Sony’s PlayStation 4 may be the newest console on the market, but even they know that good old school game play never goes out of style. This is evidenced in the excellent Resogun which is a download only title that was launched with the PlayStation 4. It was developed by Housemarque, who also developed the excellent Super Stardust HD for the PlayStation 3. Many companies think that to make an old school game, you have to make the graphics look pixelated, add 8-bit chip tune music, and make the game frustratingly hard. Housemarque understands that good classic games are simple to play, but give you different options once you start playing them. In Pac-Man you can eat the dots to clear the level, or take your chances by going for the bonus fruit in the middle, or devise a strategy to eat as many ghosts as you can. This is why these classics are still fun to play 30+ years later.
Resogun is a horizontally scrolling 2D shoot-em-up. Your goal is to defeat the enemies, and save the humans, and defeat the enemy aliens. You move your ship with the left analog stick or d-pad, and you can shoot either forward or backward by using the right analog stick. There is a “boost” button that makes your ship move faster, and makes you invincible. Other buttons are for a bomb that destroys everything on screen, and an overdrive button that supercharges your weapon, and slows everything down. Obviously all these powers are limited, so you’ll have to wait for your boost to recharge, pick up bomb powerups, and recharge your overdrive by collecting the green things that appear when you defeat an enemy. There are large bosses to defeat at the end of each stage.
The game starts off really slowly with just a couple of enemies on screen, but quickly becomes chaotic, especially on the later levels, and higher difficulties. Because of this, it took me a while to figure out how to save the humans. What I found out is that whenever you hear your controller say “keepers detected”, that means that one of the 10 humans on the stage is in danger of being attacked. The enemies that are glowing neon green are the ones who are planning on attacking a human, and you have to destroy these enemies before they do so. The thing is that you don’t know where these enemies are, so if you want to save the human, you’ll have to frantically search for them, and risk crashing into another enemy. After these enemies are destroyed, the human is released from his cage, and you then have to pick him up off the ground, and carry him to the mothership at the top of the screen. You can also choose to ignore the humans, and just try to keep defeating the enemies in your current vicinity in order to keep your score multiplier going, because your multiplier will reset if you don’t keep constantly killing aliens.
When I say the game is a 2D game, I only mean that the game play itself takes place on a 2D axis. You can move left, right, up, or down. The graphics are definitely 3d, and look great. There is a lot of neon colours, and the hugest explosions I’ve ever seen in a game. When you defeat a boss, the entire stage explodes into pixels, and the voice in your controller appropriately calls it “armageddon.” The speaker in the Dualshock 4 controller is put to good use here. The announcements of “keepers detected”, “human in danger”, etc., are really important to playing the game, and might be lost if they were merely coming through your TV speaker. Besides that it’s just cool to hear voices coming out of the controller. To keep the game play fresh, there are 5 stages to unlock, different ships that you can use, and 4 difficulty levels to cater to all skill levels. There may not be many games on the PlayStation 4 at the moment, but you’re not going to be concerned about that when playing this awesome game.