I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet, well, a hail of a bullet hell rather, for missing out on reviewing Returnal. The idea of trying to review that game ahead of launch, when there are no guides or tips or any of the nicer quality-of-life additions it added over the years since would be maddening. I still can’t progress past that first boss after all these years! Returnal got hands!
Returnal was just not for me, despite my feeble attempts. It just didn’t click. It doesn’t help that I’m not a fan of the roguelike genre where, in my experience, it’s just as often you get a dud run where nothing aligns your way, only the bad upgrades spawn, and the pathway to the boss fight is a long, arduous one. Even if the core gameplay was top-notch, I always walk away feeling I wasted time.
That’s not the case with Saros.
The house that kept the bullet hell arcade shooters alive in the indie space proved themselves they can deliver sleek, finely tuned, challenging yet fun gameplay when given the opportunity to deliver, a big-budget, AAA video game. And now they’re part of PlayStation Studios, developer Housemarque is doing it again with Saros.
One can say Saros is Returnal 2 but it’s not quite that, it’s an entirely unique world with a new story and significant changes to the gameplay structure. Yet it is built on the foundations of Returnal’s brand of third-person shooter.
Make no mistake, Saros is not a safe sequel. Saros rejigs the entire gameplay loop of Returnal by streamlining the bits that makes roguelikes tough to swallow for some gamers. They removed the bones on the proverbial dish but it keeps every bit of flesh and skin from the resulted proverbial fillet intact. Such is the level of skill, and experience, that the Finnish-based studio demonstrated for being able to serve what’s essentially the same dish: a challenging, addictive, adrenaline-pumping game with a good story and worldbuilding hook. The difference this time is with Saros, it’s ever more palatable for the masses.
Presentation
We’re six years deep in the PS5 lifecycle, with rumours of the eventual next generation PlayStation has start to swirl right on que. But there are really not that many first-party games that feel like quintessentially a PS5 game that can’t ever be made before, most of it through the long period of cross-generational releases of PS4 and PS5 games, and later PC ports. From my observation, as someone who only entered this generation of consoles around 2022, it was only Death Stranding 2 that really wowed me with its presentation thanks to its photorealistic terrain and attention to detail on minute changes to a person affected by the environment.
The next game to do this for me is Saros, but not exactly through sheer graphical prowess.
The landscapes of Carcosa has a specific mood to it. It’s all blazing hellfire. Not to be confused with the “piss filter” that defined the games of the 2010s, but it is that shade of brown that defined the games of the 2010s. Though more amber and orange. I don’t really feel too strongly about the way Carcosa and the enemies you face look, it’s a little safe despite the whole cosmic horror theming it had going. You won’t feel scared, though it will make you feel tense and unease.
The world can be a decaying rot brought by the passage of time evoking Lovecraftian vibes, Giger-esque mechanical tombs made of wire looms and unnatural creations beyond human capacity, and more commonly so, hot, hazy lands scorched in hellfire (not too dissimilar to a hot Southeast Asian day), depending on what biome you’re in.
But what’s not hot is, crucially, my PS5. All these detailed geometry, the detailed player character model, all the enemies and the copious amount of projectiles and sparks being blasted onto the screen and yet I have never heard the base PS5 spurred into full throttle to avoid itself being heat throttled. This game is optimised, as a first-party title should. This is what really impressed me the most about Saros: its performance.
Saros performs incredibly well on Performance Mode, with all those particle effects only ever cause a minor stutter or two in the most freak instances I witnessed, but nothing that affects gameplay. More technical outlets will point this out better (I’m only observing with my two eyes using my decades of experience of playing games to feel this out), but for all intents and purposes, Saros maintains 60 FPS with relative ease. Whatever sacrifice in graphical fidelity that was made to keep it a steady 60 FPS was worth it as it still looks stonkingly good. The game only drops to a crunchy 30 FPS intentionally for cutscenes that makes use of more detailed assets.
Speaking of the cutscenes, there are a few, but they always capture my full attention. Part of it because the story’s intriguing (more on that in a bit), but the performance capture of the star-studded cast comes through and make these people feel like people. There’s good drama being unfold under this layer of mystery. So I ended up paying attention to every little thing that each character does in these moments, their expressions, their body language, just to see if I can gleam more than what vaguery these folks are talking about, even if I found out not much out of it.
