Weapons

These descriptions are for the weapons that are available during the first play-through of the game. More guns and one new grenade become available after you beat the game for the first time; we’ll discuss them in an update to this guide should we have the chance to play the game a bit more.

M5A2 Carbine

Best Against: Hybrids, Rollers, Leapers

The M5A2 works quite well from range.

Your standard assault rifle, the M5A2 should be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a game with an M16 rifle in it; it has a large clip, accurate fire, and an underslung grenade launcher that’ll help you quickly deal with clusters of enemies.

The most notable thing about the M5 is that it fires extremely accurately when you zoom in with the right analog stick. You can press the fire button once for a single, accurate shot, but even when you go to full-auto mode, the grouping of the shots will still be quite close. (Much closer than, say, that of the Bullseye.) Use it at medium or long range before you get the Fareye or when you simply want to conserve ammo for that weapon.

Bullseye

Best Against: Hybrids, Slipstreams, fast-moving enemies

At first glance, the Bullseye might appear to be an objectively worse variant of the M5A2; it doesn’t deal quite as much damage, and the rounds it fires have a much worse spread effect, making it unreliable at anything but short range. When you get used to tagging your enemies with the weapon’s alt-fire, though, it’ll quickly become one of your mainstays.

This all could’ve been avoided if they hadn’t been so blurry.

If you manage to alt-fire at an enemy and hit it with the tag, then all the bullets you fire from your weapon will home in on that enemy, allowing you to fire from behind cover. The best way to take advantage of this is to get near a piece of cover, such as a corner or a barricade, tag a Hybrid, then duck behind the cover and fire into the air in front of or on top of you. All your rounds will make a hard 90 degree turn and zoom in towards your enemy, killing them post-haste. Keep in mind that if your reticule turns red when you’re aiming at an enemy, then you’re guaranteed to hit them with a tag, but even if the reticule doesn’t turn red, you can still attach a tag to them if you aim properly. You’ll know you’ve tagged a foe by hearing the small tone that indicates contact.

Bullseye tagging can also be useful against enemies that force you to move, like Howlers. If you’re running from a Howler, or attempt to lead a Titan around an obstacle, just tag them with the Bullseye and fire up into the air.

Note that Bullseye tags are ineffectual if your foe is actively taking cover. The bullets are capable of heading straight for your enemies, but they won’t navigate around barricades or through corridors or anything like that.

A hidden function of the Bullseye is the ability to make a grenade. If you fire a tag at the ground and hold down the L1 button, you’ll eventually hear the tag-lock tone. Let go of L1 and start firing the weapon at the tag; the rounds will be caught by the tag and float in the air, making a kind of bullet-grenade. If you target an enemy and hit L1 again, the bullet grenade will fly through the air and all of the rounds will impact them instantly. This is a pretty flashy function, but takes a long time to set up and is rarely very useful.

Rossmore 236

Best Against: Howlers, Grey Jacks, anything that gets close.

Your standard shotgun. R1 fires a single shell; L1 fires both barrels simultaneously. This is, as you may expect, a weapon that only works well at extremely close ranges, so it’s best to use it on enemies that attack at melee range, like Grey Jacks and Howlers. You can keep it up while corridor-crawling; even if it doesn’t kill a Hybrid on the first shot, you’ll usually send it to its feet, allowing you to finish up with a melee attack for the kill.

Auger

Best Against: Enemies that man sentry guns, enemies behind cover.

The Auger isn’t the first weapon in FPS history that lets you shoot through walls; games such as Red Faction have had them for years. However, it is one of the few that actually makes the process fairly easy. When fired, an Auger round will travel straight, and pass through any walls that it encounters (although it slows down on the way through solid objects). The more walls it travels through, the more powerful it becomes. What’s more, your aiming reticule will actually turn red if you’re aiming at an enemy through a wall, letting you know if they’re going to be hit or not.

Enemies behind crates getting you down? That’s nothing a little Auger fire won’t fix.

Generally we found this to be best at killing enemies that are stationary, or when they’re just on the opposite side of a wall from us. Enemies that man the many sentry guns you’re going to find in the game are also prime targets; their shielding protects them from normal fire, but not from Auger rounds. Many of the Hybrids you encounter will also duck behind cover in between firing at you; shoot at the cover and you’ll kill them easily. Firing the Auger by itself, in the clear, isn’t really worthwhile, as it doesn’t seem to be very powerful unless it travels through walls.

