It hacks like a high school friend’s hand-me-down Dodge Shadow trying to accelerate after idling too long at a red light. The alternate fire options are sick as hell, though, and one of the few areas the Housemarque I remember peeks through.
It’s the best use of the haptic triggers I’ve experienced on the PS5, but also pulling back like you would in literally every other game since the invention of controller triggers is a muscle memory that gets you killed in Returnal. I don’t like having to retrain my fingers and brain to make sense of the alt fire on the haptic feedback L2 (there’s bumpers, just let me use those), or the impossibly slow recharge time between alt-volleys. And the various random powers you’ll accrue can be neat remember bunnyhopping in Quake? Returnal lets you turn every landed jump into a kinetic blast of death-the ultimate in forward momentum. The weapons are interesting if a bit underwhelming at times, though some of the alt-fire moves are truly fantastic and show off the much vaunted power of the PS5-watch as those teraflops go to work orchestrating the particle effects and physics of a dozen balls of deadly blue light bounding and ricocheting like the Mega Millions Lottery Machine bringing death to an entire arena. To be honest, I expect a little more from the studio that gave me Super Stardust Delta, my personal favorite arcade experience on the unfairly neglected PlayStation Vita. If that’s all we’re using as a metric (and unfortunately it is), we’re already lost.Īs an action shooter, it’s a competent enough game. I wasn’t a huge fan of Stormdivers, but putting that on hold for this? Well, it’s probably the right decision for Housemarque and Sony’s bottom line, but also, yeesh. The second I managed a run up to the mid century farmhouse in the middle of an overgrown alien ruin, I knew I’d made a mistake. A game so big and important that it halted a battle royale in its steps and turned Finnish studio Housemarque away from its arcade history and towards the AAA. It put their battle royale, Stormdivers, on ice for god knows how long, for a game that wanted to be so daring that it warranted a blog post that murdered arcade games. This was the game that snuffed out “arcade games” in a blog post. Because I’m fully convinced now that AAA isn’t just a more expensive-looking caliber of game, it’s a creative dead end in an industry that doesn’t even realize it’s gasping for air in a world wracked by the seismic convulsions of capitalism. That’s what these big launch-window titles are supposed to do: oversell all the features that the new tech can pull off before everyone abandons it for raw horsepower later in the life cycle.īut by the time I was trying to solve the mystery of a mid century farmhouse, I kind of stopped caring about the promise of the future. I didn’t care so much for the game fully enmeshing with all of the features of the PS5, from 3D audio, to the more esoteric haptic feedback (which mostly just feels like a vibrator on its last ounce of battery or an overfed mouse trying to escape your hands), to its taking advantage of the ultra-fast SDDs (still far too small and non-expandable) inside the giant sci-fi boxes, but I was willing to see it out. Returnal, despite the terrible name, looked like it scratched a number of itches. Bungie betrayed me with whatever the hell they were doing in Destiny 2, and the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 is still nowhere on the horizon. I was pretty sold when I first saw the trailer for Finnish game studio Housemarque’s PS5 debut, Returnal. Frenetic over-the-shoulder shooting from a studio known for raucous arcade mayhem.
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