Voice acting is incredible, as the story allows for a range of emotions to be displayed, these actors put in an incredible job in their performance. Though my favourite performance comes from the computer voice of Arjun’s armour, labelled Suit in the subtitles. Her cadence has that posh British lady vibe of the female announcer from Wipeout HD and Wipeout Omega Collection.
If you think Saros’ landscapes look nice, wait until you hear the soundscapes. Composer Sam Slater successfully evoked the mystique and deadliness of Carcosa through the soundtrack of Saros. Lush but moody ambient scores. Drone metal with wailing electric guitars juxtaposed with tight, thumping and intentionally expressionless drums. The use of comforting hymns of sirens weaved through heavy, angry beats of rage. The music makes you feel unease. It makes you feel how this place reeks of evil but at the same time, it tempts you to stay. It keeps you on your toes, focused and locked in. The soundtrack is not something I personally would add to my playlist, but the music serves its purpose in painting the horrid allure of Saros’ doomed world.
On that note, I like to point out a good comparison of what the vibes of Saros is with another game series. Saros is like Doom. Yeah, the Bethesda shooter. When I saw the chunky, beefy shotguns in Saros that made this connection clear. The presentation of Saros really gives off Doom vibes, and if you love the aesthetic choices of id Software’s shooter, then there’s a lot of commonality, and enough distinction between them, that you’ll appreciate what Saros is doing. It’s cool but not the scary kind of horror.
The UI is Saros is good enough. The button presses in the menus isn’t snappy but it is satisfyingly thumpy. The fuzzy display that can barely produce colour is charming. The 3D map (yeah, can’t unsee the Doom comparisons now, even though this is actually straight out of Returnal) is useful. The equipment screen presents the high-level stuff you need to glance clearly, but doesn’t do a good job in making you aware how to navigate the screen to read all of the passive traits you picked up, plus it hides one useful feature that you only know if you read the button explainer at the bottom of the screen or if you go through the tutorial pages.
I’m also not a fan of how it handles navigation, as it doesn’t do a good enough job at pointing exact places where you need to go which did lead to having to do the run again, wasting time. Not really an issue early on, but this becomes a problem in the late game.
But there’s at least one good feature of the UI specifically for the fans of the original Kingdom Hearts: the Integrity (health) bar does grow in length as you increase your maximum Integrity.
Gameplay
In Saros, players take on the role of Arjun Devraj, a Soltari Enforcer as part of the Echelon IV group tasked on a search-and-rescue mission to find the lost human colonists on Carcosa. There’s a lot of terms there that will make sense as you play the game, but the gist of it is that Arjun needs to head out to find these colonists, in a world that seemingly shapeshifts over time. Or die trying. Over and over.
In gameplay terms, Saros is a third-person roguelite, with more roguelite features than its predecessor Returnal thanks to permanent upgrades from the skill tree, the Armour Matrix, a streamlined gameplay loop, and the introduction of custom modifiers that lets players customise their own difficulty settings.
Great Game Feel
For those who never played a Housemarque shooter before, let me describe how Saros feels in the hands. It is simply sublime. Camera controls are fast enough to rotate around in heated moments but not too fast to disorient you. Jumping and dashing have a consistent arc and range respectively, but can be adjusted by how long you press those buttons like a good 3D platformer.
You also have a melee strike, which also doubles as how you activate your shield to absorb incoming bullets. The shield only activates if you press the button long enough, yes it’s another usage of long inputs.
Weapons fire really satisfyingly. The sonic boom of each shot from the handcannon, the punchy burst of each shotgun shot, the rattling speed of an ever accelerating rapid fire of a tactical rifle. You feel powerful when taking out enemies.
Yeah, Saros is a very tactile game, and that’s not even counting how it uses the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback in just about everything. From small rumbles in the background to thumps that follows a text scroll. Yet never once it feels tacky or overused. The feedback here has a soft yet wide range that makes me never put the controller down in a cutscene, which used small and perfectly timed vibrations to really sell the, well, vibe, of the scene.
