Returnal review
Availability: Out April 30th on PS5
The history is going to be important here, if we're going to pull all of this apart. Returnal is the latest from Housemarque, the Finnish team behind masterly arcade-style shoot-em-ups like Resogun, twin-stick shooters like Dead Nation and Alienation, and the superlative Nex Machina. It's their first "triple-A" one though, and with big budget comes big scope. Returnal's is vast - it wants to be everything. It's a roguelite, insofar as death returns you to the start and the dungeonlike world procedurally changes with each run through it. But it's also a metroidvania, handing out new abilities after boss kills which open up new paths. And it's a third-person shooter, obviously. But also a bullet-hell arcade game. And a first-person narrative horror. And a soulslike. It picks from Ridley Scott, Eugene Jarvis, Hidetaka Miyazaki, H.R. Giger. From Metroid, P.T., Control. From Defender and Vanquish. Pick your poison - Returnal stocks everything and almost everything is sublime.