Resistance: Burning Skies is the only Resistance game built for the PlayStation Vita, and it is the last one Sony has made. Nihilistic Software developed it. Sony Computer Entertainment published it in 2012. It is a first-person shooter, single player and multiplayer, and it puts you behind the eyes of Tom Riley, a New York fireman who spends the Chimera’s invasion of the East Coast trying to find his wife and daughter.
Six outlets aggregated to a 6.5 out of 10 on IGDB. That number is fair, and this review lands on it. Burning Skies is a competent handheld shooter with one real idea — the Vita’s dual analog sticks — and not enough around it to be more than that.
Trailer, via Gamesplace-se.
Tom Riley and Engine 174
The story opens with Riley riding through Staten Island with Engine 174. They pull up to a power station that is in flames. Inside, Tom falls through a broken floor and drops into the lower levels, cut off from the rest of his crew.
When he climbs back up, he watches a fireman get attacked and killed by Longlegs. He fights his way out and rescues Smitty, the only other survivor. Then the two of them step into the streets of Staten Island and find the Chimeran invasion in full swing.
That is a good opening. A fireman is the right hero for this series, because the Chimera story has always been about ordinary people caught under something larger than they can stop. Riley does not want to win a war. He wants his family.
The premise is set on August 14, 1951, one month after the liberation of the United Kingdom. The Chimera hit the East Coast of the United States. William C. Dietz wrote the story. He also wrote the novels Resistance: The Gathering Storm and Resistance: A Hole in the Sky, so the series’ fiction is in steady hands here.
Ellie Martinez and the Minutemen
Riley picks up a broadcast asking him to help with an evacuation. He follows the directions and meets Ellie Martinez, who leads a group called the Minutemen. Her ally Mac fights alongside them.
The three of them push toward a highway bridge, where Tom finds his wife Natalie and his daughter Rachel. He sends them to safety and promises to find them again. More Chimera arrive. Riley stays behind with Ellie to buy the survivors time.
Along the way, the two of them find a shipment in a military truck called Gray Tech. It upgrades their weapons. The shipment was being sent to Richard Gorrell. Then an Executioner attacks, and Tom and Ellie destroy it and escape a bombardment of Spires and Crawlers.
They reach a military base in Bayonne, New Jersey. Ellie introduces Tom to Colonel George Amherst, who tells him his family has been sent to a Protection Camp.
That is where the source material stops, and it is also where the game’s storytelling problem starts. Burning Skies has a reunion, a promise, a mystery shipment and a colonel with news, and it moves through all of them at the same speed. Nothing lands hard. The family is the whole point of Riley, and the game keeps them at arm’s length.
Six Maps, Three Modes, Eight Players
Burning Skies carries competitive online multiplayer for eight players. There are six maps and three modes.
- Deathmatch
- Team Deathmatch
- Survival
The weapon wheel returns, a staple of the series. So do the Carbine, the Deadeye, the Auger and the Bullseye. Secondary functions on those weapons are often handled through the Vita’s touchscreen.
The multiplayer is the part that holds up best, mostly because it asks the least of the story. Eight players, six maps, three modes is a thin offer by console standards, but on a handheld in 2012 it was a real one. The weapon wheel gives the combat a shape, and the returning guns give series fans something they already know how to use.
The Dual Analog Sticks
Burning Skies was built specifically for the Vita, and the pitch was the dual analog sticks. That matters more than it sounds. Before the Vita, handheld shooters were stuck with one stick or none, and aiming was the thing that always suffered.
Here, aiming works. That is the single strongest argument for the game. It is the reason Burning Skies exists at all, and it is the reason the firefight in the power station and the run through Staten Island feel like a console shooter squeezed down rather than a compromise.
The touchscreen is the weaker half of the control scheme. Mapping secondary weapon functions to taps and swipes is a solution to a problem the sticks had already solved. It is not broken. It is just not the reason to play.
Gray Tech and the Executioner
The Gray Tech shipment is the one piece of plot the game bothers to make mechanical. Picking it up lets Tom and Ellie upgrade their weapons. The shipment was headed to Richard Gorrell, which is the closest Burning Skies comes to a conspiracy.
Then the Executioner shows up. It is the campaign’s biggest fight, and it works because the game finally asks you to use the aiming the Vita made possible. The escape from the Spires and Crawlers that follows is the campaign’s high point.
That the game’s best sequence is also its most conventional is the problem in miniature. Burning Skies can stage a set piece. It just cannot find a reason for this one to matter to Tom Riley.
A Spin-Off With Nowhere to Go
Resistance: Burning Skies is a spin-off, and as of 2026 it is the most recent installment of the Resistance series. That is the fact that hangs over the whole thing.
A spin-off is supposed to be free to try something. Burning Skies tries the Vita. It does not try much else. The campaign is short, the hero is new but the beats are familiar, and the multiplayer is a small version of what the console games already did better.
None of that makes it bad. It makes it small. Nihilistic Software got the shooting right on hardware that had no right to shoot this well, and then built a story around it that never quite earns its own stakes.
What 6.5 Out of 10 Means Here
The IGDB critic aggregate is 6.5 out of 10 across six outlets. That is the right score, and it is worth saying why rather than just repeating it.
Burning Skies is not a failure. The dual analog sticks work, the weapon wheel works, and eight-player online multiplayer on a Vita works. Tom Riley is a better protagonist than the campaign gives him room to be, and the opening at the power station is the best stretch in the game.
Key facts
- Release year: 2012
- Developer: Nihilistic Software
- Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
- Platform: PlayStation Vita
- Genre: First-person shooter
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer (eight players)
- Maps: six
- Multiplayer modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Survival
- Story by: William C. Dietz
- Setting: August 14, 1951, East Coast of the United States
- IGDB critic aggregate: 6.5/10 (six outlets)
The score is not a knock on the hardware experiment. It is a knock on everything the experiment was asked to carry. A spin-off lives or dies on whether its new angle justifies the trip, and Burning Skies’ new angle is a control scheme. That is a thin reason to build a game around, and the campaign never finds a second one.
The most recent Resistance game is a Vita shooter about a fireman looking for his family. That is a strange place for a series to stop, and it is a stranger place for it to stop well. Burning Skies is playable, and on the Vita that was not nothing. It is also the last word the series has gotten.
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