(My putting-down-the-controller-when-the-cutscene-plays habit stems from, would you believe this game that has no relation to Saros at all but mentioned twice, Kingdom Hearts, which ever so often go full rumble as so many seismic shifts happen during its cinematics.)
That aside, there’s a very practical use of a DualSense feature Saros makes brilliant use of, half-pressing triggers. The left trigger, L2, will oftentimes have some pressure to it and you can half-press it to the point where the pressure just holds to use the alt-fire of a gun, or press the whole way with all your might to unleash the new Power weapons. It’s incredibly intuitive to switch between the two firing modes as well as switching between using the alt fire and the Power weapon fire.
Saros isn’t the first first-party game to use this trick (shout out to Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart), but I’m glad to see this isn’t a forgotten feature. Having these two different abilities bound to the same trigger makes so much sense and again, adds to the tactility of the game feel.
Maniac On The (Dance) Floor
Saros controls great, but it plays even better. During a run, the camera zooms out so that Arjun is just a little guy running around a big, mysterious and dangerous land. That’s by design. You get to see a lot more going on, and all that space that makes up for stunning vistas during the quiet times will be filled with enemies and a whole load of bullets upon bullets upon bullets. Seemingly unending in the most tough encounters.
There will often times where the area of the map is temporarily sealed as it demands you to take out every single enemy that spawns. This is where combat shines. Each of these sealed off area are the dance floor to what the game marketing calls the bullet ballet. A sandbox, as fans of Halo would call them. Or for fans of Doom, an arena. Here, you will take on the hordes, as part of the “dance.”
You will be moving, shooting, jumping, making use of any unlocked traversal abilities, meleeing, and most importantly, collecting loose pick-up items dropped by defeated enemies. There is a lot to take in. So many enemies. So many projectiles on screen. It will feel overwhelming in the first few hours of play. This is the “dance.”
You will get a good variety of weapons (five core archetypes including the handcannon, rifle and shotgun, each with at least three variants) and Power weapons. The ones you unlock later on are more tricky to use and harder to master (that includes weapons with no auto-aim and lock-on targeting), enough that will make you yearn using the simpler weapons (which some do have auto-aim and lock-on targeting) you’ve got used to in the early game.
The Power weapon you start with, Prominence, may seem simplistic, but you’ll learn to realise its true power lies in being a quick-to-fire rocket launcher with quick, direct damage.
While Saros is designed to overwhelm you by making it feel like the odds of you succeeding is slim, once you danced long enough to know the choreography by heart, you will for sure able to beat the odds, and it’s exhilarating.
Peak Saros is when you are comfortable in your step. You know exactly when to dodge and when to pull up the shield. You know what targets to prioritise. You know how to manage the push-and-pull of resources that is the power/shield bar. Bar’s full? Use that power attack you have, but save some so you can still pull a shield to absorb the bullets that’s supposed to damage you. Knowing that some traversal movements will render you invincible for a moment is key to avoid getting flustered by enemies that regularly pounce towards you.
Even the shooting has a hidden trick for the illuminated to make great use of. The Ricocheting Handcannon has an alt-fire where you can fire bullets as fast as you can fan the hammer. But the real big-brain move is to find the right cadence, the right rhythm of fire, so that you keep pressing the same button on beat that when it supposed to reload you nail the perfect time for a perfect reload. That’s effectively infinite ammo at a steady rate of fire, so long as you can keep the tempo perfect, which the enemies will try their darndest to throw you off tempo.
If you truly master Saros, you will reach a point where you just know which bullets are there to kill you and which are there to simply intimidate you. There’s a point I was so locked in that I just intuitively dash, jump and parry and dodge again without skipping a beat, not even flinching over the vast amount of scary bullets that I now know won’t ever scar me.
Play enough of Saros and you’ll find that there is a beat to follow, you can dance to it, and only by that you can overcome its onslaught of obstacles.
In other words, hot damn Saros got hands, but with persistence, you can clap back.
Saros will demand you to unleash your inner gamer, and should you able to meet its challenge you’ll be rewarded with one of the most satisfying shooters that makes you feel incredibly powerful, buzzing with adrenaline and a high more powerful than getting caffeinated because that rush of blood to the head from the audiovisual assault is also addicting.
Saros hits like a bonafide arcade game.
