Too aggressive and you’ll find you don’t last the stage, too passive and your survival will have been simply to achieve a minimal score.
These conditions work together perfectly, forcing a perfect balance of risk and reward. This multiplier will continue to rise until reaching its variable limit, dependent on the difficulty level, unless one of two things happens – your ship is destroyed (achieved after just one hit from an enemy), or you go a few seconds without shooting an enemy/rescuing a human. As you destroy enemy ships, you gain both points and an increase to a multiplier. In fact, the number of points you acquire is the measure on which success is judged not the length of time survived nor how many humans have been saved – although both of those are important aspects to achieving a personal best. Yet the draw is not simply carrying out a rescue operation or blowing up hundreds of enemy ships but instead a desperate struggle for a new high score. The stages have three distinct and increasingly difficult phases, before ending with a boss fight which are often the highlights of the stages, requiring far more acute aiming and increased reactions – although one of the five bosses battles is significantly under par and boring to battle against, as simply flying straight and firing backwards is sufficient for victory.
To satisfy the electronic voice’s command, you need to shoot down all of the ‘Keepers’, at which point a human is set free from their cage, requiring you to find and fly them to safety. Other ships called ‘Keepers’ (identifiable by their fluorescent green tint) instead focus on preventing you from saving the remaining humans. Once the level begins, enemy ships spawn with the primary goal of blowing you up. Each of the five stages begins with an electronic voice (projected through the Dualshock 4’s speaker) telling you to ‘Save the last humans.’ These bright green figures, scattered across the map are locked in transparent cells.
Resogun is a twin stick shooter, played on a circular plane. So let me fill you in on this surprise hit.
This was a mistake, for now, it is my most highly recommended PS4 game. Having never really gotten into twin stick shooters and thinking I’d be dedicating my gaming time to the triple AAA, blockbuster launch titles, it was simply not on my radar. When looking at the admittedly short list of PS4 exclusives before it’s launch, there was one title that I nevertheless managed to pay very little attention to – Resogun.