Resolutiion Gameplay Preview – First Hour

Resolutiion’s full release was something I was looking forward to ever since I managed to get my hands on the demo. The game looked, felt, and sounded great and the story was interesting enough that my curiosity was piqued.

Once the full version was released, the game has, so far, met my expectations on almost every level except for one area, the dialogue. I’ll get to that part shortly. Before that, let’s cover all the outstanding aspects of the game first.

The game’s art style is a charming blend of retro 2D (being almost minimalistic in nature) and part cyberpunk, part disturbing, and part dystopian, post apocalyptic future. The animations are fantastic as well and make the action in the game feel really smooth.

The game controls smoothly as well, with the character feeling very responsive. I’m playing on keyboard unfortunately, and while not the ideal instrument to play the game with, it still felt great. However, I would highly recommend using a controller, and if stuck with a keyboard, to remap the default key binds as they felt a little awkward.

The game’s charming art style is paired with an equally charming sound track. The music stretches across a wide range of styles and genres. For example, in one area of the map where you encounter some fellow soldiers, the music turns in a lovely western track. But it’s not just western, it’s western blended with some retro chip tune music and it works extremely well.

The game offers a fair level of difficulty with a generous save system. If you die, you will restart at the last save point you activated. However, you will maintain all the progress you made, including enemies slain, upgrades acquired, and mission objectives completed. This means that when you die, your only real penalty is having your character moved to the save point’s location. Not only that, if you die in a boss encounter, the game will simply skip all dialogue when you respawn at the save point and restart the encounter. This is a welcome improvement to the quality of life in playing these types of video games as you can get back into the action much more quickly.

The game’s narrative structure and backdrop is pretty interesting as well. The game’s protagonist, named Valor, starts the game with amnesia. As you play the game, you slowly gather memories and piece together what happened. There is also a significant amount of lore in more hidden areas of the game world for the thorough explorer to discover.

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Even though the overall narrative is well written, some lines of dialogue fall very short. Some characters deliver lines that are both serious and sarcastic in the same sentence. This undermines both aspects, as the sarcasm underscores the more serious thematic elements and vice versa. Some of the attempts to tackle heavier themes come off as a bit hamfisted and bordering a bit on being didactic, even though the thematic elements themselves are very relevant to today’s time.

Minor lines of dialogue aside, Resolutiion is a charming and fantastic game to play. It’s a refreshing and welcome change of pace.

P.S. If you are getting lost frequently and don’t know where to go next, bring up the map and look for doors you didn’t go through (the little blue squares on the map). The doors can be in buildings as well. Chances are, you didn’t explore one of the passageways and possibly left something you needed behind.