Faster, Streamlined Loop/Run/Cycle
The gameplay loop, a run (or a cycle) of Saros, as what I detailed in my impressions of playing the game at a preview event, feels a lot more streamlined compared to Returnal.
The gist of it is that Saros isn’t a “pure” roguelike as was Returnal (which is technically a roguelite, but it’s more roguelike than most titles in the genre due to how much RNG can affect one’s run). There’s a clear escalation in difficulty that gradually ramps up through a run, rather than starts and spurts like a regular roguelike.
The procedural generation of the biomes (levels) per run has been tightened. You don’t get silly stuff like having the tough arena with a warning sign to spawn right as you leave the hub. You are limited in the amount of backtracking is available. And each biome doesn’t span hours to clear—going through each optional area available in a run plus the boss fight should be within 30 minutes of play. Heck, you’re intended to start at very biome you need to progress the story rather than having to play from biome 1 every time. Though no one’s stopping you from going through multiple biomes for a marathon run (+2 hours).
“Streamline” might bring some other connotations with it, but this specific design change I argue makes the pacing of Saros much better than a typical roguelike or roguelite that rely too heavily on the mercy of a random number generator. Less lull times, less unexpected difficulty spikes. You get the break in pace when you need it, an empty area usually spawns right after a long encounter to give you breathing room. And the difficulty only gets tougher at an expected pace.
By doing this, Saros should allow more players to better appreciate Housemarque’s signature taste of shooters. At least one person has. This is the house that hard-carried bullet hell shoot-’em-ups in their indie days, later evolved to make twin-stick shooters, and now are making third-person shooters that carry all the design ethos of the classic titles that dominated the arcades way back then.
Housemarque had a “you must be this high to enter” sign in Returnal, like a it’s a rollercoaster ride gatekeeping shorter folks for safety reasons. It had a filter as horrible as the one in Armored Core VI. I still haven’t beaten Returnal, I’m just not high enough, height-wise, to pass.
Saros won’t gatekeep or filter you out. Thanks to this one neat trick.
Have It Your Way
With Saros, Housemarque pulled a Burger King. Have it your way, thanks to the introduction of Carcosa Modifiers.
With the Carcosa Modifiers, you can fine tune the difficulty just the way you like your burg—game. You can make it more difficult for the true masochists, or easier if you simply can’t deal with what the game throws at you. And the game says you shouldn’t be ashamed of it, this is a system you can interact with. It’s part of the game. It even doesn’t describe it as a custom difficulty setting, which it effectively is.
Each of the Carcosa Modifier has a different value assigned, and you need to balance total of these values before you can head out. You can’t make the game too easy (unless you enable the option in the settings menu, with some text saying you’re not playing the game as intended but have at it if you must).
The modifiers you can enable are proper game-changers. Are you like me who hates the whole monkey-paw-curl thing of picking up an artefact the confers a good and a bad passive? If the idea of having to adapt to a weird playstyle mid-run is a turn off, just like a fast-food joint, you can request for, effectively, no pickles.
That alone is already a godsend if you ask me, but positive modifiers can also make the enemies less bullet spongy (by having you deal more damage), take less damage (for folks struggling with the bullet hell avoidance) and give you better, rarer artefacts to spawn. Meanwhile, the negative modifiers let you deal less damage, take more damage, have a random artefact break when you enter a new biome and other mean stuff.
Another specific annoyance I had with Returnal, which made had me stuck in an endless cycle was that even if you’re put in the time of having scoured the biome of basically everything, you still need to that again and again as that’s the only way to get stronger. One of the Carcosan Modifier in Saros is labelled as debuff: it removes all Halcyon, the permanent currency equivalent to Returnal’s Ether, from ever spawning. The thing is, Halcyons that appear in containers and optional areas have a finite number from each biome. So what this supposedly debuff can do is, assuming you’ve scoured the whole biome enough times that Halcyons don’t spawn anymore, that’s free budget to spend and make the encounters much easier so you can progress with literally no downsides!
In games like Doom: The Dark Ages, I usually don’t mess around much of the custom difficulty options as Medium difficulty is always good with me. But Saros is that one game (well, and Rogue Legacy 2, another rare roguelite title that I played and enjoyed) that absolutely benefits from having this feature available for the masses, and crucially labelled as a feature, rather than an accessibility setting.
