and kept thinking I should at least beat it once, but I just ended up abandoning it again because it's just kinda boring to me.

I like a lot of what it does, but for whatever reason it just fails to win me over.

I guess the most obvious culprits would be the linearity and stupid AI, though the cliched story doesn't help either, but these things are like in every Call of Duty, yet I still had enough interest in most of them to complete them. Not Resistance: BS (great acronym btw) for some reason.

I don't know how many of the cool features here come from the mainline entries, but one thing I can say for sure is that here they're at least heavily adapted to the form factor. For example, tap on the enemy to lock your main assault rifle onto them and shoot homing projectiles at them. My favorite is how to throw grenades you just point at the screen and drag the grenade icon onto any position you want your character to throw it at. Playing shooters on consoles is generally an inferior experience compared to PC, but this actually gives you an advantage you can't get on PC. Or like, how to load an explosive arrow into your shotgun/crossbow, you slide your finger diagonally across the screen, along the edge of your gun. Things like this just add immersion and make the game more fun to play.

The controls are great in general. Unlike that Killzone game, here you don't have some confusing mappings that interfere with each other. For example, in Killzone your running and crouching were the same button, which was just super uncomfortable. But here nothing really gets in the way.

Resistance: BS kinda keeps things fresh compared to most CoD-likes by having a variety of significantly different weapons and the ability to upgrade them in various ways. Enemies differ too, and there's a number of mechanics unique to specific enemy types.

At the end of the day though, the feeling of it being a CoD-clone at its core persists. I think after a while I started finding the gunfights repetitive.

But really, the more I think about it, the more one thing stands out to me from the rest: this game is kinda ugly. There is a kinda cool Technicolor pallete in the first mission, immersing us in the era the game is set in, but after that it just goes completely brown. The third mission has a kind of cool skybox, but still mostly drenched in brown and grey colors.

I think, even if a game has a great gameplay, the thing that most attracts the player is the promise of getting lost in a fascinating and/or beautiful world, or experiencing something unforgettable. I don't really get any of that with Resistance: BS. Despite all of its cool mechanics, and this being probably the second-best handheld FPS of all time (mainly due to such low competition), it still feels kind of limiting and generic.

I know it's kind of a miracle we got a shooter this good on Vita at all. This was the first no-compromise home console FPS experience on a handheld. But I couldn't stop thinking of Medal of Honor: Heroes with its open and intricate levels, despite PSP having no analogue stick to allow you comfortable aiming.

I think this game was probably cool to play through back when it released. I remember when I first got my PS Vita and got that Unit 13 game, I played the shit out of it, despite it being an even more generic and boring military shooter. Just the novelty of having PS3-level graphics and two analogue sticks was attractive enough. But looking back at these games from 2025, I'm just really indifferent.

Still, it's not a bad game by any means and has a lot of cool mechanics for a linear handheld shooter. My rating mostly reflects what this game means for its platform and form factor. If this was a PC game, I'd rate it much lower.