Title Picture |Resonas
Statement |This article does not include commercial cooperation.
Author |Night Wind.
How to say it. I should be sure that when I** a mobile game that is a common two-dimensional card mobile game no matter how I look at it, I never thought that I was going to **car. It's really open.
This game that I got a little bit of a head for is called "Resonas", which was launched yesterday (February 29) and was developed and released by the Game Principality. This is a game company with some accumulation, which has been doing overseas game outsourcing business since 2009, and later made flash games to reach 30 million users. Their two-dimensional mecha beautiful girl mobile game "Mobile Squad Battle", which was launched in 2016, has been very famous at home and abroad, and the cumulative turnover has exceeded 500 million yuan since its operation (Sensor Tower data).
Mobile Sentai Operations
Resonas was first revealed in 2021, when it was released by Lightyear**. In March 2023, the game was approved for version number, and around the same time, the company received investment from Tencent, which became the company's de facto majority shareholder through an equity pledge relationship. It can be considered that these two (at that time) large factories had relatively high expectations for this project.
Throughout the second half of 2023, the game was in a state of disconnection for a while, and there was a lot of speculation that the project had been canceled. However, with the large-scale withdrawal from the game industry at the end of last year, "Resonas" also announced that it would cancel its cooperation and change to a developer-led distribution, and also revealed that earth-shaking changes have been made in the system, gameplay, and plot. The game has gradually resumed the rhythm of publicity since then, and after a paid deletion test, it is finally set at the end of February.
According to the timeline, it can be speculated that the current appearance of the game is likely to be influenced by the new investor Tencent.
As mentioned at the beginning, this game is really distinctive. It puts more of a car and freight runner at the heart of the experience – or at least succeeds in delivering that effect. The combat and development elements that are common in most games of this genre are still retained, but are a bit milder in comparison.
Is the label niche a good thing or a bad thing in the current market? It seems that the two major manufacturers also want to know the answer.
In Resonas, the world is devastated by a disaster, and the surviving humans have teamed up around the world to build cities to defend themselves against roaming monsters. The player acts as an important public official and train conductor to run a train, traveling back and forth between different cities at his own expense, transporting goods or passengers, thus helping to keep human society thriving. That's the basic premise of the story.
On top of that, crews with special combat abilities will protect the train from the monsters that are rampant all over the place under the command of the player, thus forming a part of combat and training.
How do you transform the core gameplay of the game? Resonus' emphasis on train operation gameplay is very simple and brutal: it directly greatly increases the expendable content of this part of the gameplay and improves the gameplay experience of that content.
The most impressive thing is the process of **car. In this game, the train does not jump directly from one city to another, but shows the whole process from the platform to the platform. The train runs along the tracks, and the scenery along the way is unobstructed.
This driving scene is subject to weather changes, and the sunrise and sunset are simulated according to the in-game time. The modeling of the surrounding environment is not particularly exquisite, but fortunately, the overall lighting rendering effect is relatively comfortable and atmospheric.
The BGM when the train is running is very road movie soundtrack, and the melodious, incomprehensible foreign female voice songs have a soothing rhythm, which makes people particularly comfortable and leisurely. At the same time, you can also hear the rhythmic clatter of the train colliding with the track, and there is a sense of loneliness and decompression. It's reminiscent of realistic racing games like Riders Republic and Forza Horizon, where you're cycling, skiing, and driving while enjoying the scenery around you with a similar style of melodious BGM, like you're on a road trip.
The game also provides multiple perspectives such as the driver's cab, side windows, and the outside of the car to switch. If you really run a train, your daily routine is indeed like this, looking out the window in a leisurely and lonely way. This deliberately peaceful and comfortable experience is almost like a stand-alone railway simulator game on Steam.
As the main story unfolds, players will be guided to travel from city to city. It was at this time that the elements of management were gradually revealed. Players can earn commissions by taking freight orders in the city, or selling local specialties at low prices, and then selling them in other cities** to earn the difference, similar to a railway version of "Age of Discovery".