I feel no shame cranking up the damage modifier to the highest as Housemarque themselves declare it’s balanced as I put in other debilitating modifiers to balance it out to zero, just to show I am mostly playing on what would have been Medium difficulty. I even had it on -2, indicating that I had more modifiers that made the game easier, in the early game due to some skill checks (you will learn to parry or you will die). I don’t regret it, dignity intact.
If you struggle with progressing through Returnal but love the concept of it, Saros does just about everything to make sure you have all the tools to make the game fit your playstyle. As much as the game wants you to adapt to any bullshit it throws at you, it also gives back and allows you to adapt the game to your tastes, and I think that’s a brilliant call.
Come Back Stronger
Lastly, on the gameplay side, Saros introduces a skill tree called the Armour Matrix. There are no shops in the runs to buy items, all the Lucenite and Halcyon collected are to be spent exclusively in the Armour Matrix.
Here you can invest in points to permanently boost your three core stats, each of them will make you stronger in different ways. Resilience gives you more health. Command increases power/shield bar. Drive makes you gain more Lucenite drops and in turn increases your Proficiency better, where every level of Proficiency increases each of the three stats. You can level up, basically. The weapon proficiency system from Returnal has been reworked for Saros, for the better.
There will be instances where you simply are not good enough to deal with the many enemies and bullets at hand. And that’s okay, take back all of the resources you have collected, spend it on unlocking new nodes on the skill tree and, as the marketing tagline goes, come back stronger.
And you do indeed get stronger over time. It does so by making it more consistent to snowball yourself into becoming even stronger throughout the run. With the right nodes unlocked, you’re not only making yourself starting at a higher baseline stat, you also develop the potential to grow those stats faster within the run itself.
There are limits to what you can grind. The skill tree is effectively gatekept by each boss fight, so you can only grind to a certain extent. Though the good news is, unlike the first two bosses, the ones after that have much more nodes to unlock that it will require multiple runs (and deaths) to really clean house and unlock them all. Not to mention the costs go up sharply. So grind runs where you really don’t expect to beat a boss but try as much collect as many upgrade resources are a thing.
Grind long enough, and you’ll find that you become so, so strong that you might’ve outgrew the Carcosan Modifier. Late game with hundreds of nodes on the Armour Matrix unlocked, enemies just melt and can’t make a dent on you when you get hit. You will want to crank up the difficulty, add some more debilitating modifier, just so you can feel something. But by then, you already have played enough that you’ve gotten good at the “dance.” The idea of removing the Second Chance mechanic where you get one free revive (handy when you are so, so close to beating bosses) become frivolous rather than a big handicap. Bullets barely scratch you. You, yourself, the player, have become stronger in Saros. And you’ll need a bigger dose of difficulty to get that same high again, which the game gleefully provides.
The developers want players who play Saros to feel powerful over time and they can overcome the seemingly overwhelming odds. The developers want players to keep playing Saros over and over (like every other Housemarque game) so it makes that power trip tantalising and addictive.
To the surprise of no one, Saros scores full marks on gameplay. Housemarque is the hallmark of peak arcade shooter and Saros continues this exemplary track record.
Content
I rolled credits for Saros within 15 hours of playtime. Miraculously, only two hours was spent getting stuck on the first boss. And I then continued to play further and hit 20 hours before writing this review, having seen more or less all of the content on offer.
The beauty of a game like Saros is that you want to play it again and again, just for funsies. You might be done with the story, but the high you get from the gameplay loop makes you want to go for a run again and again. Calling a game “addictive” is a video game review cliche but Saros truly earns it, enough that I’ve laced this review with jokes of this theme.
I felt a genuine buzz after each run, even the dud ones. Especially the dud ones, as I know exactly what I did wrong and usually just go out and run it back. Because I know I can. I deserve a better run.
But you do want to play Saros again and again for the story. Saros doesn’t tell its story straight, and will require you to piece together all the lore drops from texts and audio logs to really figure out what’s going on. And with the central drama being something of human nature, it makes more compelling. If you follow the story hard enough you’ll end up feeling a lot like detective James Doakes—something is clearly wrong but you just can’t prove it yet.
