Resogun Heroes: An Expansion Worth Your Time

Resogun is a downloadable game that a lot of PlayStation 4 owners have enjoyed since it launched along with the PS4 last year. While it’s not available on PlayStation Plus anymore, its success and popularity has been greatly aided by many gamers being able to experience it at no additional cost.

Now we have Resogun Heroes, the first of at least two DLC expansions planned, and it comes with a €4.99/$4.99 price tag. It’s worth noting that a fairly significant patch came just prior to the release of Heroes and includes a ship creation system, new leaderboards, and a host of minor changes to the aesthetics of both the menus and gameplay. That patch is available now for anyone who owns the game.

On the surface, Heroes appears to include just two new game modes but the expansion actually goes much deeper than that. New enemies, new music, and a few other goodies are thrown in along with the two new ways to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b81NrqN8L4

The first is Demolition, and it’s unlike anything you’ve experienced in Resogun before. There are no guns, no overdrive, and no boosts. Instead, you have a constantly charging bomb at your disposal with varying degrees of lethality, depending on how long you charge it. To go along with the bomb, there’s a large ball on the map that can be blasted in any direction with your bomb, destroying almost anything it touches (including you), with the goal of racking up as many points as you can.

I enjoyed Demolition the least of the two new modes and I often felt helpless without a consistent way to defend myself against homing enemy ships. The mode forces you to take an agile and strategy-heavy approach as opposed to constantly shooting what you see, but the screen eventually becomes so packed with enemies that – without a more consistent way clear foes and obstacles from your path – it can be very difficult just to make it around the map to wherever the ball stopped.

That said, if you’re looking for something a little different from the standard Resogun formula of just flying around the map and shooting whatever you see while rescuing an occasional human, Demolition might be your cup of tea.

Survival is the second of the two modes and it pretty much makes Heroes worth a purchase on its own. In Survival, you take on waves of increasingly difficult enemies while trying to save as many humans as you can, and there are a ton of them. However, rescuing humans works a bit differently this time around. You don’t have to take them back to a base after you have them in your grasp, and they don’t break out of small cages anymore. Instead, the majority of them fall from the sky, with others being directly released from the highlighted Keepers that roam the map as they did in the regular game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTNPhvUT62U

Aside from rescuing humans, Survival sees you trying to stave off death for as many days as you can, while accumulating as many points as you can along the way.  A full day/night cycle is included, and the challenge winds up within just a few minutes of spawning. Although you can build up shields that don’t expire over time, the intensity is aided by your restriction of only one life. If you die, you start back from square one. That may sound a little off-putting but there are a couple of bonuses Housemarque added to aid you, such as a ship massacring and ridiculously fun to use supercharge mode (seen in the video above), as well as several random bomb and power pickups.

Accumulating massive amounts of points has a bit of a different feel in Survival. Whereas in the standard game the ticket to hitting the top of the leaderboards was never letting your multiplier drop, only having one life means that is not a concern in Survival. Instead, the path of least of resistance is saving all those humans, and they’re tossed at you very frequently. Along with the new enemies, audio, and the cycling background scenery, this created just enough of a change to really make it feel like I was playing something fresh.

For the price, Heroes is a worthy expansion, even with the Demolition mode falling short of a great time. Survival is where the fun is, and it brings with it enough bells, whistles, and scream-out-loud moments to make the whole ride worth it. If you enjoyed the stock game, you likely won’t regret jumping back in and playing the hero once again.