I love the arcade style games, so I’m definitely looking forward to Resogun. This title is reminiscent of shooters like Super Stardust and Defender but has that next gen flair to it. At Pax Prime in August, I watched Vourtron play this one over and over again. If I can’t stop watching other people play this game, how am I going to stop playing it myself? He was so impressed with it, he wrote it up (see below).
Resogun is a PS4 exclusive and free with Playstation Plus.
RESOGUN
Of course, I was just in my 3rd year of my annual shmup search at PAX. First year found Sina Mora (Xbox 360) and Jamestown (on Steam, which doesn’t even work on my netbook so GMAFB). The next year was… NOTHING. This year, is was just shy of nothing with RESOGUN. It ain’t a shmup, of course, since you ain’t going nowhere to do nothing, but as a borderliner shmup*, it was the hottest and shmuppiest action possible, shooting left and right only- not an arena feel at all.
To describe the game exactly…. Defender, the old arcade game. To flesh out the defender a little more, here’s a list:
1. Defender has one moment, the player death, that wow’s the player with a pixel firework of epic rainbow proportions where individual pixel sparks expand in a, well, firework explosion. The art direction for Resogun IS that single phenomenon, combined with dark and glowy space shit mostly resembling driving by an oil refinery after being maced. Everything explodes in a subtly, yet screen filling firework. Each one of those fireworks, as an homage to the pixels of the defender source, is an incredible particle-physics-gasm of tiny squares. Yes, everything is reduced to it’s “Pixels”, or TINY glossy HD squares tumbling and casting about. Shmup enthusiasts will also recall boss explosions from Cave’s Dangun Feveron as they are admiring this glorification of the individual pixel. If you beat the boss and finish the level, the entire environment begins to explode and crumble into a chaos and CLOUD of these tiny HD cubes.
2. The level is a spindle, say, a few miles around at high speed, floating in space, like a key-chain-sized spaceship hovering over and zipping around the perimeter of a kiddie wading pool, side view, with said oil refinery type buildings rising from the rim.
3. You shoot and travel left and right, (it IS Defender), and shoot enemies as they spawn hither and thither throughout the level. If you kill all waves of enemies, a boss comes next. In the demo’s case (one level), it was a giant wheel rollin’ around the track, that I had to open up a path into, hover inside of, and shoot the f@$&ing core, all while it slowly spun towards me, and around me, menacingly.
4. All destroyed enemies cast of a shower of green “pixels” that you have to collect to raise your score multiplier*, which drops to zero if you wait too long before the next. I don’t remember a strict Mars Matrix style timer, more like a Dino Crisis fade out (can’t remember exactly)- for a steady chain, it would be just shy of Mars Matrix cube collecting intensity level, I imagine. Actually, if you point blanked throughout the level, you’d just suck the cubes in till infinity. I couldn’t get on the scoreboard at all on account of crappy chains, so this is the main thing for shure.
5. You’ve got two buttons for special moves: one is an indestructible dash (which would at first be considered a cop out to the traditional shmupper), And the other is a Super Laser, that doesn’t lend indestructibility, but does stop bullets and kills everything. It’s surely designed so you can launch both those at once, and then zip around the ring as an indestructible angel of points and death at just the right moment (so maybe it’s not a cop out). Meters for both of those charge up as you collect the greens and kill bad guys or something. You know, I think it’s designed to attempt to dodge and play like a regular shmup, and then to just point-gasm out at the right moment. I never could plan ahead for that perfectly-timed release of white lasers and hyper-speed at the same time around the rim.
6. You’ve also got a super bomb that you can drop in a pinch, that launches a thundery explosion shockwave that travels left and right- ALL THE WAY AROUND, to pinch together far in the background on the other side of the circle. Enemies also spawn back there, so seeing them and zipping around to get them is a big part of the gameplay.
7. Like defender, UFO’s come down to carry space-suited little guys away- if you rescue one and pick him/her up, you can drop them off at a glowy beam station and double your firepower from one needle to two or three. Straight needle shot all the way, baby!
8. The controller is: all four Left and Right shoulder buttons for bombs, lasers, Dash, and spaceman chuck (!), and DUAL STICK for move and shoot. The demo had no option to configure joypad and buttons for move and shoot. That is my only criticism of the game- the twin sticks sucks, and is the only thing the brings it down to the arena-shooter feel. If I could of used pad and buttons, I would have been very comfortable. Twin sticks is such a stupid move. I can see that they were going with a very futuristic “flight grip” kind of feel, as the twin sticks plus all shoulder buttons would feel VERY cohesive in a twitchy “dance of death” kind of way (once you’re fingers have memorized what does what), and the game is VERY fast-paced, with enemies just spawning and rushing everywhere- and on that note, it’s got some “bullet hell” stuff, but dodging a rare and meandering bullet is the same as dodging just-spawned and meandering enemy craft. So it’s really a clusterf$%k of explosion and collision, rather than the dodge of the bullet spread. But the game NEEDS an option for pad and button control for any precise dodging of anything, lest it just become a bomb and rush fest. Perhaps the finished game will have that option. Besides that major detail, the game is just fantastic (based on the first level). The twin stick and all shoulder buttons approach makes it feel like you’re holding some Cronenberg organic blob from Existenz. I want clicks, dude!
9. The crowd sucked at the Resogun booth! It was very hard for people to take turns on a game where you can loose all three lives in 15 seconds. I should also mention that the company’s previous project was “asteroids played around the surface of a sphere” (the company is Helsinki, Finland’s Housemarque- the game is Super Stardust. They are one of Finland’s oldest video game companies.)
-Dagobot
Get at me on twitter: @markdago
Like me on THE Facebook: facebook.com/markdagoraps
Download my latest EP for free: markdago.bandcamp.com
Listen to MY podcast http: http://poppundits.libsyn.com