If the human drama at the center of Saros’ story isn’t your thing, try and read the subtle hints of how the lore connects to the gameplay. There’s a bit of ludonarrative harmony in there if you dig for it. Underneath the eeriness of people turning into fans of Coldplay’s first single to hit platinum is a commentary about the addicting power trip you’re experiencing.
(No shade to Coldplay, they helped cleaned our river once, and the deep cuts in X&Y are great stuff.)
While most big-budget PlayStation Studios titles have the storytelling that aims to replicate cinema, Saros is written more to the scale of a TV/streaming series. A lot of the bite-sized cinematics don’t make much sense at first but fits a wider narrative once the metaphorical season finale hits.
Saros treats its audience as adults with media literacy, befitting of its story. There are hints you can discover yourselves of where the story may turn, and when it does twist and turns, it feels earned and fitting if you see it coming. It might also leave you head scratching with its insistent vagueposting that one might want to wait for a loremaster content creator to make a video explainer. Your mileage may vary.
Personal Enjoyment
I may not vibe with Returnal, but I think that the game is well made for the objectives it had in mind. It wants to be a roguelike, that’s fair.
In turn Saros is more of a roguelite, or so I thought. In reality, it is a third-person action shooter that has roguelite elements but not much of its structure.
To put into another perspective, a bullet hell shoot-’em-up game makes you feel like a tiny David facing against a Goliath. A bullet heaven (i.e. reverse bullet hell/survivors-like) makes you feel in control of the carnage, you are the Goliath.
Saros, the self-proclaimed bullet ballet, dance between these two opposing genres, though not exactly stuck in neither (i.e. it’s not a bullet limbo, not in terms of gameplay). Saros has you climb from the depths of bullet hell into the heights of bullet heaven, all while pirouetting around and into bullets throughout the ascendancy.
It’s an interesting exercise, trying to put Saros into genre conventions. That alone is already made me like what this game is doing.
But what really made me love Saros is how it’s not precious in having every player face the same, exact challenge. It still wants you to experience some form of challenge, but you get to pick what you want more or less of, and still make you sweat to take out each boss.
It does require one to understand the “dance.” If you’ve played enough soulslikes you’ll get this. And if you grew up with arcade shooters, the ones Housemarque are inspired from and make, you’ll also get this. Positioning yourself to gain an advantage or deny the enemy of it. Having the exact dodge, jump and parry timing to each attack treating them like a call-and-response. Managing the resources you have to deal as much damage as possible. It’s form of mastery, this dance. And also a form of art and expression. While boss fights have the bosses lead the tango, in normal arena encounters you get to dictate the tempo.
If you like the idea of the “dance,” as expressed in many other game genres, Saros will hit you like crack. I don’t know if it hits as strongly for the hardcore players who enjoyed Returnal as it was, this review is from the perspective of a lesser-skilled player who tried to get into Returnal but failed, felt like I deserve that experience, and Saros gave me what I want, what I need.
A good spell during my review I feel like I was a Powerslave, intoxicated by the power fantasy on each good run. Unlike the subject of the Iron Maiden song, I get to revive and seek that power again, and again, and again, and again. If the experience I had with Saros is described like a song, it is a lot like Powerslave. A little hard to get into at first, the exotic yet haunting imagery paints an intriguing picture, and once you listen to it enough you can’t get enough of that powerful solo, the perfect crescendo of all the snowballing the galloping riffs during the verses alluded to.
I swear this is the last sentence to evoke the use of substances in this review, but man, the power trip in Saros left me tripping.
Verdict
With Saros, Housemarque improves on the third-person bullet hell roguelike formula it created by blazing a new path for roguelites. This bullet ballet of a third-person shooter has tight controls, a satisfying gameplay loop that makes you want to play more and an intriguing story that keeps you guessing and eager to see more. You can make a big-budget, cinematic game while retaining the game design honed from the days of arcades.
Saros is a scintillating shooter and another shining example of a PS5 game.
Played on a base PS5. Review copy provided by the publisher.
Saros
Saros is a scintillating shooter and another shining example of a PS5 game.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 10
- Content 9
- Personal Enjoyment 9.5