Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Review — Treasured Legacies

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a narrative-driven action-adventure game and the latest entry in the A Plague Tale franchise. Far more action-oriented than the original, this prequel takes you back in time as you step into the shoes of Sophia, an orphaned member of a group of treasure hunters who seeks to uncover the secrets of an island revealed to her in childhood visions. While the game is very narrative-driven, to the point of feeling at times like it’s on rails, the story it wants to tell is worth experiencing, making for a title that I enjoyed despite my initial reservations.

To clarify, I didn’t play the original A Plague Tale game. Understanding that it was more of a narrative-driven stealth game, I avoided it like, well, the plague. Despite my frequent and fervent praise for the Metal Gear franchise, I’m actually not a huge fan of most entries in the stealth gaming genre, so it simply didn’t appeal to me.

That said, I was caught off guard by just how combat-heavy a prequel bearing the A Plague Tale title would be. As a rogue in the service of a treasure-hunting band of outlaws, our protagonist, Sophia, is no stranger to the occasional scrap, and scrap she does. Wielding a deadly sword-and-dagger combo, she finds herself fighting pretty often in her search for the Minotaur’s treasure.

I was also pleasantly surprised by just how good this combat was.

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy follows a combat formula that I have compared to and described as “Arkham-style” in the past, thanks to the clear inspiration this style of combat takes from the Batman: Arkham games, which introduced me to it. This style of combat places the player-controlled character at the center of a group of enemies and gives them the ability to block, dodge, or parry incoming attacks. These combat systems are most easily recognized by the way attacking “bounces” the player from enemy to enemy, allowing them to take out a group of enemies one by one if their reaction times are fast enough.

Asobo Studio’s take on this one-versus-many combat system feels like a well-evolved version of the original system that inspired it. The mechanics are familiar enough that anyone who has played a similar system will get the hang of them quickly, with some smooth animations thrown in to make things spicier, alongside some gadget-based mechanics to turn the odds in your favor. The best part, however, is that the combat is incredibly quick. Enemies die remarkably fast, and so does Sophia, who can only take three hits before falling. The speed at which you dispatch enemies, or are dispatched by them if you aren’t careful, makes the combat feel very satisfying and realistically deadly, and the game weaves in some very exciting, high-speed moments of tension along the way. Every time I found myself perfectly spamming the parry button to fend off two enemies attacking me at once, it felt like something straight out of an action movie.

Outside of combat, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a platforming puzzle game with a focus on narrative. Like I mentioned earlier in this review, this “focus on the narrative” means that the game is essentially linear and borderline on rails from start to finish. You are still given control of Sophia and made to solve the puzzles and handle the platforming yourself, but there are moments that remind you the game wants to keep you on its predetermined path. A good example of this happens in Chapter 3, when the game uses an invisible wall or outright stops your movement to keep you from going the way you just came, for no other reason than that it doesn’t want you to… get lost, I guess?

I’m not really a fan of these kinds of very linear, overly directed games, just as I’m not a big fan of stealth titles. It was hard for me to ignore the many times when it was obvious that this was a heavily directed experience and that, as a player, I didn’t really have any choice in the matter. I appreciate, at least, that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy was honest about its nature, not filling the game with chore-like side objectives just to sell the illusion that I was free to do more than follow the game’s plot.

Said plot, as directed as it is, is incredibly good and definitely worth experiencing if you can handle the fact that the game will guide you through it like a dark ride. The game’s serious tone is never undercut by cheesy dialogue or awkward humor placed where it doesn’t belong. While the game started a little slowly in my opinion, I thought that it really picked up and became deeply intriguing by Chapter 2, holding my interest throughout the rest of the experience.

If there were one big, non-subjective issue I had with Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, it would be the game’s performance. I got to the title late, finishing my review almost two months after its release, but I still found myself plagued by some really bad FPS drops, despite what I’m sure were performance patches released in the meantime. These drops only happened, I presume, when the game was loading something in front of me. Still, they were prevalent enough to be distracting, and I had to mention them for my review to be complete.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is available on Steam, Epic Games, Xbox, and PlayStation.