Given all the attention that fancy Killzone 2 was getting on the E3 show floor, Resistance 2’s playable kiosk was looking a little bit lonely, and so we decided to head over and give it some love. Of course, our play session wasn’t motivated out of complete pity. After all, the original Resistance was one of the only real quality offerings at the PS3’s launch, and with 60 players online who wouldn’t want to give its sequel a whirl?

The demo offered only one map, the isolated village of cottages in a surrounding forest that you’ve probably already seen videos of before. The name of the game: Skirmish, pitting Humans and Chimera in the classic struggle for control points seen in most online shooters supporting an exceptionally high number of players (fighting over one flag with 60 people wouldn’t make much sense, now would it?).

Thankfully, Resistance 2 didn’t devolve into utter chaos with its mass of online participants, a problem which I find sucks the fun out of most large-scale FPS games. Instead, Insomniac has preserved the more intimate nature of, say, a 12-player game by placing you in a squad with a small group of other gamers. Your unit will also have a rival faction with opposing goals, giving you the chance to form some personal vendettas even in a game with loads of other enemies to shoot at.

Most of our encounters ranged in size from some small firefights to heated battles over certain control points, but things never really flew off the handle. Something very apparent was that, despite having about 60 people in the match at all times, there was never any lag whatsoever, and this isn’t even the final build.