As you unwrap your shiny new Playstation 4 you’ll find a card giving you a 30 day trial of Playstation Plus. Redeem the card and Resogun will be your reward. There are other games currently available for free on PSPlus but they might be better off forgotten and unlike those games Resogun is actually probably worth the asking price once the Playstation Plus offer expires.
Resogun is colorful and absolutely stunning to look at.
In Resogun you take command of one of three spaceships and are tasked with rescuing the remnants of humanity across five different missions. The game is an arcade style shooter which means most of your time spent playing is meant to be working on getting a high score rather than crawling through a large mass of levels.
Developer, Housemarque, is no stranger to hyper stylized arcade shooters with games like Super Stardust HD and Dead Nation resting in their list of past achievements. Resogun changes things up slightly in that the gameplay doesn’t take place on a flat square level but is instead shifted to a cylinder that you rotate your ship around. Much like Dead Nation and Stardust you control your ship with the left analog stick while firing your weapons with the right.
So how do you get that sweet high score? Well by shooting enemies of course. Resogun implements a fairly standard score multiplier which increases as you kill enemies and can be lost if you go too long without mowing an opponent down. Your overall goal on each mission is to rescue humans who you first have to free by taking out certain enemy types called “Keepers”. Once you destroy a fleet of Keepers a human will be released from one of the boxes on screen. It’s your job to scoop them up and carry them to safety before your enemies wipe them out. Once a set number of humans have either been rescued or killed it will be time to take on the stage’s boss.
Your mileage may vary with boss battles. The first two are almost identical to one another and while a couple in the middle look like they might sport a unique weakness, ultimately the battles all basically just boil down to “shoot at the boss and don’t get hit in the process”.
There are a couple power ups available to you as you play. Weapon upgrades can be found on the map and will sometimes be given as a reward for rescuing humans. Your ship also has an “Overdrive” mode which greatly amplifies the power of your gun for a set amount of time. And lastly if things are looking particularly dire you have a bomb at your disposal that will wipe out every enemy on the screen. For the most part it’s pretty standard stuff for this type of game.
Although gameplay in Resogun is simple enough but there are a couple little details that aren’t explained very well. When I started playing I knew I needed to rescue humans but I didn’t fully understand how. Could they be killed while they were trapped in their boxes? Did I have to do something special to free them from the boxes? You can pick all this up pretty quickly, especially by reading the digital manual that comes with the game so it’s not the end of the world, instead it’s just something that could have been streamlined better.
Bosses are cool but don’t really offer much in the way of variety.
Resogun is almost certainly the best game in the PS4’s launch line-up but that really says more about the PS4 than anything else. Despite a few minor hang ups the game is a lot of fun and stunning to look at. The real question for me is how far you’re going to want to take things. This particular type of game isn’t for everybody. If you’re looking for a wealth of content or a plot of some kind this isn’t the game for you. I saw pretty much everything Resogun had to offer me in just a few hours of play. But if you’re the competitive type who loves to crawl up the leaderboards and show up your friends Resogun is almost certainly your ticket.
