Housemarque really tapped into something with Returnal. On paper it really shouldn’t work: a bullet hell third person shooter roguelike? I mean with that many genre descriptors it should be a recipe for a confused mess but the developers blended all those elements together perfectly. You can then imagine my excitement for Saros which on the surface looks to be more of the same, which I’d wholly welcome, but it’s changed in many ways that I believe is the positive. Indeed Saros is one of the few games I’d strongly recommend playing before it’s progenitor as the quality of life improvements make it so much more approachable and, for this aging gamer, far more enjoyable overall.
The Echelon missions were designed to bring about a new era of prosperity for humanity, all at the hands of the Soltari corporation. The first would survey the world of Carcosa, a place which holds the precious mineral Luncenite, and lay the groundwork for the following missions. Echelon II would then build out the mining infrastructure and begin extraction, ensuring all profits would make their way back to humanity. Finally Echelon III would be the colony, a new home for those hopeful few who wanted to make a new life off world. When the colonies went dark though that’s when the final Echelon mission was dispatch with Arjun, one of Soltari’s elite enforcers, was sent along with his mission team to find out what had happened to the next great hope for humanity.
Saros’ visuals have the unenviable task of having to balance on the knife edge between visual candy and performance. For the most part it achieves this, with the games numerous wide open environments feeling alive and rich as you speed your way through them chased by various brightly coloured particle effects seeking to ruin you day. Of course stopping and getting up close with things reveals the sacrifices that have to be made for this balance but Saros isn’t a game to force you to dwell too long enough in one area where that’s a problem. There were some areas that had some performance issues although I’m sure those will be patched in due time. Overall it’s a fantastic looking game and most certainly a step up from what they showed us with Returnal.
The core of what made Returnal so good returns in Saros with a lot of tweaks to make it far more approachable and with a helping hand of permanent progression mechanics to boot. You’ll still be engaging in the same kind of run and gun, bullet dodging platforming that we came to love in the original but this time around you’ll have a few more mechanics up your sleeve to deal with the challenges thrown at you. The procedurally generated maps (made up of different chunks that are rotated and scattered with varied hazards) are also back, making everything familiar yet different for each run. It does really feel like Housemarque listened to the feedback about Returnal’s punishing gameplay and gave players a more approachable way of engaging with it. Good news for the sadists though, you can make it harder than Returnal if that’s the kind of thing you’re into.
Combat is still as fast paced as ever with the calm of the first few rooms swiftly replaced with a hail of unrelenting bullets chasing you down. Differing from Returnal is the inclusion of a shield mechanic, allowing you to absorb certain coloured projectiles in order to use it with your power weapon. This plays heavily into boss and elite enemy fights as they’ll often corner you in ways that you can’t really dodge out of. Getting a hang of the shield (and it’s later iteration, the parry) goes a long way to taking the heat out of a lot of the game’s encounters.
Weapon variety is also good with almost all players having different tier lists and rankings for which one should be on top. I will admit that I lent on the Smart Rifle quite heavily for a lot of the game as it gave me more brain space to focus on my movement and dodging than other weapons did. That being said though the Repeating Crossbow and Myriad Chakram are right up there, offering up some fresh gameplay style whenever I wanted it without feeling like I was gimping myself. This all being said though I get the feeling that basically any weapon past level 50 is going to absolutely wreck anything as even when I was forced to take a weapon I wasn’t keen on at that stage I still felt like I was in control of everything.
The progression system is probably the most welcome change as it provides a path to increase your overall effectiveness without having to risk a run through lower levels. There’s two types of currency: lucenite which unlocks your typical kind of upgrade nodes like additional stats, base level increases and some ancillary skill improvements. Halycon is the more rare of them and is reserved for upgrades that have a bigger impact like more heal drops, increases to more valuable stats, etc. It’s not a free for all though, you’ll have to unlock later parts of the tree by defeating bosses and that’s definitely been a sticking point for a few other players I’ve seen on the /r/saros subreddit.
The game will take mercy on you though should it see you struggling for too long, unlocking some of the game’s other systems to let you tilt things in your favour. The Carcosan modifiers allow you to tweak things like enemy’s damage, corruption generated, healing effectiveness and a bunch of other things to make the overall run easier or harder depending on which direction you want to move the needle. For me I took a few choice mods like removing the negative effects from artefacts (even though they clear after each boss win, something I didn’t know) and extra damage to enemies/less to me. For the game’s final areas which are…more demanding in some respects I tweaked a bunch of things to amp up my power level to the max. To be sure I could’ve probably ground out a number of more runs to get a similar effect but honestly there’s only so much of that I can do before my eyes start to glaze over.
I will admit to being slightly annoyed by the metroidvania-esque level design of “Oooohhhh you can’t go there…yet” places that were obviously going to be unlocked later on by some gated traversal mechanic. It’s a problem I’ve had for ages as it always felt like that was forcing you to come back to an area that you’ve quite possibly already gone past enough. In Saros’ case at least the traversal mechanics were fun enough and the rewards for going back over were in fact worth the trouble so it got a pass from me on this in the end.
PLOT SPOILERS BELOW
There was someone on Reddit who mentioned how refreshing it was to play a main character that is just simply unredeemable and having sat with the ending (the true ending mind) I have to agree. At the start I was all on board with Arjun’s journey to win back his wife as he seemed like someone who was doing a lot for the people he loved and making mistakes in the process. Of course the game masterfully strips away each one of his excuses as you progress through the game and in the end you’re left with a character who’s got what he desired but you as the player in no way agree with him.
Nitya’s revelations at the end, that this was her dream not his and that his relentless pursuit without a care for what she actually feels is what drove her away in the first place. The audio logs showed she found happiness, lived countless lives and then for it all to be ended when Arjun blasts his way through the remains of her dream and the shore. It’s one of the few endings I can think of in a long time where I can say that it’s brilliantly done and I don’t like where it sits in the end (which I feel is the point so I do…like…it?).
PLOT SPOILERS OVER
Saros shows that Housemarque has mastered the niche that they created. Everything about the game is what I loved with Returnal but better. The bigger environments, the included progression systems, all of it just feels bigger and grander. There’s a few small areas where things could be improved but man, it’s nothing 1 or 2 patches (which might already be out at time of writing) could fix. Whilst I’d be the last one to pigeonhole a company into making the same game again and again I can’t say I’d be upset to see Housemarque riff on this formula again and maybe a couple more times after that.
Rating: 9.25/10
Saros is available exclusively on PlayStation 5 right now for $99. Total playtime was approximately 23 hours with 65% of the achievements unlocked.
