll witness the battle raging on overhead. It’s an area the franchise has always excelled in and it’s captured perfectly here.
Presentation & Sound
By building on their knowledge of the hardware from two Syphon Filter games, Sony Bend have crafted one of the PSP’s most beautiful and technically advanced titles in Resistance: Retribution. There’s moments you’ll think could pass for a Vita-native game and the level of polish for the whole package is just superb.
Grayson and all other human characters contain a surprising amount of detail – mouths move when talking, clothes are emblazoned with emblems and they all clutch and fire weapons believably. The Chimera are equally impressive – the range of different types provide a good variety and they’re each distinct in terms of defining features. Your standard troops have visible yellow injectors on their back, while drones flit around the skies charging their energy beams, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.
Speaking of weapons – a lot of care has been put in to craft scenarios where visibly impressive gunfights can play out. Enemy weapons like Augers provide a suitable screen-lighting array of laser shots that travel just slow enough that you can dodge out of the way, but fire can come from all angles and the framerate holds up extremely well during these circumstances (I did notice some minor slowdown in certain levels, but nothing that affected the gameplay).
I have to give it to the developers though – the environments are where Retribution truly shines, effectively capturing that dystopian alien-invasion feeling found in the home console releases. Each area feels transformed into this galactic warzone – crumbled buildings are augmented with alien tubing and mechanical constructions, yet navigation remains easy despite the clashing designs. The next level might funnel you down a series of underwater tunnels (featuring some of the most beautiful water effects I’ve seen on PSP), heightening the feeling of truly being in the midst of a foreign takeover.
Not everything works perfectly – Resistance as a series suffers from that late-noughties pitfall of having a grey-brown colour palette which is present and correct here, although it does add greatly to the atmosphere. A handful of levels miss the mark graphically too, namely the gameplay-padding staples of sewers and catacombs, which come across fairly drab and lifeless and on occasion were too dark to properly make out on the Vita’s screen.
Voice acting isn’t a strong area for the game, with some stereotypical accents and flat delivery of certain lines, but it’s never bad enough to be comical (although Grayson’s one-liners get a bit silly considering the tone of the title). Music is a bigger offender – never more than background noise during certain scenes, but the heavy use of silence does add greatly to the atmosphere of terror that Resistance aims for.
Soundtrack highlight – Retribution
Gameplay & Content
Adapting the Resistance series’ first-person gameplay into a third-person cover-based shooter template, Retribution also makes some smart changes to the formula to adapt it to a handheld console. The end result is a game that straddles a number of different styles effortlessly and is a joy to play, although some of the later levels teeter on the edge of being too frustrating to be enjoyable.
The most notable change to the series formula is the way Grayson controls – rather than faster-paced first-person gameplay, the developers opted for a slower almost survival horror esque level of movement that encourages tactical placement to ensure you don’t get caught in the open – because you won’t just be able to run away and hide, plus there’s no jumping or crouching. That’s not to say he’s a difficult character to control, just that everything is deliberate and takes a little getting used to.
In keeping with the tactical thinking theme, Retribution opts for cover mechanics for the majority of its shootouts. Walking up to a waist-high wall or to the corner of a doorway will cause Grayson to duck behind it to shield himself from oncoming gunfire. From there, you can line up your shots and pop out only when it’s safe – which works surprisingly well, although the sticky cover caused me a few problems where it automatically happened when I wanted to run past a certain wall or door.
On PSP, aiming without dual analogues was a bit of a problem, but the team at Sony Bend have come up with an elegant solution that I’m surprised hasn’t been used more often. The game uses a targeting window which you simply have to get an enemy in for the cursor to automatically lock on, which alleviates the frustration of imprecise aiming. Actual camera movement is handled with the face buttons which you can handily remap onto the Vita’s second analogue, making the title completely natural and in fact miles better on Sony’s newest handheld (even if the auto-aiming can be a bit finicky sometimes).
Gunplay in Retribution therefore feels pretty good (you can turn off the targeting window if you wish). A handy zoom-in feature allows you to go for headshots and navigating cover while aiming feels easy. A series staple has been inventive weapons and that’s fully in tact here too – each has a secondary fire, which ranges from the mundane (grenade launcher on a rifle) to the quirky (alien shield on the Auger) to the lifesaving (slowing down time on the Fareye sniper rifle).
You’ll need all of this weaponry too, because the game isn’t shy at throwing hordes of foes for you to take down. They’re all quite unique too – boilers for example are heavily armoured suiciders with their weak spots on their heads, meaning you’ll often have to switch to zoomed-in aiming to take them down; while Slipskulls flit around the walls and ceilings and require a few well-placed shots to take down. By throwing combinations of the various enemies at you, Resistance achieves an enjoyable level of difficulty as you’ll constantly have to mix up your tactics, but there is a point where things become a little overwhelming.
The latter levels (particularly in the catacombs) begin to drift into frustration as the game throws endless waves of the same enemies at you, often providing little in the way of breathing room. One corridor in particular sticks out as you’re expected to progress forward to stop foes spawning, which plays completely against the ‘find cover and stick to it’ mindset that Retribution had been conditioning you towards all along. In fact, you’ll find cover and safe spots more scarce as the levels progress which begins to feel slightly unfair as you’re left out in the open without the means to properly defend yourself thanks to the way the controls are set up.
The difficulty also spikes during the spectacle boss battles. These are pretty fun – you might fight a mech in a Metal Gear Solid-esque showdown one minute and a giant flying mutant Chimera the next, but they pretty much all rely on using the LAARK rocket launcher (with a handy secondary fire mode that lets you redirect the rockets) to take down. They feel suitably challenging and high-profile, without ever degrading into tiresome pattern recognition, but the difficulty could be a little more balanced.
Outside of shooting aliens, Retribution mixes things up every now and again in the gameplay department with a variety of ideas. There are a selection of underwater levels which have the distinction of not being universally awful (like the majority I play in gaming) while one section has you piloting a mech in a bombastic and brilliant shooting gallery. It also loves to give you allies in fights which is a treat as the AI is pretty good, holding their own through the linear levels (which is no bad thing in today’s open-world obsessed gaming environment).
The game takes place over a series of missions in continental Europe that’ll take you around 10-11 hours to clear, replayability is provided by hidden intel which fills backstory on the Chimeran invasion. There’s also a really neat ‘infection’ mode you get by linking your Vita to a PS3 and copy of Resistance 2 that slightly changes the story and gives other perks such as regenerating health and underwater breathing – it’s worth checking out. Sadly, there was online multiplayer but the servers are no longer up, but when I tried it out way back in 2013 it was a lot of fun.
Overall, there’s an incredibly solid package here that’s the epitome of ‘console quality on the go’ – a gorgeous shooter that’s smartly adapted to handheld sensibilities, which is better than ever on Vita. It’s slightly let down by the wonky difficulty, but that shouldn’t be enough to put you off the game if you want a quality TPS on the go.
Conclusion
The team at Sony Bend have long established themselves as brilliant handheld developers and Resistance: Retribution cemented this – a fantastic conversion of a console IP to a portable that manages to keep all of the series’ identity in tact while stamping out its own mark too. It’s a meaty package with plenty of clever scenarios and plenty of tense and enjoyable shootouts, but just beware of the spiky difficulty towards the end that somewhat sullies the experience.
8.5/10
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