Resistance: Retribution

Late in Resistance: Retribution, you’re tasked with trying to evac a scientist researching a vaccine that could prevent Chimera from infecting humans. Pinned down inside a fortress in Luxembourg, a fellow military officer (Rachel Parker, last seen in Fall of Man) asks you to lay down some covering fire while she fiddles with an old radio.

“Ugh,” Parker says. “This equipment is so 1920s.”

Vernacular anachronisms aside, she’s right. The equipment looks old and worn down, and seems to exist naturally in Resistance’s alternate-history WWII-(ish) setting. And while I’ve finally come to accept that the series will probably never again recapture the era it supposedly depicts as it did to some extent in Fall of Man (I’m sorry, but the soldiers in these games are just way too familiar with computers) Retribution isn’t as crazy futuristic as Resistance 2, and sandwiches Chimeran tech and old-school WWII feel appropriately, given its chronology somewhere in the middle between its two console brothers.

This may or may not have to do with Sony Bend handling development duties rather than Insomniac. If Retribution is any indication, and it is, the change of hands may be just what the Resistance series needs—though I’m certainly not saying Resistance 2 was bad, because it wasn’t. But I’ll take James Grayson over Nathan Hale any day. Grayson’s past and personality (and that jacket) drive Retribution’s narrative forward, giving us a protagonist to connect with while affecting a more engaging experience from what could have been just another military shooter. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and luckily Retribution has enough of them to tell a pretty good yarn.

When we first hear of Lieutenant James Grayson, he’s just happened upon his brother, Jonny, at a Chimeran conversion center in Manchester; Jonny’s been infected and someone has to put him out of his misery. A hard man, Grayson volunteers himself to do the deed. His brother’s death leaves deep emotional scars in Grayson, and he deserts his unit. Grayson goes on a Chimeran killing spree, destroying as many conversion centers as he can, but he’s eventually court-martialled and thrown in death row’s brig for his desertion.

Right away, Grayson is an interesting character. He hates the Chimera with every fiber of his being, not just for his brother’s sake but for the untold thousands they’ve left dead in their wake. He is a character defined by his quest for vengeance, not unlike Takashi Okazaki’s Afro Samurai, and he shows it every chance he gets, disobeying orders, doing things his way, etc.

“I don't care what their new shit is. I’m going to blow it the hell up,” Grayson records in a journal when infiltrating a new type of Chimeran conversion center in Germany.

Coarse and profane (and often funny because of it) Grayson almost feels like he’d fit right in to a rogue’s gallery in a cockney gangster picture. In short, he’s not your typical grunt.

Retribution follows Grayson on his quest for, well, retribution, throughout Chimera controlled (“axis”) Europe. Donning his brother’s old leather pilot’s jacket, he works in tandem with the French resistance and his former unit of British royal marines, but Grayson’s really in it to continue his suicidal personal agenda, killing as many Chimera as he can. Throughout the story’s twists and turns, Grayson has continual run-ins (while working with) his former commander (Stephen Cartwright, also last seen in Fall of Man) and the head of the Maquis, Roland Mallery. Grayson is distrustful of Maquis. They claim that they're working on a serum to inoculate humans from the Chimeran virus, and because of the proximity to Grayson, we do feel that there’s something amiss about the group, or at least Mallery—Grayson actually even comes to blows with him a few times. (“F*ck you, Mallery,” Grayson likes to say). It’s the personality injected into Retribution’s story (and don’t forget that jacket) that’ll hook you, and thanks to Grayson the game is entirely entertaining until the last shell casing falls.

Of course, there are the more obvious changes to the Resistance formula. As a PSP title, the game’s tech is obviously lower, yet Retribution still manages to be a fantastically pretty game, probably one of the best on the system. One could argue that Retribution’s change from first to third person (you get to look at that jacket a lot) also connects you more to Grayson, rather than just staring at most of a gun. Ironically, the game still plays, at a basic level, like an FPS. The wonky controls take a little getting used to (I suggest you immediately change from the standard set-up to the alternate—who would ever want to control camera movement with the PSP’s face buttons is beyond me) but once that happens they work just as well as any other games. Well, almost. I still found the standard control set-up close to unplayable.

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