This review is written looong after Resistance's official release, but this surely doesn't make it any less relevant since it still is the best (if not the only) shooter on the Playstation 3. One of the things Resistance: Fall of Man had to put up with was the comparison to next-gen heavyweights like the critic-worshipped Gears of War from Epic for the Xbox 360. It is worth mentioning that there are several things that needs to be considered before we can begin to play gaming-experts.
Now, it is true that in terms of the polished experience Gears of War delivers, Resistance can't keep up; the level design in GOW far surpasses Resistance, so does the character modelling and so on. But... the all important BUT, GOW was 3 years in the making and it came out when the Xbox 360 was a cummon sight in stores. Therefore, let's see what it is that Resistance compensates for in terms of competition:
First off, the engine suffers from all the juicy details seen elsewhere since its designed to power 40 people online, without lag I might add. And still we have cool physics like glass breaking realistically and ARBITRARILY, which is rare to see in massive online shooters. GOW can maximally handle 8 and sometimes lags intolerably.
Secondly, there's the quantity over quality in Resistance: I tried to count how many enemies I mowed down in a single scene; I counted 124, ragdolled, shaded Chimera that lied flat on the ground. And that's not even including my own fellow soldiers that were scattered all over the scene as well. While the firefights in GOW are more hectic in a strategic sense, they never really match the scale of Resistance in terms of size. In Resistance, a typical Chimeran wave of consists of 30 to 40 soldiers, all of them behaves accordingly to your movements, they all get to cover, strafe, duck and shoot.
Finally; Resistance is a LAUNCH title, as in developed by people with all new software on their hands. GOW had as mentioned 3 years in its developement. While it's true that the stuff in GOW looks better, there's much less of it.
I know it's childish and fanboyish to compare the 2 in a REVIEW, I'm just tired of a brilliant piece of code being slaughtered by biased reviews around the net, and when I'm writing this review I want to assure people that have just bought a PS3, that Resistance is an awesome experience both off- and especially online. It will stand as a classic. Surely is doesn't completely wield the power of the PS3 in terms of sheer graphics, but boy does it compensate in physics and online capability! Viva la Revolution!