Saros

Housemarque is back with yet another fantastic fast-paced third person shooter. Saros builds on Returnal, delivering deeper and more enjoyable gameplay, as well as a new permanent progression system and modifiers which allow you to tweak the difficulty to your preferences. All in all, it's Housemarque's best game yet.

A blistering, rapid-fire epic without peer, Saros confidently delivers a dual masterclass in third-person shooter design and roguelike sensibilities all wrapped in a delectable veneer that elevates it to one of the best looking games on PlayStation 5. To quote the kids - Housemarque cooked here. This is their masterpiece and it is next the must have, utterly essential PlayStation exclusive. Carcosa beckons.

As a follow up to Returnal, Saros is excellent. It builds on the foundations of Selene’s adventure and is a sensational slice of bullet-hell shooter goodness.

SAROS is head and shoulders above Returnal, which was already a stellar reinvention of the bullet-hell genre, thanks to a richer story, tougher enemies and gameplay systems that tailor the game to the player.

Discovering a powerful (and profitable) new element on a faraway planet is a sci-fi staple that is especially prevalent in modern media, but Saros embraces this trope by making Lucenite’s home planet, Carcosa, the stuff of inescapable but wholly engaging nightmares. Protagonist Arjun fights to maintain his sanity, find a lost love, and stay alive (failing often) against an onslaught of lasers and monsters while the people around him descend into vague madness. All this while your AI-driven ...

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Saros is a relentless, exciting and demanding rogue-lite shooter that combines cinematic spectacle with tight bullet-hell combat. It’s a marvellous follow-up to Returnal, that retains the best bits of its predecessor while sanding down its (minor) rough edges. It pulls very few punches, but will have you saying “one more run” on a loop.

Saros is an excellent, heart-pounding action game that is easily one of the PS5's best exclusives. The combat is exhilarating and Carcosa is a blast to explore. The quality-of-life features make it more accessible than Returnal, and while that might upset some purists, it helps Saros avoid some of the frustrating pitfalls that roguelite games sometimes fall into. Saros is one of the year's best releases and a must-have for PS5 gamers.

Saros might be following in the footsteps of Returnal in many ways, but this is very much a standalone experience, telling a new story within another original sci-fi setting, building out its third person bullet hell action with its own particular twists, and a compelling new roguelite narrative to unfurl.

Arjun, for all of the scattered bits and pieces of his backstory that Housemarque dripfeeds to the player, is a pretty awful protagonist when you take a step back from the sci-fi mythology and look over his shoulder at the way he interacts with his colleagues and chases after his missing partner. Arjun is a flawed man with anger issues towards his father which manifests in the brief backstory vignettes players stitch together in the course of death and rebirth. The entire time I spent on Carcosa in his standard issue space boots was watching a man who refuses to take no for an answer slowly su...

Returnal was a bold statement from a humble Finnish team in 2021. After decades of smaller, arcade-oriented projects, it showed just what Housemarque was capable of when reaching for the stars. Now, in following it up, the devs have proven it was far from a fluke. While rough around the edges at launch, SAROS shows that when afforded the opportunity, they can shine brighter than even Carcosa’s blazing sun.

Saros’ levels are beautifully eerie, with the best and weirdest vistas saved for its second half. Character and enemy design are generally excellent as well, though NPC conversations can appear disjointed, with underwhelming mocap outside its gorgeous proper cutscenes. That doesn’t distract from the game’s many superb voice performances, but it can get noticeably awkward at times. Returnal’s Jane Perry was transcendent, but her voice had to carry that entire game, so it's gratifying that Saros' ensemble cast, led by Rahul Kohli as Arjun is exceptional across the board, well beyond the quality ...