I’ve always had a soft spot for the Resistance franchise. Something about the idea of an alien invasion beginning in the throes of World War II and continuing through the 1950s just tweaks my pleasure centers in all the right ways, even if the games themselves could never decide on a consistent tone and direction. Unfortunately, Sony’s latest effort with the franchise and debut FPS effort on the Playstation Vita embodies that sense of directionlessness to a frightening T. Developer Nihilistic not only shows an alarming lack of awareness for the things that made the past Resistance games great, but also somehow manages to fudge up just about every aspect of first person shooters that we have come to take for granted in the modern gaming era.

The graphics resemble those of a Playstation 2 game, with environmental textures looking particularly gnarly and explosions and gun effects feeling weak and toothless. The character models are the best thing about the graphical package, as they occupy a weird middle ground between late-generation PS2 game and early-generation PS3 game. The detail on their faces and clothing is certainly there, but their eyes all have a vacant, cartoonish look to them, and the actual facial animations are practically not there at all. It’s like being shepherded through the game by a bunch of people constantly reliving a particularly awful drug trip.

It certainly doesn’t help the game’s case that those characters are lacking in almost all personality and motivation. Calling this cast paper-thin would be an insult to the girth of paper everywhere. In this iteration of the long-running series, you will embody Tom Riley, a fireman who is unlucky enough to be called to the scene of ground zero in the Chimeran invasion of the United States. As the invasion tears the city apart, Tom’s family is lost in the fray and he must join up with a group of freedom fighters in an attempt to repel the invasion and find his loved ones.

It’s a solid basis for a first-person action romp, but Nihilistic never does anything interesting with the concept. Tom’s plight merely feels like an excuse to shoot some aliens, mostly because even he can’t seem to bring himself to care about his family. He barely ever mentions them in the duration of the game, which makes them come across as an afterthought even to the rest of the cast. “The purpose of the game is to shoot aliens; what more justification do you need than that?” Nihilistic seems to say as they funnel you down yet another linear corridor into yet another directionless battle. And it certainly doesn’t help Tom’s sympathy factor that he keeps making goo-goo eyes at his new female companion, Ellie. Didn’t you just abandon your wife and child to die like seven minutes ago, buddy?

The freedom fighters who you join up with early in the game have no sense of purpose in the plot, either. Tom just kind of stumbles upon them in the middle of the first level, and without even introducing themselves the group just kind of wanders around with you, humoring you as you try to find your forgotten family. You will eventually learn their names and motivations, but they all feel as if they were written by a kid in junior high who still thought it was cool to “fight the man.” According to the story, the Chimera have taken over all of Europe, Asia, and Africa by now, but the American government denies that the aliens are a threat and refuses to take any action to protect themselves or their citizens. Thus, it’s up to the resistance to defend the country when the aliens inevitably come. But wait, if the Chimera have already taken over the vast majority of the civilized world, what could the American government possibly stand to gain by deluding their citizens about the inevitability of the invasion? Wouldn’t it hurt the politicians and the government just as much as the civilians to deny this vast and incredible threat? And even if the government did deny the threat of the Chimera, wouldn’t everybody figure it out anyway since, you know, everybody in practically every other continent is dead?

The already-worthless story is told in a way that’s so disjointed, so stinted, and so impersonal that it’s literally laughable. I was in hysterics over moments that were supposed to be serious and moving thanks to the ham-fisted, expositional writing. The characters sound like a walking Wikipedia plot summary, with the occasional “golly” and “gee” thrown in to remind you that you’re in the 1950s. It’s also quite awkward when, on numerous occasions, characters prove to have deep knowledge of Chimeran names and functions despite the fact that this is the first time any of them are encountering the aliens. If the government really went through so much trouble to block knowledge of the aliens from the people, how come everybody seems to know the inner workings of the Chimeran hive-mind and the functions of their technology? The final nail in the plot’s coffin is the horrible compression on all of the between-mission cutscenes. The artifacting in the videos is all but impossible to ignore.

The story issues become all the more annoying thanks to the game's lousy checkpointing. Oftentimes, the checkpoints will be placed before cutscenes rather than after, meaning that if you fail a particularly tough boss battle or checkpoint you will have to watch the preceeding cutscene each time until you get it right. The last boss is a particularly offensive example of this, as failure means not only watching an entire cutscene again but also walking around through a few mostly empty hallways that seem to have  been included for the sole purpose of wasting more of your time. 

