Resistance 2 Beta

I've played a couple of Co-op matches of Resistance 2 and I have mixed feelings.

 

My biggest problem is that it seems that in order to keep the game challenging, the enemies take quite the beating before they die.  They also seem to have severely weakened the offensive abilities of the non-soldier classes (Special-ops and Medic).  For example, in my first co-op game I played as a Special-Ops.  My role was basically to supply ammo to my teammates when they ran low.  It works to your advantage to supply them with ammo, since the only way for the Special-Ops class to get ammo themselves is by supplying others with it.

 

This particular match only had 4 players.  Myself and three others (a medic and two soldiers -I don't remember if they are called "soldiers" or something else).  We were working well as a team.  I was constantly giving ammo, our medic was constantly healing, and the two soldiers were doing the bulk of the killing.  I quickly realized that in order to succeed in this mode you really have to play as your particular class.  As a Special-ops character, my default weapon was a sort of sniper-rifle, except it seemed to be shooting bb's, because it would take several headshots to take down the "grunt" of the alien army.  And by several I mean more than 5.  Clearly, my role was to support the team by supplying ammo, reviving the occasional teammate when the medic was busy, and distracting the enemies so that the soldier class could kill them.  Seriously, my weapons felt pathetically under-powered.

 

Once I accepted the fact that I wasn't going to be racking up too many kills, I began to have a good time.  I felt useless at times from an offensive standpoint, but I was enjoying myself.  Our team was playing very well together, even though none of us had head-sets to communicate with.  Everyone knew their role.  It was frustrating when fighting the larger enemy types which literally took about 5 minutes of constantly bombarding with everything we had to take down, but it was fun.

 

We weren't able to finish the level - after fighting tough for about ½ an hour - because the number of enemies (and the amount of damage they take to go down) was just too much.  When the match was over I realized that it was fun and all, but it felt a bit cheap.  These enemies should not be so difficult to take down.  Make them smarter, increase their number, but having a regular enemy take 6 or 7 headshots is ridiculous.

 

I then jumped into another game of 8 player op-op.  I chose a soldier this time (I wanted to get some kills!) and I stopped playing after 15 minutes.  Nobody was playing the game properly.  I was constantly low on ammo or health and all the medics or special-ops were doing their best Rambo impersonations.  At one point I was on the ground, needing to be revived and I had 2 medics about 5 feet away just shooting at the enemies, completely ignoring me.  Another time I was out of ammo and standing in front of a Special-op character and he just ran by me to continue the fight.

 

Oh, and the previously mentioned "hard to kill" enemies only get worse the more players you have.  We fought this one big enemy which had all 8 of us just raining bullets on him for about 10 minutes, non-stop, and he wouldn't flinch.  It was pretty ridiculous.  And I'm not talking about some giant, building-tall creature like was shown at E3, I'm talking about an above-average brute of 15 feet.  10 minutes on CONSTANT fire from 8 different people.  Again, that just comes off as really cheap.

 

I left the match pretty frustrated.  Frustrated at my stupid teammates who did not know what their roles were, and at the cheap design of the co-op experience.

 

I have yet to try regular death-match, but when I have Dead Space sitting in my 360, Resistance 2 is not really on my mind right now.  I wasn't as immediately impressed with it as I was the first time I played the CoD4 Beta.  I might be taking a wait-and-see approach to this one.