The secondary fire here pops up a force barrier that temporarily shields you from enemy fire while letting you fire the Auger through it. It’s great for travelling through areas with mines in them, since you don’t always know from where they’ll pop; simply throw up a force barrier when they explode to avoid all damage. Apart from that, we confess to not using this ability very often, although individual tastes may very. In general, it seems better to just get used to taking cover and knowing how to do that.

L23 Fareye

Best Against: Steelheads, Hybrids.

This is a pretty standard sniper rifle, with a bit of a twist: holding down the L1 button will slow time down, letting you line up a perfect headshot. Since most enemies, even Hybrids, can take multiple rounds to the body without dying, headshots are going to be almost required while using this weapon. Get used to ducking out of cover, sighting an enemy, tapping L1, tapping right on the d-pad to zoom in fully (if necessary), lining up a headshot, firing, then quickly ducking back behind cover. You can continue to hold L1 after firing, but it’s better to let go and wait for it to cool down. It takes too long to fire again in slow-motion, and the cooldown on the timer when it reaches the red zone is pretty lengthy.

You can only carry 12 rounds of ammo for the Fareye, so it’s not something you want to keep firing all the time. It’s best for using against Steelheads, who’ll otherwise screw up your cover with their Auger fire, but you can, of course, take down almost anything that you spot at long distance with it.

XR-005 Hailstorm

Best Against: Hybrids, enemies around corners.

The Hailstorm is an interesting weapon, although "interesting" doesn’t always translate into "overwhelmingly useful". When fired, it sends out a stream of bolts that bounce off of walls and corners until they come into contact with flesh. In theory, this lets you bounce your shots around corners towards enemies, but in practice, the damage done is so light, and the ammo runs out so quickly, that you may as well wait until you have an enemy in your sights and simply fire away at them headon. The damage is still pretty light on a per-bolt basis, but the rapidity of the firing will overwhelm most standard-sized foes.

The alt-fire is a bit more useful. When you hit it, the remainder of your clip will launch into the air, where the bolts will auto-fire at the closest enemies to it, acting as an auto-turret. This lets you, for instance, jump up and launch an auto-turret into the air, where it’ll be able to fire down on enemies in the distance that are hiding behind cover, or fire it into the air near a corner, letting you hang back while it shoots the enemies that are coming at you. There are some drawbacks, though; the turret has a hard time tracking enemies that move at even a modest pace, which will waste some of your ammo, and it won’t prioritize enemies very well, meaning that it’ll often shoot at a close enemy that’s behind cover instead of a more distant enemy that’s exposed. Still, if you store up a goodly amount of ammo for this because you don’t use the auto-fire, you can use this to help clear out some dense concentrations of enemies a bit.

XR-003 Sapper

Best Against: Rollers, Leapers, Slipstreams

Mining paths that you know enemies will be hitting soon is a good way to blow them up.

The Sapper lays organic mines that stick to walls and each other. Each individual mine, when fired, will sit where it’s laid until an enemy comes close, when it will explode. Unfortunately, the individual mines don’t deal much damage, so you’ll have to fire out five to ten of them to take down a Hybrid or a Steelhead. That’s not such a problem, usually, especially if you know that one of them is coming down a hallway or is attempting to rush you, but when coupled with the limited range of the device makes it a weapon best suited to weaker enemies. Laying down a thick layer of mines in front of you when Leapers or Rollers come your way is a great way to eliminate them all without having to waste more valuable ammo.

The L1 button here will detonate any mines in the area when held down, but since they blow up when enemies approach them anyway, this is only really useful if you happen to block off a corridor that you need to pass through or something. Even then, you can shoot the mines to destroy them.

L209 LAARK

Best Against: Large enemies, dense groups of Hybrids or Steelheads.

Every shooter game has to have a rocket launcher: this is a federal law. The L209 LAARK fulfills this requirement for Resistance. When fired normally, it pretty much acts as you suspect it might: a rocket shoots out, impacts whatever you were aiming at, and does a great deal of damage, enough to kill anything in a good-sized radius around the blast zone.

If you fire the rocket and then hold the L1 button, though, you can actually slow the rocket down in midair and re-aim it. You can simply slow it down by lightly pressing the button, or completely stop it by jamming the button all the way down. When you let go of the L1 button, the rocket will immediately take off and fly towards whatever you’re currently aiming at, allowing you to adjust for a missed shot by forcing your rocket to reverse course. Of course, it’s better not to miss the first time.

If you hold down the R1 button after you fire the rocket, the shell will launcher small munitions that will automatically track down and hit individual targets. Useful for dealing with clusters of Hybrids.

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