Game review: Resogun for PS4 and PS Vita

After getting my PS4, Resogun was one of the games that was supposed to be at the top of my must-buy list. Being made by Housemarque, makers of the fantastic Vita launch title Super Stardust Delta, and having garnered favorable reviews from so many sites, it stayed in my mind as something I HAD to play. But once I had my PS4, a lot of other bigger games stole my attention. It wasn’t until the release of Resogun on the PS Vita that I decided to get it. Cross-buying an arcade shooter that I could play on the big screen or on the go? Yes, please!

So I played it, and I beat it on the first couple of difficulty levels, and…and now I have no desire to play it anymore. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying as Super Stardust Delta does to me. Keep in mind, now going on three years, and I’m still playing Super Stardust. I have the high scores over all my Vita friends in most modes by a wide margin of several million points, and I still get jazzed when I hit a new high score record.

Why didn’t Resogun hit the same high notes for me? Before I get to that, I want to talk about what it did right. It’s pretty, and the design of the levels on a cylinder is clever and visually appealing. I like how blowing up enemies causes parts of the buildings and the platforms to collapse in a shower of cubes. The music is good, the sound effects are great, and the controls are easy to grasp. That’s about it.

For me, the biggest problem is that the game keeps shouting at me to hurry up, go, go, GO! You rescue humans like Defender, the old-school arcade inspiration for this game, but to rescue the humans requires first waiting for “seeker units” to appear. When this happens you must race around the cylinder to find them NOW. Because if they slip off the screen, the human dies, and you have no chance to go after them without resetting the whole game. The restart doesn’t reset the level, you see, it resets the whole game. To reset just the level requires suicide, which is a little irksome when your goal is to unlock the trophy for saving all the humans.

Sometimes, seekers must be killed in a very specific order, and you may sometimes find that your higher level weapons kill the wrong enemy, so again, dead human, suicide, start over. And okay, sure, you can beat a level with some dead humans, but you can’t unlock the full score bonus without them.

Once a human is freed, you must race to them quickly and pick them up, escorting them to one of two transport beams. If you don’t, they’ll get hoovered up by a flying saucer and be killed. When you kill the seekers, often the energy ball they release to free a human shoots to the opposite side of the cylinder, and if you happened to have used boost to get to the seeker in time, well haha, now you can’t boost to get to the human. You’ll most likely have to fight a few dozen enemies to get over there. It doesn’t help that there are times when two seekers appear right on top of each other, and as I mentioned, you can’t really use boost more than once to get around and take them out. So it becomes exceedingly tedious to kill the seekers, find the humans, and rescue them before they’re beamed up by a flying saucer and probed to death.

As an added gotcha, your weapons will hit humans and launch them into the air. That’s right, your guns and missiles that kill enemy ships will just make the weakling humans fly up into the air and turn flips. Shooting them in mid-air makes them flip higher. Which sounds like fun, right? Well about half the time, this can also launch them off the edge of a platform and into empty space or water. So guess what, even being right there, you can end up killing the human yourself because of this ridiculous form of friendly fire.

Shields in Super Stardust Delta last until you take a hit from an enemy or an asteroid, but in Resogun, they last only a few seconds and then go away. Frankly, it’s fucking pointless, and rarely did I ever lose a shield from an enemy hit. It was much more often that it faded, and two seconds later, when I needed it, I got killed.

There’s a bonus multiplier in Resogun, but unlike in Super Stardust Delta, this thing is on a fast timer, and it’s all or nothing. If you fail to kill an enemy or free a human every five seconds, you lose the whole thing.

So everything in this game is telling you hurry, hurry, hurry, go, go, go! But that’s still mostly okay, except for the fact that there’s this game announcer mentioning all this stuff so fast and so often that the messages overlap. I just wanted her to shut up and let me play the game after just a few levels. In fact, that announcer is a big reason for my burning out on the game so fast. The Vita version has a glitch where the announcer sometimes doesn’t talk because too many other sounds effects are happening, and I found that version preferable because I was so sick of her constant commands.

Then there’s the boss designs. On the first two levels, the bosses are kind of neat, if a bit simplistic. The first is a wheel with outer shields you have to shoot before flying inside to break down the shield of the inner hub while flamethrowers try to pick you off. The second boss…is a wheel, but when you defeat its first form, it has some different tactics that require waiting for the vulnerable points to become available. If you save just one bomb for this point in the stage, one hit is all it takes to wipe out the secondary form. From this point on, all the bosses show a complete lack of imagination. Look out! It’s a CUBE boss! Look out! Its a SPHERE boss! Look…it’s a…a rope? Seriously? It’s like the first two bosses had one team working on their design, and the other three had some bored interns doodling on napkins.

The rest of the enemy designs aren’t all that great, either. There’s ships that hone in on your position and try to attack you Kamikaze-style. But most just sit there, waiting for you to fly around and kill them, and once again, if you don’t do it fast, they upgrade to a gold version with more health and the ability to launch fireballs. None of this is all that exciting to me, and even in the thickest fights, I felt bored.

The game has the option to build your own ship with an editor and share it with others, but no matter what you design, you’re limited to the three weapon systems of the basic model ships. Of these, I preferred the Nemesis weapons, and found the other two ships to be huge pains in my ass. When I found the editor, I was thinking how cool it would be to make my own ship, but my interest quickly died because I couldn’t define the stats or the weapons. I could just give it one of the definitions of the three base ships. It’s a cosmetic change, and it doesn’t give me any reason to keep playing.

Ultimately, that’s the fatal flaw in Resogun for me. With one mode (Endless mode is AWESOME) and one ship design, Super Stardust Delta has a siren song that goes “just one more try” for many long hours. But once I’ve beaten the five bosses of Resogun the first time, I found it a struggle to want to play on higher difficulties with the other ships. It’s not the difficulty that turns me off, but rather how stale the whole thing became for me in just a few hours of playing.

So I’ll give Resogun 3 stars. I want to give it 2, but it’s not broken. It just becomes boring too quickly and isn’t as addictive as I’d hoped. I am still holding out hope for Housemarque’s next PS4 release, Super Stardust Ultra, but Resogun was a disappointment for me. Thankfully, it was fairly cheap, and I didn’t have to invest a lot of time in it before realizing it wasn’t for me.