Few console rivalries get fans arguing quite like a head to head between platform exclusives, and 2011 has handed us a great one. Insomniac’s Resistance 3 and Epic’s Gears of War 3 are both the third chapters in trilogies, both lean on grim stories about humanity on the ropes, and both are expected to land later this year. So we have lined up the latest screenshots from each game side by side to see how the flagship shooters on PS3 and Xbox 360 compare.
Two Trilogies Reach Their Third Chapters
Resistance 3 was revealed at Gamescom last August and marks a significant shift for Insomniac’s series. Nathan Hale is gone, and players instead take control of Joseph Capelli, the soldier who was forced to put Hale down at the end of Resistance 2. The game is set in 1957, with the alien Chimera now in control of most of the planet, and follows Capelli on a journey across a ruined America toward New York. Insomniac builds the series on its own technology, and the studio has been pushing hard to show a clear jump over Resistance 2, as an earlier comparison between the two games made plain.
Gears of War 3, meanwhile, brings Marcus Fenix’s story to its conclusion. Epic pushed the game back from its original April 2011 date into the fall, and it runs on the studio’s own Unreal Engine 3, the same technology behind a large share of this console generation. New this time are four player cooperative play through the campaign and a fresh threat in the Lambent, while owners of Bulletstorm’s Epic Edition have been promised access to the multiplayer beta.
Destroyed Beauty Versus An Occupied America
Looking at the shots together, the two games are chasing different moods. Gears has long been defined by what Epic called destroyed beauty, with towering ruined architecture and chunky, armored heroes framed tightly by an over the shoulder camera. Resistance is a first person game with an alternate history 1950s backdrop, so its screens tend to emphasize scale, open skies and the alien hardware dotting a familiar American landscape. Both studios are clearly leaning hard on lighting and detail to sell their worlds.
Which one looks better? That is the fun part, and we will leave the final verdict to you. Bear in mind that publisher screenshots are carefully chosen to show a game at its best, are often captured in ideal conditions and say nothing about frame rate, which matters at least as much as texture detail once you have a controller in hand. Different camera perspectives also make a straight like for like comparison tricky.
What is not in doubt is that both teams are now deep into their respective consoles. Insomniac and Epic have each shipped two previous entries on this hardware, and that experience shows. Take a look, then tell us in the comments which game is taking the visual crown so far.