Since you have to move back and forth between cities due to the needs of the story, it's easy for players to think of earning some money by the way. The money earned can be used to buy a large number of gacha items and cultivation items, and can also add various buffs to the driving distance, which provides players with an incentive to make money.
When buying and selling goods in the trading houses of various cities, players can also bargain with the boss to raise the price, which adds a bit of realism to doing business. After each business is completed, a settlement page will pop up, so that players can intuitively see how much money they have earned on this trip, and how much money they have earned by relying on their incorruptible tongue. The coolness of being an upside down master has been further amplified.
The money earned and the resources and materials purchased can be used to modify the train, thereby increasing the freight volume, increasing the speed of the train, increasing the strength of the armament, and so on. In the end, these upgrades are designed for two purposes: to improve the efficiency of making money by running Dora, or to improve the driving experience by reducing the distractions of monsters on the road. The way of train operation has thus formed a logical closed loop. As the experience progressed, the desire to make another fortune had gradually overshadowed my curiosity about the main plot. Who doesn't like to watch your balance rub against it.
The management gameplay is interesting, and the audio-visual experience of driving is guaranteed, which makes the train management gameplay itself rich enough, which can not only undertake the daily content consumption needs of players, but also not be too boring or too high a threshold to dissuade players.
However, it is conceivable that the slow-paced gameplay of watching the scenery and simulating business is not the general preference of the two-dimensional market. And because the driving process is not very interactive, no matter how good the scenery is, sooner or later there will be a day when you get tired of watching, and at that time, player retention is likely to be affected. This is also the disadvantage of the game's more niche temperament.
Building on the core framework of train management, the rest of Resonas' gameplay and design revolves around it and serves it. This abdication also makes the game's character more distinctive.
Even the combat and character development, which are the core points of the second game payment, are also restrained as much as possible, and strive not to consume too much energy and attention of players.
The game uses real-time card gameplay, similar to Slay the Spire, but with much less complexity. Characters don't need to be positioned, they will assign their positions according to the relationship between the front and back rows. Each character comes with three abilities that they add to their library as cards in their hand. Each time a player discards a card is discarded, the cost is restored over time, and the cards in the hand are automatically drawn over time. When the player does not play cards, both the character and the monster will automatically maintain the basic attack.
The strategic hand of the deck is honestly not very high. Some skills have various special effects such as lightning guidance and burning, and skills with the same effect can be combined to combo, which greatly increases damage. Hoard cards, hoard costs, and then release combo at one time, and then add shields according to the situation, ** interrupt monster skills, and the biggest strategy of the battle lies in this. The proof is that in the case of automatic mode, the combat AI highlights what is there to fight, and the actual effect is actually very similar.
It is even easier to cultivate. Since there are player levels stuck with character levels, at least in the early stage, there is basically no need to invest additional cultivation resources, and the main and side quests can provide enough cultivation needs, and the cultivation items can only be used when cultivating a new character from scratch. Equipment slots have been cut to just three. The Resonance system, which provides further stat enhancement for characters, is common in games of the genre with a dozen or so upgrade points, but this one has only five upgrade points. And the effect of upgrading resonance ......Why is it still used to run a business to make money?
As for the second tour, the favorability system is often indispensable......It's not that no, some checkout pages can see this value in **. However, there is no way to improve it specifically, and its usefulness is only to unlock more character profiles - just one more piece of text.
On the whole, the idea that raising a wife is better than making money has not only been shown in the words and deeds of the protagonist, but also changed the player's game experience. For players who prefer deep combat and development content, this game is clearly far from satisfying. And in this way, the depth of the game's payment will inevitably be greatly affected.
However, the weakening of the character development system does not mean that the game does not shape the characters enough. From the previous description, it should also be seen that the world view of this game still has the characteristics of Deep Black Remnant, which has been more popular in the second-game market in recent years: a world where monsters are rampant, environmental pollution crisis, human mutation and monsterization, and the ...... of the two sides of the same body of fighters and monstersThe protagonist and his companions, who live in the last days and take on the responsibility of perpetuating civilization, face danger and pain as a matter of course.
