Resistance 2

I'm knee deep in the single player, and I must say its a vast improvement on the first.. it is setup very much like a CoD game, however, there tends to be a bit more, weapon and ammo considerations to taking out the different types of chimera.. so it can begin to feel a bit survival horror at points. It certainly keeps the tension up, and its one of the few FPS's I've tasted recently that has me physically anxious as I step into a new section. Some of the bosses are spectacularly huge.

I've just had a couple of hours on Multiplayer, and I must say its rather good. I managed to get in on a 60 player Skirmish game (although when I joined there was about 40 players in it) and it has objectives for your squad to complete. These are assemble at a rally point, capture a point, assasinate an enemy player, or protect a friendly player, and the squads do their objectives independantly, although sometimes you're called in to reinforce another squad during one of their objectives. All that keeps the game positively buzzing, theres always something new on the go, and your'e not stuck in a rut doing the same thing over and over, because these objective shift about.

The gunplay is usually fast and loose, especially when you're in a crossfire situation. The longer range guns (fareye and marksman) are popular, as is the carbine - the exotic guns tend to be used less, because theyre all a bit situational, and usually you ain't got time to be situational. It reminds me of Halo combat more than anything else. The environment making a lot of the firefights exciting, more than the different weapons. You have beserker perks, which are little additives, when you've been on a decent killing spree.. ones like discharging electrostatic orbs that pulse damage out across an area, or boost your radar range, see through walls, move faster and retain weapon accuracy.. these add a little to the strategy and perhaps your choice of loadout.. but as I said, the gunplay is almost too fast to be worrying too much about taking it slow and considered.

Skirmish was much better than the team deathmatch, which comes across as almost Quake 2 style combat - mainly because there was always something new on the go, you're always shifting between offensive or defensive, moving in cover as fast as you can, or flanking a clustered group of enemy.. this is going to worth a ride for a while I think.. the only thing is, there'll be an accepted way to loadout, to get maximum kills and when everyone learns the maps off by heart, there'll be plenty of sweet spots for camping etc.. still with more modes than you can shake a stick at, that I have yet to explore, and a co-op campaign that has different maps to the main campaign, its still got some legs.