When Resistance: Fall of Man was first released, the Playstation 3 was struggling its way through an over-hyped and under-supported launch. The games worth playing on the unbelievably expensive machine could be counted on half a hand. Resistance’s presence as one of the few games actually worth the $60 price of admission helped to propel the game and resulting franchise to success. Time has passed however, and the PS3, while still lacking in the eyes of some, has a much wider library of critically acclaimed exclusives and multiplatform titles to its credit. Noting that, the question that remains is if Resistance still shines today the way it did when there was nothing else to hold against it on the PS3.

The answer is a little bit of yes and a little bit of no. Playing Resistance today, it’s still a very solid game. A number of things have come along that have made it a bit less attractive, but as a game, people could choose far worse. In many ways, when one adds all the things that Resistance does well, it may even be a better value than the games that followed it, especially with the upcoming greatest hits line of PS3 games.

The single-player campaign is rather solid, but not without its flaws. The length and scale are in many ways superior to the games that came after it; Resistance’s story mode is much longer than many of it’s contemporaries. It’s length actually brings to mind a time when the single-player mode was the focus of shooters, rather than the multi-player mode, and to its credit, it remains interesting and challenging up until the very end. The game successfully pulls off things what a lot of other games have all but abandoned in recent years. Large-scale boss battles, for instance, dot the game throughout and do a good job of breaking up the more routine firefights. The levels that involve vehicles, though they are few and far between, also run well. Resistance’s single-player experience simply offers a more substantial experience than its competitors, which seem almost to just tack on a story mode out of the necessity of making a complete game.

This said, while the single-player campaign is fun, the story that accompanies it can be downright mediocre at times. While the narrative, told in an after-the-fact historic style, is interesting, the game barely puts forth an effort to make you care about the characters. The player’s character, Nathan Hale, barely speaks more than a few lines throughout the entirety of the game, and is the ultimate representation of the generic interchangeable tough guy character. You know and care so little at the end that the story is almost inconsequential. This is a far cry from the likes of Call of Duty 4: despite having a short campaign, it featured a story and ending so gripping that gamers still talk about it long after its release. Even Battlefield: Bad Company, which features one of the worst story modes in recent memory, has a cast of characters more memorable than that of Resistance. For its flaws, Bad Company featured personalities that were capable of making you genuinely laugh in the middle of just about any fight. In Resistance, if there are any other soldiers to speak of helping you they are about as expendable as an NPC could possibly get, often leaving little or no impression on the player.