Boosting makes for a shooter with an extremely strong racing line and reveals the ingenious choreography of Housemarque's wave design. It also tempts you back to that deadly, thrilling boost, which allows you to chug through foes with impunity as long as it lasts - and can itself be chained for surprisingly long periods of time if your aim is true. The multiplier ensures you stay close to the centre of the action, and it encourages you to use smart bombs and your super-powered overdrive weapon only when you really need to, although you may wish you could use the former more frequently - they look amazing as they ripple all the way around the curved edges of the drum. As you zip around, you're trying to keep that combo fed by chaining kills together, and real defeat comes not with the loss of a ship, but with the withering of a x10 booster in an empty sector of space. Work your way up through the ranks, though, and you'll start to realise that it's where the whole thing comes alive. On easy settings, you'd be just about forgiven for missing the game's simple multiplier system entirely. Humans are far from the only element in Resogun that's eager to lead you to ruin. Different ships balance agility, boost and overdrive power. Play it safe, on the other hand, and you'll never know just how useful that specific something could have been. It's all so treacherous! Fight the odds and navigate the hordes and you could get something really useful. Miss them and they'll quickly be abducted. Picking up humans and returning them to a hub - you can even throw them to safety, like you're scoring a basket - will grant you a power-up: shields, perhaps, or a weapon upgrade. Let these greenies live and your humans die in prison hunt them down before they disappear and they'll unleash a trail of light that zips across the map, pinpointing a little escapee freshly in need of a lift. It only frees them when you blast specific sets of enemies, highlighted in green, who warp onto the map at regular intervals. Resogun keeps its flesh-and-blood collectables in cages like they're working shifts at some infernal sci-fi nightclub. Often what you're missing is your humans getting killed by aliens. The side-scrolling levels are wrapped drum-like around a central hub, not because it's a cool effect (although it is), but so that you can always see what's going on elsewhere in the map - so that you can see what you're missing out on, and so that the frantic design can tempt you away from your safety zone. Situational awareness is the key to mastery here. Although you can race through the game on the rookie setting, firing blindly as you go, to work your way across harder difficulties or to get a proper foothold on the high-score table you're going to need to pay attention to the near-ceaseless stream of information lobbed back at you - much of it coming via a calm computer voice that updates you through the speaker in the DualShock 4. This balancing of risks powers almost all of Resogun's central thrills, in fact. You can see just how gorgeous Resogun looks in this Let's Play. Resogun opts for a chainable boost instead - a calculated, educated risk for a game packed full of calculated, educated threats. Just look at the finer detailing: Defender could offer you a nutty mechanic like a random hyperspace jump because it was fighting anarchy with anarchy. They're zipping around in polite formations they're warping in from Namco's galaxies rather than Williams'. Resogun's 2D levels definitely scroll, you can shoot backwards and forwards, and you can even protect dinky, neon-green humans from abduction in between all the explosions, but Housemarque's enemies exist in a world of hectic predictability. Defender's handful of mechanics were shaken into vivid life by regular jolts of chaos as the flockers and the baiters wove mysterious paths through the scrolling levels. If Super Stardust HD was Housemarque's twist on Robotron, then Resogun must be its Defender, right? It makes for a pleasing narrative: the hardware's moving forwards, but the Finnish arcade masters are clearly headed in the opposite direction, working their way ever deeper into Eugene Jarvis' cherished past. Resogun may be the secret star of the PS4 launch line-up - a shooter built with energy, precision and voxels.
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