How to ruin a franchise

Resistance: Fall of Man was about the best thing PS3 had going for it when it came out. It was supposed to be really pretty and take advantage of all the horsepower of the thing. Since I just played it a month or two ago, it looked about on par with the current generation of games for late '09. Some things were better, some things were worse. But what was unique about it was the concept of an alternate past and the isolation in which you experience the story. After WWII some kind of crazy plague started in Russia and started turning everybody into zombie/alien dudes. They had access to all sorts of weird looking technology too. You eventually find out that they've been on Earth forever but were dormant or something. But the story plays out where you're a soldier that has some sort of resistance to their disease and he becomes super strong and able to kill them all. This takes place in England after the rest of Europe has been destroyed by the Chimera dudes. You learn all of this from your character's perspective and a pleasant British lady that tells you where to go. You seldom see other soldiers, and then only briefly. There are lots of quiet moments going across England.

So I expected more of the same with Resistance 2. Nuh uh. Not at all. They must have noticed that mindless military shooters like Gears of War were popular and decided to copy them. It's an endless progression of "clear out the LZ!" or "hostile down!" the entire game. You're also almost never alone, surrounded by a squad of mindless idiots who don't really help you kill much of anything. Oh, and it takes place in America, since apparently the alien dudes have gotten tired of mucking up Europe. Mainly, it just gives them an excuse to show more recognizable landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge or that famous theater in Chicago. Other than a few old cars and some radios here and there, you're never really reminded that the game is supposed to be set in the fifties, either. Wow, now that I've laid it all out like this, I don't think I'll be playing much more, since they've taken away everything I liked from the first one.

Granted, there are some welcome gameplay refinements. The crouch controls wisely took a cue from every other game out there and make you click to enter/exit a crouch rather than holding down a button. My fingers were getting tired! I hear there's a multiplayer mode that's decent. I'll probably skip that based on my past history of getting immediately killed by 12 year olds as soon as I start up the map.