Soggywaffle825

Six years after Returnal, Housemarque has delivered a game that strips away everything that made their first effort special. As a fan of Returnal, I went in with high hopes and came out genuinely disappointed. To start with the good: the fast twitch 3rd person combat is still fun, at least for a while. The graphics are sharp, the sound design and gunfeel are excellent, and the orb-based enemy attacks have a cool Nier-esque quality to them. That's about where the positives end. Unlike Returnal, the run-to-run variety here is almost nonexistent. The world generation feels like a formality and you'll start recognizing the same exact locations within a few hours. The gun selection has been gutted to four archetypes (assault rifle, pistol, shotgun, crossbow) with minor variations like burst fire or auto-aim, but nothing that meaningfully changes your approach. Perks are described so vaguely you'll need to look them up, and if you die with a weapon, the game just hands it back to you on the next run rather than pushing you toward different builds. The artifact system has the same problem. There's no incentive to be selective, so you just grab everything. The skill tree compounds it all: an enormous grid of minuscule stat buffs that never change how the game actually feels. The bosses are easy but frustrating for the opposite reason you'd want. Most have three bloated health bars and a moveset they'll cycle through on repeat until you finally outlast them. The second boss, for example literally spams the same three attacks the entire fight. The story doesn't help either. Protagonist Arjun spends most of his time shouting his wife's name and calling out to characters you've never been properly introduced to. When those characters turn up dead, there's no emotional weight because the game never gave you a reason to care about them in the first place. The facial animations and lip sync issues make it even harder to invest, and it's clear that combat was the studio's priority above all else. What Saros feels like, ultimately, is a game that traded complexity for accessibility. Skip the day one price, play Returnal if you haven't, and if you loved that game and still want this one, wait for a deep sale.