Video Game Review: Resolutiion

Resolutiion

Monolith of Minds

Top Down Hack’n’Slash

Nintendo Switch

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t get very far into Resolutiion. I played about the first two hours, by which point it made absolutely no more sense to me than it had when I first started out, and I decided to look at the game’s steam page thinking it might provide me with some context that would help my understanding along. It didn’t, but it did tell me that the developer’s estimated its playtime to be around 20 hours, and that really took the wind out of my sails. Based on my experience with the game so far, I really didn’t want to play it for that long. Because I like to try and give everything a fair shake, I tried to stick it out for about another half hour and then decided I’d seen enough.

Resolutiion is a top down hack’n’slash game that takes some very clear cues from Hyper Light Drifter, both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay. Unfortunately, the gameplay in Resolutiion doesn’t feel nearly as good as HLD. The game describes itself as having “punishing combat”, and while that is certainly true it’s not in ways that feel good. For starters, you don’t really actually have the tools you need to consistently succeed. You don’t start off with either gun or dash, being forced to rely instead on a short-range slashing combo that leaves you extremely vulnerable to enemies which can tear you apart all too quickly, especially considering that many of them have dash attacks of their own which feel like they would easy to play around if only you had some means to quickly get out of the way. Once you do get a gun, the time it takes to get into firing stance is so long that it feels like more of a burden than a boon, and you’re really no better off in terms of avoiding damage than you were before. It’s a similar story with the eventuality of the dash – in addition to it being more of a sprint option than a proper dash, it uses the same extremely limited and slowly recharging stamina resource as the gun does, which severely limits its utility both on its own and in conjunction with the rest of your abilities. To top it off, the player character is fragile and slow when moving regularly, which makes avoiding fights entirely just as inviable as engaging in them.

There is a small mercy in that enemies don’t respawn when you do, but even that feels bad because it gave me the sense that any progress or success I made was less due to any skill and more due to just brute-force persistence. I wasn’t learning anything when I finally got through a tough fight, it was just that I had whittled down the enemies over several attempts until I could finish the last ones off. I will concede that since I only played a fairly small portion of the game it is entirely possible it gets better later in, but “it gets better” is no excuse for having to play through something that isn’t fun.

I will say that the graphic design and soundtrack are high points of what I played. The environments and characters are eerie-looking in an aesthetically pleasing way, and the music was similarly appealing… for the most part. There was one part where I was in an elevator and was briefly subjected to some muzak which felt out of place for the tone up to that point.

To that point, the tone and general construction of the plot and setting are a bit messy. Much as I hate comparing one game to another rather than allowing it to stand on its own, drawing comparison to Hyper Light Drifter is useful in highlighting where Resolutiion goes wrong. I’m no stranger to the concepts of minimalist storytelling and making the reader of a text (both terms used slightly loose here) work to understand it, but a text should not work to intentionally hinder its reader. The player is thrown into Resolutiion with next to no explanation as to what they’re doing or why and things only get more confusing from there. Again, this may – and probably does – change moving forward, but in Hyper Light Drifter there is cohesion and clarity to the world from the onset, with things being expounded upon and revealed more fully as the game progresses. In that case, it even manages to do so without any words whatsoever – even items and gameplay mechanics are described by images rather than text – whereas Resolutiion has dialogue boxes and is still just plain obtuse. This difference results in the game coming off as somewhat pretentious and fake-deep.

There are definitely parts of this title that I appreciate, as well as parts that I think I could come to appreciate if I forced myself onward, but I have no desire to do so. I did not enjoy the time I spent playing with it to the point I felt actually aggravated, something which I don’t tend to do when I play games no matter how poorly a match might be going in Apex Legends or Titanfall or whatever else. I’d recommend giving Resolutiion a pass.