I wanted to try out Resistance: Fall of Man because I was looking for a good first-person shooter for my new PlayStation 3. What I found was a great-looking game that keeps the action moving and the bullets flying.

Basically, you play as Nathan Hale, an American Ranger in the 1950s who is sent to England to help stem the onslaught of the Chimera, a virus that creates human mutant soldiers and other beastly creatures. The mysterious virus began in Russia and has laid waste to Europe.

You pick up weapons along the way to fight these enemy hordes, the most common of which are large humanoid mutations with four glowing eyes and teeth that look as if they belong on a deep-sea fish. They also carry there own air conditioners around on their backs, because their metabolism is so fast they overheat easily. The huge air conditions come in handy sometimes when the enemy is trying to hide behind something only to be given away by the integrated cooling system.

There also is the usual assortment of health cannisters, ammo, etc., laying around for you to discover when you don't have Chimerans firmly in your sights.

The game, developed by Insomniac, moves at a brisk pace. Your battles are interspersed by cutscenes designed to advance the storyline, but these don't seem too long or overblown. Missions range in difficulty, but for the most part, there are plenty of checkpoints for saving, and missions sometimes actually seem a bit short before the next cutscene. This is welcome if you're running low on health, but sometimes you are just getting the feel for blasting Chimerans during a mission (like when you're driving a tank, for instance) when it comes to an abrupt end.

The game looks great with graphics rendered in 720p for those who have HD sets, and the gameplay is smooth and relatively free of annoying glitches. Background music is suitably ominous but not distracting. Resistance supports one to four players, with up to 40 players able to play online. I wasn't able to play multiplayer since I haven't gotten around to getting the second controller.

Controls are fairly intuitive and correspond to other first-person shooter games; i.e; the right trigger blasts 'em, left trigger generally makes a bigger boom, left and right thumbsticks move Nathan around, etc. The PS3's sixaxis controller doesn't come into play much in this game. I've only come across one use for it so far as a tool to shake off a particular form of Chimera. It took some getting use to before shaking the controller didn't seem silly.

The game pauses when you decide it's time to use another weapon, which is a nice feature, especially when you're in the middle of a Chimeran crossfire. If you run out of ammo, the game will also automatically switch weapons for you.

There are oodles of customization features available. The learning curve is not steep, and there are several difficulty settings for the game, so novice players and more-experienced shooters can jump right into the mayhem. Controller configuration can be customized, as well.

The game carries a mature rating for violence, blood and gore and strong language, and it definitely is not for the faint of heart. Downed friends and foes don't "disappear" from the battle zone like they do in some shooters and, in fact, you often get extra ammo for walking over the bloody corpses. One mission has you fighting through a Chimeran facility where they convert humans to Chimerans, and it's fairly graphic.

In short, Resistance is a first-rate shooter with great graphics and smooth gameplay. What the game isn't is any great leap forward in advancing the genre. More experienced players may grumble that they've seen this type of game in different forms many, many times before. But, I still find it entertaining.