But instead of starting from the heavy side, the game does the opposite, focusing on the fun and funny everyday life. This makes danger and combat not steal the role of train management, and the daily interaction of a lot of fights and slapsticks is more in line with the relaxation of the main gameplay of the driving business.
This light-hearted and funny style can be felt even before entering the game. During the time of the extra pack, the game's login screen will be a spin-off of the game's Train Captain's Day - it looks like the team even set up an animation studio to produce in-game CG animations and out-of-game spin-off animations, which are really of high quality.
This spin-off animation is similar to the main plot in the game, full of nonsensical plots, funny Q version expressions, and light-hearted and funny daily life, which immediately left me with a different impression from the common Deep Black Remnants Second Tour. Due to the game's overall flat and bright art style, this Q version of the expression does not appear abrupt even if it appears on the face of the proportional character.
When the protagonist and the character are talking, the picture sometimes shows the back of the protagonist, which is quite a comic composition.
In order to maintain a relaxed and cheerful rhythm, when the main plot involves the difficult concept of world view, it will be briefly explained on the side of the screen in the form of pop-up windows, so as not to interrupt the coherence of the story. This is also more in line with the situation of everyday spoken dialogue, after all, it is too dramatic for the characters to suddenly start explaining the worldview in a serious way.
This playful style is carried over throughout the game. For example, when entering the battle, the combat power matching prompt, sweaty soybeans and quite colloquial expressions have long become a widely circulated emoji among players.
At the level of gameplay, marginal gameplay such as urban exploration is also moving closer to the direction of the conductor's daily life in terms of packaging. The link of adding buffs to the battle before the next dungeon is packaged in the game as everyone drinking milk tea, eating fried chicken, and even jumping in a nightclub, as if it is an atmosphere of "grasping happiness in the interval between selling your life".
Another benefit of this is that stories of joy in the midst of suffering and friendship in the midst of crises can also make the characters more three-dimensional. We've seen a lot of bitter vows in the face of monsters, but this game shows that a celebratory fried chicken that you eat together after a catastrophe is more intimate, delicate, and touching.
With train operation as the backbone, and other gameplay modules such as combat and development, text plot, etc., the game uses a mission system to connect them together and provide players with enough guidance. With the support of the mission system, the game abandons the main story chapter page that is common in similar games, and directly integrates the main story into the interaction of the player's train operation, and no longer sets up a separate related page. In this way, the sense of substitution in operating the train is even higher.
After weakening or changing the style of various details, the game has successfully raised the game experience of driving and earning money to a more central position, and even has a feeling of medium and light two-dimensional games, showing a unique effect among similar competitors. Because of this, the game's strengths and weaknesses are very obvious. For the second-game market that is looking to break the game, "Resonas" may be a rather bold attempt.
For the time being, regardless of whether it can be favored by the market, the game itself is still very self-consistent in its experience with ** cars as the core. It seems that it is not difficult to understand why Lightyear and Tencent at that time would have taken a fancy to it successively - the giants need a game-breaker even more, and "Resonas" is a good experiment whether it succeeds or not.
But objectively speaking, being niche means that you have narrowed your path. How to take care of the feelings of more players, how to ensure commercialization, and how to ensure player retention are all problems that this game has to face. Perhaps over time, the market will give us an answer.
In fact, the launch of "Resonas" did not go well. The game was originally scheduled to start at 11 a.m., but it was attacked and extorted by criminals, and the server was completely paralyzed, and the server was forced to be postponed for one hour. Although you can enter the game one after another around 12 noon, for more than two hours after that, the in-game network has been quite unstable, and problems such as frequent loading and flashbacks have greatly affected the game experience. This will undoubtedly lead to player churn.
In this case, the game is currently ranked 6th on the iOS free list and 55th on the best-selling list, which is also a good record. Judging from the trend of change, this game with ideas and characteristics seems to have untapped potential in a short period of time.