It's been a while since I played a game that was anything like this so I commend their attempts to recapture a retro arcade style game with modern sound and graphics. That being said, this game gets repetitive and dare I say, boring, pretty quickly.
Just a quick catchup for anyone just joining us: I drunkenly signed up for the upgraded PlayStation Plus plan a few weeks ago and the next day didn't even remember that I had done it. I suddenly found myself with access to around 100 games that I previously didn't have access to. There is no chance I was ever going to be able to play all of these games in their entirety so instead I decided that I wouldn't even try to do that. Instead, I am going to devote at least an hour to them and if they manage to grab my attention and keep it through good game design, I will stick around for longer. Unfortunately, this has only happened with a handful of titles that I have tried and you can see those detailed at the end of this post.
I am bypassing AAA studios and instead going for indie titles or at least lessor-known games. This is how I ended up trying Resogun, which is a game that I almost certainly wouldn't have tried otherwise.
Like all games that I play, I went into this one having absolutely zero idea what it was about. I presumed it had something to do with a spaceship based on the logo. What I found inside is a rather simple game that functions in a very similar fashion to a truly retro classic named Defender. There are humans that are being kidnapped or killed by alien forces and you alone are charged with stopping this from happening. Many years have passed since Defender was released, so obviously there are a lot of improvements.
The game mixes things up by having a wide variety of enemies come at you and as the game progresses it seems as though almost the entire screen is filled up at all times either with enemies or bullets from said enemies. In this regard I feel as though Resogun could be classified as a "bullet hell" game but only a bit later in the game.
It's difficult to tell by that screenshot but it actually IS possible to make it through that without getting touched.
You are operating around a column of sorts and if you go far enough to the right you will emerge on the left and vice-versa. At least as far as I played in my 1.5 hours or so, I never encountered anything that was blocking my path in either direction and since the enemies must be dispatched before they disappear, it doesn't really matter which way you choose to go. The only reason why you would ever choose one direction over the other is because you are alerted that a human is being captured and you need to get there to save them as soon as possible.
I always play single-player and even after years of having a PS4 and a PS Plus account I only have a handful of online friends. This could be part of the reason why I tired of this game so quickly since it is an arcade-style game where getting the top score is more important than your overall progression. This sort of high-score competition on a global scale has never interested me since I will never be as good at these games as Japanese teenagers.
While I haven't looked it up, the game plays and feels an awful lot like Matterfall and the chase for a top score is a big part of the reason why I feel this way.
The boss fights are creative and interesting, which is something that original Defender never had. Resogun also has powerups that you get to keep most of even if you die. While I didn't play the game long enough to confirm this, I suspect that you get to continue for as long as you want to since most of the people that play this game for any longer amount of time are probably going to be chasing high scores.
For me, I lost interest in the game after 90 minutes or so and have already deleted it from my hard drive. While I do appreciate the effort in reawakening a nearly forgotten arcade-style concept, it just isn't going to have enough variety to hold the interest of most players. I can't recommend this game to anyone unless they enjoy chasing leaderboards in what I consider to be an otherwise quite repetitive game.