The gameplay fares better, but still suffers from some of the most misguided design decisions I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing in a video game recently. It stands to mention that the core shooting action is absolutely functional. The L button will pull the view in to iron sights or your scope, and the R button will fire your weapon. The Square button is used to reload, the Circle button is used for crouching, the Triangle button will bring up a weapon wheel (in a rare wise decision, Nihilistic decided to go with the weapon wheel of the first and third Resistance games rather than the two-weapon system of the second game) and the X button is used to jump. It’s completely standard stuff, but it works just as well as you could reasonably expect it to and the Vita’s tiny analog nubs feel great when aiming and shooting.

That’s all well and good, but as you may have noticed, much of the standard Resistance functionality is absent in that list of basic controls. Everything else, from melee attacks to alternate weapon modes, is handled using the touch screen. This is where the troubles really start. Three icons plaster the right side of the screen. These icons, from top to bottom, handle series standard Hedgehog Grenades, Frag Grenades, and melee attacks, which in a nice touch are performed with a fire ax. The problem is that the icons are a little too close to each other, so it can be easy to accidentally throw out the wrong type of grenade, or melee attack when you meant to throw out a Frag, especially if you have big hands. When you consider the fact that many contextual actions, such as opening doors, are also mapped to moving icons on the touch screen, the whole control scheme seems convoluted at best.

Alternate fire modes on your weapons also make heavy use of the front touch screen. When using the standard Carbine rifle, you have to touch the area on the screen where you want to launch a grenade. When wielding the Chimeran Bullseye with its homing rounds, you have to touch the enemy who you want to lock on to. The problem with this control scheme is that it forces you to take one thumb off of the sticks in order to touch the screen, usually around the middle, which not only will end up rendering you a sitting duck on the battlefield but also will obstruct your view of the action, since you often have to plop your thumb right in the middle of the screen. It’s a shame, because the alternate firing modes have always been some of the coolest parts of the Resistance games, and controls aside that is true of Burning Skies. While most of the weapons function in the same way that they would in the console games, the Mule shotgun has actually had a crossbow grafted onto it, allowing it to fire out explosive-tipped arrows. Blasting groups of enemies with the Mule’s crossbow was easily my favorite part of the game, unwieldy touch screen controls aside. The rear touch panel is also utilized, but only for sprinting. It works so infrequently that you will often find yourself falling back on hitting down on the D-Pad instead, an option that is far from ideal but at least functions properly.

Utilizing the alternate firing modes of the game’s numerous weapons often creates explosive results, but something about the gore effects just look wrong. When enemies explode, it’s not into gooey giblets like in most games, but rather into jagged, meaty chunks. You’ll shoot an enemy’s head only to have it roll right off and across the ground, as if the creature was just a puppet and you severed the cloth keeping its head attached. When the Chimera do blow up, it’s often into the individual limbs that make up their bodies, like pulling an insect apart by its extremities. You’ll shoot a grenade off into a crowd only to end up wading through a sea of identical feet, arms, and heads littering the floor, but no blood or guts. It contributes to the feeling that the Chimera are all just a bunch of props in a poorly-told story.

An online multiplayer mode makes the lousy story a moot point, but the unfortunate gameplay decisions still carry over to the online arena. In this case, everybody will have to grapple with poorly-placed touch screen icons, bad sprinting controls, and awkward alternate firing options, so at least the playing field is evenly balanced. The game's several standard modes each support up to eight players, an amount that feels about right for the game's medium-sized maps. Sadly, each of those eight players will look almost identical thanks to a glaring lack of customization options, perks, and unlockables. You will get the standard array of unlockable weapons as you level up, but little to nothing else. Because of the lack of unique online modes or customization options and the poorly thought out gameplay, it's hard to envision a big community springing up around this one, so it's  best to hedge your multiplayer bets elsewhere, even when it comes to gaming on the Vita. 

Resistance: Burning Skies is a laughably awful embarrassment for a franchise that frankly deserves much better. A laundry list of complaints both small and large keep it from competing even with the PSP-exclusive Resistance Retribution, much less the core trilogy on the PS3. While the basic actions of aiming, shooting, crouching, and jumping feel fine, the touch screen controls are unintuivtive and muddled and some of the more extraneous controls, like sprinting and utilizing alternate firing modes for your weapons, feel like they were simply shoehorned in wherever they would fit. The story fails to pick up any of the slack thanks to some of the laziest storytelling and characterizations I’ve seen in recent memory. The online multiplayer also fails to impress thanks to an overall lack of options. Even those desperate for a new Playstation Vita game will be disappointed by this wreck of a game.

Score: 2.5/10