Resolutiion (English) · Test

Bizarre, Brutal and Classic Playstyle

Resolutiion is an action-adventure utilizing classic 2D sprites pixel art that reminds you of a time before the NES. This is only about the visual style because there’s a lot of detail and elaborate animation despite the smallish size of the characters. In terms of gameplay, Zelda might be the most well-known genre example of exploring, finding equipment to open up new areas. It also comes with a bizarrely unique world and a story that has to be put together piece by piece.

An adventure in a dystopic cyberpunk world

The story begins with your main characters' childhood memories of playing football/soccer with others. By moving to the right, you get ripped out of the memory and find yourself awake in a mechanical body. Suddenly, you find yourself in an unreal feeling place full of technology but devoid of human presence.

With your memories gone, your first goal is to find the Ai Alibi who is going to be your guide for the mission to quench the terrorist rebellion. As deserted things might seem, it only applies to the initial area that is a city above the skies. You will experience the variety of the world by going through deserts, forests, mines, a sunken city, and a fleshly surprise. It sounds normal but bizarre things are awaiting you that makes you question whether everything is real or just some fantasy/virtual reality playing a trick on you.

Part of your mission is to recover some of your memory but maybe there’s more to it and you than it appears…

Gameplay & Steuerung

Like you can see from the graphical style, it’s going to be a game with controls on the simpler side. You only need 4 fully customizable buttons: Melee (Y-button), Inventory (X-button), Use Equipment (ZR-button), and later on Dashing (B-button).

Melee is going to be your only way of attacking for a short time. It doesn’t do much damage and has a short-range. Soon you get your first weapon, which is something akin to a shotgun that fires a mid-range 3-way-projectile. Further along, you’ll be picking up new situational Equipment that helps you get to prior unreachable areas.

All of your mission targets are marked on your map, giving you a general direction and culminating in a boss fight.

While this is the gist of it, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into the specifics.

Life and Stamina gauge

The „stats” at the beginning are less than stellar. You can take a few hits of ranged attacks but when they come close you’ll be fighting for your life as those will claim your life much faster. One specific boss can kill you in 2 melee hits for example.

Your stamina can’t take more than 2 or 3 shots before you’re running out of it. This severely limits your fighting capabilities but more about it later. Even the dash will deplete your stamina in a few milliseconds and takes a few seconds to fill up again.

You can recover both by destroying item that randomly spawns recovery items. Most of the time, they are not accessible at boss fights so make sure you got a tight strategy to survive with your limited resources.

Save points will fully recover both life and stamina.

Fighting

While enemies appear semi-frequently, they aren’t much of a point of frustration as they stay down for a long time. Most likely as long as you don’t go too far away from the current area. Considering this, there’s a very low chance that you won’t be able to progress until you meet the boss.

You’re going to have a low amount of choice when it comes to weapons as seemingly only the before mentioned shotgun is guaranteed (I couldn’t find the Gatling and possibly the other one in my playthrough).

Melee attacks aren’t worth your time without power-ups. They have a very short range and you will most likely get it while trying to hit them. This leaves you with the shotgun and the bombs as viable choices.

The shotgun takes a little bit to take out which leaves you stationary (akin to old-school Resident Evil), which can prove fatal in high-risk battles. Once it’s out you can aim it with the left stick. The best-case scenario is hitting the enemy with the full brunt of all 3 projectiles.

The bombs on the other hand are very difficult to utilize as an offensive tool as they are timed explosions and can get hit away. The latter can prove to be useful or detrimental to your intentions. You’ll use them against stationary and slow-moving targets at most.

Boss battles

The first few boss battles are nothing much to talk about. The patterns are simple and short but once you get to the boss in the mines there’s a high chance that you’ll meet your first major roadblock.

It’s a grueling fight and starts giving you the feeling that your character is no longer adequate to fight these types of difficult enemies. They can take a lot and dish out a lot of damage. Couple it with your immobility when trying to attack, it becomes really difficult to find the timing to attack while not getting hit. It’s not an exaggeration to say that some of these boss fights are akin to screen-filling Shoot’em Ups (Shmups) with the catch that you don’t have the mobility to match it.

You can also find some optional bosses but they can disappear once you reach a specific point in the story.

Exploration, Backtracking und Quick Travel

There will be a lot of times where you find power-ups that are not accessible with your current abilities and that you’ll have to come back at a later time by backtracking. Fortunately, these are all marked on your map after finding so you know where to collect it.

