Fail to kill a group of keepers? The human dies in its box, laying dead for the remainder of the level, a reminder of your failure.Ī bar sits at the bottom of the screen charting your progress.

If you die while carrying a human the human dies with you. Miss the point and the human will fall to its death. There is an option to toss the human, but this can be dangerous. After you grab a human you need to fly it to one of two extraction points. They can be blown off an edge or, if you take too much time, abducted by a flying saucer. Freed humans always walk along the ground, immune to enemies and weapons. Take too much time and the arrow will start blinking red. When a human is released a green arrow guides you toward it. Later levels turn up the heat by forcing you to destroy keepers in a specific order. Fail to do so and the human dies, lost forever. Destroy the whole group and a human is freed, blasted out of its box by a green bolt. The speaker in the Playstation 4 controller announces their arrival: “keepers have been detected.” Their flight path is mapped as a glowing trail prior to their spawning. A level will have ten groups of special green glowing enemies called keepers, each group tied to a specific human. Coming out of boost results in a spherical explosion, the more enemies you fly through the bigger the charge.Įnemies spawn in groups, or fleets, with different weapons, flight patterns, toughness, and abilities. Boost is a speed buff granting temporary invulnerability. Overdrive is a massive sustained laser blast, fleeting but destructive, tearing through whatever it hits. Bombs issue a shockwave clearing the level in all directions. The primary weapon upgrades over time as you rescue humans and snag power-ups. Your ship is equipped with a primary weapon, a few bombs, and two special abilities: overdrive and boost. Like all great shmups the difficulty acts as an additional multiplier. Three difficulty levels are offered upfront - rookie, experienced, and veteran - with a fourth, master, behind an unlock. The decision of which ship to pick is one of many ways to alter the gameplay. You have a choice of three starfighters - Nemesis, Ferox, or Phobos - each with their strengths and weaknesses. A level is large enough that traversal from one pole to the other - marked by floating extraction points in the sky - takes some time but small enough that you see exactly what’s happening in every direction, even through the level to the opposite side. Each of Resogun’s five levels - Acis, Ceres, Decima, Febris, and Mefitis - is shaped like a drum, or cylinder, wrapping around the backdrop of a city or complex. Resogun’s innovations are simple but brilliant. I find it fitting that at the dawn of this new generation Sony has decided to anchor its launch to a bedrock gaming experience: the score chase.

Not only is it the best of Sony’s Playstation 4 exclusives, it may be the best game on the entire system. It is developer Housemarque’s reimagining of the 80s arcade classic Defender. I finish off a wave of keepers and a green bolt shoots halfway across the level, shattering the glass box of human number 10.Īfter the jump, the disastrous rescue of human number 10. The Nemesis is an agile messenger of destruction spitting bright colored death. My main cannons are upgraded, homing missiles unlocked. The Nemesis knows their flight path well. Green glowing keepers materialize with a warning. Tanks and cannons launch fire into the sky. Fleets of voxel sentients patrol in patterns. Human prisoners are held in glass boxes elevated above a crumbling cylindrical cityscape. Scouting reports call Acis a “derelict city run by the species known only as the sentients,” its primary function “a prisoner processing compound.” The city looks like a collapsing Atlantis, the light an aquatic blue. I’m encircling the darkened dystopia of Acis in the starfighter Nemesis.

Resogun mefitis