A brilliant and addictive arcade shooter
Resogun may very likely be the first game that most owners of a PS4 play, it comes for free with PS Plus, a service that most everyone who will be doing significant gaming on their console will probably pick up. It's an arcade shooter, very much in the vein of Super Stardust HD from the PS3 launch. The fact that the same development team worked on Resogun is very apparent, and that is by no means a bad thing.
The core gameplay of Resogun has you flying your ship on a 2D plane circular plane mapped around a 3D core, destroying enemies and collecting upgrades/points/bombs. The gameplay is very fast, requiring usage of a temporary invincibility boost, similar to Super Stardust, in order to escape sticky situations and keep your combo multiplier going. Since this is a game about points at its core, keeping that multiplier up is very important. While I am not generally one to go in for arcadey games that are purely about points, Resogun manages to make the process of chasing points feel extremely rewarding. The fear of losing my multiplier always kept me pushing myself to kill faster and more efficiently in order to rack up larger and larger combos.
A twist in the gameplay comes in the forms of Keepers and Humans. Periodically Keepers, glowing green enemies, will spawn and must be killed to release one of the ten trapped humans in the level. Some of these Keepers will stay on the level, some will attempt to escape the level, and some must be killed in a specific order. Failure to kill the Keepers in time or in the correct order will result in the execution of one of the humans. Once a human is free, you must pick him up within a certain time and deposit him back at one of the rescue pods. Doing so can get you weapon upgrades, extra lives, point boosts, or more. As this is one of the main ways to get new lives or bombs, the humans should always be one of your highest priorities in the level.
Each level is crowned by a boss fight, which unfortunately are maybe one of the more underwhelming parts of the game. None of the bosses were particularly complicated or challenging, with maybe the giant wheel boss from the second level posing the greatest obstacle. The fourth level boss hardly even required I move up or down, just fly away and shoot behind me until he died.
The game plays fantastically, it feels very smooth and responsive, which is incredibly important for an action arcade game. It looks amazing, but never gets so flashy on screen that you lose track of where you are. Colour coding of things seems fairly important to know what is safe/good (green things) or what is dangerous (mostly anything orange/red) so I would be a bit concerned for colour blind gamers.
All-in-all, this is a great pickup for anyone just getting a PS4. It doesn't offer a ton of stages or variety, though experienced Resogun players (Resogunners?) could milk a lot of content from trying to save every Human in each level or racking up higher and higher multipliers. It may be a tough sell at $15 if you don't have PS Plus; however, as you really should get Plus anyway, it is well worth playing for the low low price of Free.