There’s one big problem. Quick travel is an ability that you get relatively late into the game. If you’re finding yourself stuck against a boss before it, there’s going to be a major consideration to be done as it’ll cost you a lot of time. But why When do you get access to quick travel? Just before the final boss for the normal ending.

There’s also a small nitpick to be had with how the quick travel works. Aside from the limited travel points, you also have to navigate through the underground tunnels in your special ride. While you can take an accurate guess where the exits are, there’s still a chance of taking the wrong one initially.

Yes, it’s a nice stylistic choice to make the quick travel visible but it results in another issue: Load times. Every time you use quick to travel the game has to load the underground tunnel for a few seconds and then once again your target location. It hurts the flow of the game a little bit, especially when you’re backtracking and trying to take a quick roundtrip to try and collect the missed power-ups.

Equipment and Power-Ups

These are the two major types of collectibles. Most of the equipment is part of the campaign and you get them along the way. power-ups on the other hand require you to go out of your way to reach and find them and even if you find them initially, they won’t be accessible until later.

The biggest differentiator in difficulty are the power-ups. You can increase your life, stamina, and melee attack power. The increase in life and stamina from a single power-up is seemingly tremendous. If I had to make an approximation, it doubles your basic value so if you collect two health power-ups you have 3 times the health than in the beginning. Melee attack damage doesn’t seem that good in the beginning but once you collect two of them, it becomes as strong as a full 3-projectile shotgun hit.

When you put everything together, a new and simple strategy becomes viable against normal enemies and bosses: Brute Force. You take the hits and take them down before you.

Gameplay Impression

The gameplay is seemingly balanced to your basic stats in the beginning and I don’t think you’ll have that much trouble in anything outside of boss fights. The only problem will be that the late enemies are starting to feel like damage sponges and hitting you like a tank. Nothing that patience and swift controls can’t overcome but still slightly frustrating. The suicide attack ones that come at you at fast speed and even outside the screen can be off-putting in particular. The news is that they stay down.

Boss fights are the spotlight of action. Without the power-ups, you’ll be pressed to your limits as they are very unforgiving. You might even have to resort to some ingenuity at some point by thinking about how to use your biggest damage dealer that is the bomb.

I can see what they were trying to do with them but I didn’t find the later boss fights more frustrating than fun because the character restrictions of pulling the weapon and fast stamina depletion give you a heavy feeling of inadequacy to deal what you’re pitting against. Whether it’s something good or bad, that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself as it’s a design choice that makes the fights more difficult.

The movement speed feels ok in the beginning but once you are getting into backtracking you’ll notice the lack of speed and the heavy limitation of stamina when it comes to dashing. Then there are also the load times with variable length depending on the area, which are as long as over 10 seconds (probably a non-issue for PC users with SSDs). If you don’t have a lot of patience then this could be something that could give you a slight frown.

Power-ups are an interesting idea but the execution is arguably not that good, especially when the odds are put against you when facing the later bosses. This forces you to use a rock-solid strategy, execution and a little bit of luck to survive the onslaught. On the other hand, when you have a lot of them piled up they can become even trivial.

Getting the normal ending took already over 10 hours. To be frank, 20 hours don’t seem that far off either since there’s still a lot to do afterward.

Graphics & Sound

The stylized retro graphics are doing a great job in portraying this surreal world with a lot of variety and detail. The PEGI 18 isn’t without reason as you can finish off your enemies in an optional bloody manner.

The music can be a real banger and adds a lot to the dystopic cyberpunk atmosphere. The sounds are well done too as they are punchy enough to stand out in fights.

All of it runs on a solid 60 fps according to the in-game fps counter which is a nice option to have.

Verdict

Resolutiion is an interesting action-adventure that brings something unique and bizarre with its visual style and a good soundtrack. The gameplay is solid and can go either way as the character progression is split into optional power-ups, leaving you only with utility in your way. Considering the way the fights work, I can’t agree with the fast-paced descriptor since the stamina and the way weapons work are putting a brake on the speed.

The story takes some time to get a grip on but leaves you with enough mystery to push you forward.

Overall, Resolutiion is offering a good amount of playtime. Fans of classic action-adventures should give it a good look. PC players should try the demo.

Wertung

8.0Gut

Kaufempfehlung

70% Kaufempfehlung

70%Empfehlenswert