Resogun Review: Side-scrolling shoot 'em up perfection
Developed by Finnish developer Housemarque and published by Sony, Resogun was one of the earliest confirmed launch titles for the PlayStation 4 leading up to its release.
Resogun is the spiritual successor to Defender, a side-scrolling arcade game in which the player controls a 2D ship across the surface of a planet, navigating either left or right through the terrain as they take out alien invaders. The main aim is to save humans on the surface of the planet throughout that alien challenge.
Resogun, for the most part, follows that exact gameplay: navigate your ship either left or right, taking out a plethora of different enemies and ultimately saving as many humans as you can as you progress onto the left level, which will increase in difficulty each time. Each level also has a boss that you must fight and win against in order to progress.
In terms of enemies, Resogun prides itself in throwing them at you, with there being a specific way of manoeuvrability the player can take in order to successfully destroy and avoid them. The enemies contain different movement rails and abilities that add the difficulty of avoiding and killing them all without taking a few hits yourself - this is where you must remember that lives are not easy to get, and you must attempt to save them for the much harder task: defeating the bosses.
Bosses are the ultimate challenge: they contain various weak points that the player must exploit in order to defeat them, but the boss will throw out everything it can at you, leading to some bullet-rain hell that can have you essentially running on autopilot for minutes to ensure you make no mistakes, of course, the difficulty you chose at the start can make the bosses even harder, but still very much fun.
Resogun is your typical arcade-like game, with gameplay reigning high over narrative, and it definitely manages to hold itself up against games of the same genre. It's available on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita.