Despite my rather lengthy and gushing review of Resistance 3, I am not yet done with the gush. There is so much to gush that I’m literally overflowing with gushy substances.

I’ve always said that the big thing about in-game story-telling is atmosphere. Cut-scenes are great in delivering plot points and other methods to push the story forward, but the events during actual gameplay are necessary to feed certain moods and emotions into the player. If your cut-scene is intended to make the protagonist seem afraid or outnumbered, as if he may very well die, it won’t help if the gameplay allows him to wade through the numbers as if they were dandilions flying right into his lawnmower. The player should feel as if they barely survived.

A lot of games these days fall under the “bigger is better” trap. In fact, it is one of the reasons the single gameplay video I saw for Resistance 2 bored me. It was a boss fight with yet another big monster while on top of a building, whose attack patterns and weak points were so obvious that I just couldn’t feel any sense of threat. Nearly every hack and slash game as felt the need to include similarly size bosses in their games, such as Devil May Cry 4 and Bayonetta. Usually it is no fun having to face off against these monstrous creatures as you know there’s always going to be some ridiculous weak point the game will script you to aim for. It’s not like Shadow of the Colossus, where climbing the creature is an actual challenge. It is all designed with the simple purpose of the player jumping in and feeling bad ass… only not.

This is not the trap that Resistance 3 falls into. This is also where I will be discussing specific moments in the game in detail, so if you don’t want anything spoiled do not read this. The reason these moments worked so well is because I didn’t see them coming, didn’t think about them and was just awash in the entire experience. If you plan on playing this game and want to feel that same thing, then stop reading and come back to this article later.

After the first chapter of the game, where you are thrown into the basic shooting and combat mechanics in a most violent manner (think Halo 1), you find yourself on a river boat trying to quietly slip through the country on your way to New York City. The game doesn’t rush right into action. Instead you pass beneath the decaying corpse of a massive aquatic beast, watching small creatures crawl throughout its entrials feasting upon it. Giant corpses are a dime a dozen in video games these days, yet the hordes of tiny bug-like creatures made it rather uneasy. I was expecting the game to just drop them down and begin combat, only it never had. Similarly, I never actually fought that massive creature later on in the game. Just the knowledge that such a thing exists kept me a bit on edge.

Not long after that you are introduced to the first fight, and the level slowly increases in intensity from there. Monsters leap from the roof tops of flooded homes to your boat, and soon enough you’re completely surrounded, sticking close to the ammo crate or health box on the boat to make sure you aren’t cut off from any necessary supply. Towards the end of the level you are finally introduced to a massive walking fortress, too massive to deal any harm to with your current weapon load-out. You must fend off any smaller foes attacking while missiles take out your boat piece by piece until finally the level ends and you are without a ride.

That giant mobile fortress returns towards the end of the game. I mentioned in my review a moment where I was cornered, fending off two or three giant mechs and a handful of foot soldiers. In the distance, one of these gigantic mechanical fortresses was slowly heading my way. I didn’t realize it at first, but as the number of explosions and missiles came my way, slowly destroying my cover, I looked upward past the horizon and noticed it was getting closer. I became desperate. I had no idea what to do now. Was I supposed to die? Does the game end with my character’s death? Is there finally a game willing to risk a conclusion driving the point home how pointless it all was?

This was not the case, and I managed to somehow survive the map to see the cut-scene that led me to the final level. However, unlike other games that have a mild conflict followed by a desperate cinematic, I actually felt relief to know I survived. I thought I had died, that I finally got hit with a strong enough volley to wipe out those last few health bars, but I survived. Without that giant fortress there to add pressure, without remembering it from earlier in the game, I wouldn’t have felt such desperation. The game gave me as much as it deemed necessary to make me feel like the odds were impossible.

You never fight the giant fortress either. Normally video games follow that rule, where if a gun is in the background of the play you know it will be fired in Act III. It’s an entire gag in Shaun of the Dead, where they insist that the Winchester rifle in the Pub isn’t a real rifle (only it turns out it is!). By following these rules, that giant monster corpse I saw earlier in the game should have been a boss later on, and at some point I should have boarded that giant fortress or obtained some world-shattering weapon to take on the armored mobile fortress. Yet it never happened.

I feel the game is better this way. In Halo 2 and Halo 3, the Scarab is much less of a threat on consecutive playthroughs once you know how to destroy it. It’s just another enemy, it just takes a bit more work and effort to take down. Not the case with Resistance 3. Now, when I go back to that one fight where the odds seem against me, I’ll know that no matter what I do, that giant fortress cannot be destroyed and it will be relentlessly firing missiles at my location. It presents the same threat now as it did when it was first introduced.

Another moment, the level after the river ride, teaches the player another lesson that plays off later. There is a giant creature, the Widowmaker, a spider-like monster that climbs on top of the ruined homes and houses and makes short work out of the militant Chimera occupying the old city. At one point you have to carry a heavy object, causing you to move more slowly, while an NPC tries to lead you through the rubble to safety. All the while the Chimera are defending themselves against this creature, and every where you turn it is there to wreak more havoc and devastation. Yet you are never forced to stop and put your package down and shoot things. You just run right on through to safety.

Later on in the game you are all alone, but Chimera are fighting a horde of savage Grims underground. You could fight them, but it’s better to run right on past. If it weren’t for the earlier moment of the game it would never have occurred to me to just run right on through, but in the end it paid off. I got to save my health and ammunition, despite hearing monsters chasing after me or seeing electric bolts fire off over my shoulder. This lasted until I reached a sort of “arena”, where several Chimera were fighting against another Widowmaker…only this time there was no way out. Instead, I now had to defeat the Widowmaker while simultaneously avoiding or taking out the Chimera, who were constantly being reinforced with fresh troops during the battle.

Having fought the creature also added an additional and surprising emotion later in the game. On a hijacked train, I watched the Pennsylvania country side pass me by. I’d driven through land like that between New Jersey and upstate New York several times going to and from College. So suddenly seeing an entire herd of Widowmakers in the distance actually managed to hit home. It was almost a beautiful sight, even, but watching these monstrous creatures, where just one of them is a thrilling and challenging fight, run like a herd of buffalo in the distance… I suddenly thought to myself “This is not my America anymore”. An odd thought to have, seeing something that is completely fictional have such a strong impact on me.

Yet that is the subtle emotional mastery Resistance 3 manages to evoke. There are so many memorable moments that I can recall every step of the game. For the last decade such a feat has been almost unthinkable for me without repeat play throughs or dying several times at bad check points. I hardly died in this game at all, yet I can remember so much of my journey.

I cannot say it enough. Resistance 3 is definitely one of the best games this year, and because it is more than just a shooter. It was an experience, and a damn good one at that.