RESOLUTIION
Sharpen up your cyberware and get cracking
Fractured. Strange. Surreal. The world of Resolutiion is what we imagine goes on inside a computer when you spill blue raspberry Panda Pop on it – something unnatural worming its way into the chips and wires. In this future where biology and technology have become almost synonymous, you play an old killer tasked with guiding an AI, Alibii, to unravel “the mystery of the Cradles”.
Exploring this grim cyberpunk world takes place from a top-down perspective, where you’re relatively small on the screen. Not only does this allow you to grasp the often-frantic action when you’re under attack, it also shows you the unnerving scale of the world, filled with unsettling structures. Whether they’re monuments to gods or the last remains of giants is unnervingly unclear. The lo-fi pixel-art is like an extra-detailed version of the earliest PC graphical user interfaces, simple geometry built into a distorted world.
HACK AND SLASH
Holding q lets you use your energy meter (which recharges passively) to Accelerate, leaving an after-image behind yourself as though you’re a computer window being dragged around too quickly. You also use energy to fire weapons, so you need to spend it wisely, but tough encounters will require you to get out of the way of large attacks or dodge through bullet-helllike situations, so Accelerate is a valuable skill.
You have a simple melee attack combo that doesn’t require energy, but you do have to get close to your foes to use it. In our hands-on we get to grips with the Calmer (a rifle that fires in three directions), the Resolver (a Gatling gun), and Stardust (a parasitic virus bomb that can devour obstacles, enabling us to progress).
After exploring a large desert we end up in a treacherous cave system. Following thorough exploration we hit the switches required to clear a path ahead. Most of the enemies are unpredictable and more than a little creepy, but if you die and respawn at a checkpoint (cue what we’re sure is an ancient PC boot sample), common enemies stay dead. It’s hard, but you can master these environments a little at a time, and while the boss fights put us to the test in our time with the game, checkpoints are handily placed and we uncover shortcuts to make returning to boss rooms a lot quicker.
We spend a good two hours fighting through Resolutiion’s strange world, and at the end of that time we feel like we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, we’re still keen to explore the mysteries behind the strange cults and techno-religions. It’s time to wash the fizzy pop off our DualShocks and prepare to log in.
“IT’S HARD, BUT YOU CAN MASTER THESE ENVIRONMENTS A LITTLE AT A TIME.”