Previews
‘Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy’ Preview: Greek Legends, Brutal Combat, and a New Hero
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss seeing rats. No, not in real life, but in the upcoming Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. The series had distinguished itself from other games by focusing on the Black Death era, while using diseases as thematic and gameplay markers.
Instead of using the cover of darkness to get a jump on enemies and devouring them with my supernatural control over rats, I’m jumping right in broad daylight with a sword and knife to cut open their throats. There’s a noticeable shift in setting and tone as Resonance seems to be a sunnier adventure. I played two hours of the game, and I’m interested to see how it’ll connect to the first two games.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy follows a younger version of the smuggling pirate Sophia, whom our prior protagonists, Amicia and Hugo, met in A Plague Tale: Requiem. Set 15 years earlier, Sophia has been cursed with terrifying visions, and after escaping from her home, she reaches the island of Crete, which may have the key to ending her curse.
Resonance thankfully still has some horror-tinged aspects, namely through Sophia’s visions. Often seeped in red, these visions are sudden and ominous, showing her what looks like some sort of connection to the Macula, a supernatural curse prominently featured in the series that allows users to control rats.
During my time with the preview, I played chapters 5 and 6, where Sophia is accompanied by her friend Leni. While I’m unsure of her origins or when she joined, I’m curious as to how she’ll develop as the game progresses. Resonance is much more focused on combat, and Sophia’s repertoire of moves includes slashes, blocks, dodges, and parries. It’s nothing revolutionary, but the action feels smooth, almost like Batman: Arkham. Sophia even has a few finishers that add cinematic flourish.
One thing you’ll have to look out for is her HP bar. I was only able to sustain about three hits before dying, and in order to replenish any HP, you’ll need to kill an enemy. So you can’t go in there all reckless. You have to properly read enemy attacks if you want to survive. Leni can’t be controlled directly, but she’ll often be helpful and keep at least one enemy busy as she fights on her own.
Additionally, Resonance emphasizes Greek culture this time around, giving its setting a different identity from the other Plague Tale games. Sophia also has visions revolving around the Greek legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, allowing her to peer into the past. I even played as Theseus at certain points with a similar moveset to Sophia, as he also cuts down other gladiators. There’s a bit of a dual timeline mechanic here, as seeing things through Theseus’s eyes during cutscenes gives her insight on how to progress through the dilapidated dungeons on Crete.
Puzzles are also a big focus of Resonance. During my preview, Sophia had a mysterious device that would emit three different colored lights, and I’d have to line them up properly on switches in order to open up doors to get further in. You’re rewarded for some light exploration as well. I took a side detour to another light-focused puzzle, and when I solved it, I found a chest containing the Sica, a sword for Sophia. This one contained the Focus Rush skill, where killing an enemy further increases her Focus Gauge.
Eventually, Sophia and Leni get separated, and the former is forced to navigate the temple’s underground alone. However, a giant tubular monster hides in the depths, waiting to attack. This is where the game’s stealth elements come into play. Similar to the first two games, light is a safe haven. Whenever Sophia runs, she emits a trail of blue aura, and the monster is attracted to that. So you’re basically trying to rush from one light source to the next. Additionally, Sophia can use her grappling hook to swing across large gaps, giving the traversal a sort of Uncharted-like feel to it.
After successfully getting out from underground, Sophia lets out a sigh of relief, but now realizes that she has to find Leni before it’s too late. My demo cuts there.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a prequel to the first two games, but manages to separate itself by focusing on action and the shift to Greek culture rather than a stealthy adventure through France. The gameplay and puzzle-solving aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but all of its mechanics feel incredibly polished.
I’m absolutely enamored with the A Plague Tale’s world. I’m excited to see how Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy expands its lore and fleshes out Sophia’s character since her introduction in the previous game. This might be the perfect swashbuckling adventure to close out the summer when it launches on August 27 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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