Arcade enthusiasm and a ceaseless firework sparkle brighten up this shoot 'em up.
It’s no doubt benefited by its enthusiastic emulation of the arcade classic, Defender, but Resogun is an engaging twin-stick shooter regardless. Smart additions and changes to Defender's formula make it one of the more satisfying shoot ‘em ups in recent years. Its hectic arcade gameplay is straightforward, even more so if you’ve played its inspiration.
Defender was a brutal quarter guzzling game of the early arcades. It was a sidescrolling shoot ‘em up in which defending Earth was the name of the game. It was all about shooting aliens, catching almost abducted humans, shooting being abducted humans on accident causing the world to explode, and because they were the last one, it became exclusively about shooting aliens. Well, that and pressing the hyperspace panic button to teleport directly into the aliens causing you to explode like the Earth did just a little bit earlier.
In Resogun, there is no hyperspace panic button, but there is a speed boost, a much more useful alternative. It operates like the power pellet in Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, but instead of consuming ghost trains to get your jollies, you get to plow into everything, suggesting this button might as well turn your ship into Pac-man and your enemies into flashing blue ghosts. Bombs are also useful for getting out of a tight spot, briefly clearing the map of enemies.
Another ability your ship has is called overdrive. Where the speed boost operates on a cooldown, overdrive is built up by collecting green particles generated from destroyed enemies. Once the meter fills up, you can activate overdrive and obliterate the screen.
You have three ships to choose from, each with different weapons and stats. There is a faster speed boost focused ship, a balanced ship and a slower overdrive oriented ship. Weapons are upgraded via pickups over the course of the game so as to balance the increased number and volatility of enemies.
In addition to the shooting and plowing into enemies there is the human element. Just like in Defender protecting the humans isn’t necessary. Unlike Defender, the humans aren’t under your protection all at once. The announcer will say “keepers detected,” a bunch of green flashing enemies will spawn, and upon destroying these enemies a human will be set loose. It is then up to you to pick them up and fly them to a drop off point where they can be permanently saved. Failure to destroy the keepers in time means that human is lost, and neglecting a loose human means they will likely be abducted and turned into a more agro enemy just like in Defender. Good cuing from the announcer and sound effects bring order to the chaotic action, helping this inessential objective and other challenges you might put on yourself become more manageable.
Resogun’s action is spread across five levels, each ending with tense boss encounters and Defender fan service. Functionally, the levels aren’t much different from one another, but they create breaks in the gameplay, elegantly giving you more humans to save and a place to stop or start up. It’s an easy game to pick up and play for a few minutes as well as something you can sit down and play for a couple hours to try and master it.
One of the unusual highlights of Resogun is its difficulty. Something many arcade games or arcade styled games struggle with is balancing difficulty. Games of this breed often don’t accommodate new players very well or the action takes too long to build up for experienced players. With its four settings Resogun accomplishes both. Its rookie difficulty is slowed down enough so that even casual players should be able to beat the game, and its master difficulty will keep the best of players on their toes every step of the way.
It might not have achieved being the flashiest game to launch on a console if it weren’t for all the sparkly firework explosions and pretty particles. However, it probably isn't going to blow any minds. It isn’t Super Mario 64 or Halo, not that it was expected to be, but Resogun fits in on the Playstation 4, similar to how Geometry Wars Retro Evolved did on the Xbox 360 when that launched. It is another solid throwback twin-stick shooter from Housemarque Games. They’ve now done to Defender what they sort of did to Asteroids with Super Stardust HD in 2007 on the PS3, and it’ll be interesting to see that if they keep on this path, what classic games give them inspiration going forward.
