Each weapon utilises adaptive reloading, meaning whenever you’re not firing you’ll be gaining those precious rounds back into your clip. You start each run with a rudimentary pistol and a dream, but while exploring you’ll stumble upon automatic laser rifles, scatterguns that overwhelm the screen with darts, caustic launchers and shotguns just to name a few. To stave off damage, and stave you must, you have a boost-assisted jump and a projectile-ignoring dash, but as you try to hold onto your health bar you’ll simultaneously be firing back. Seeing some of the dark and gloomy environments pulse with colour as you combat a wave of enemies is equally parts stressful and gorgeous. Returnal is a bullet hell shooter, so most enemies will make an attempt on your life with various patterns of multi-coloured energy balls and waves that you’ll need to jump over and dash through in order to stay alive. Lizard-like beasts, bipedal teleporting trees, stationary turrets and flying cuboid squids with masses of wandering tendrils are just a handful of the many enemies that you’ll encounter on Atropos, all with their own distinct attack patterns and level of aggression. Not long after leaving the comfort of your ship Helios, you’ll encounter the inhabitants of Atropos and they’re not too keen on your presence. Investigating the damp and ominous forest she now finds herself in, she discovers the body of a fellow doomed Astra Scout, though it’s not a colleague, it’s Selene’s own decaying corpse. Crash landing on the alien world, Selene finds herself stranded without any means of off-world contact. You play as Selene, an Astra Scout (deep-space astronaut) who has picked up a mysterious distress signal from the off-limits planet of Atropos and made the questionable decision to investigate. More than a marketing tagline, those words are the crux of Returnal. Having spent a considerable amount of time dying and retrying, I can say without any doubt that Returnal not only manages to meet these expectations, it also exceeds them in a great many ways. That initial trailer was atmospheric and intriguing and it piqued the interest of many who were planning on nabbing Sony’s next-gen console (including myself), but it raised one very important question – can a roguelike live up to the expectations that come with being a big AAA release? After all, the genre is almost exclusively tied to indies. It was during the PlayStation 5 reveal event that we got our first look at Returnal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |