Saros Review: Bullet ballet is the perfect description

What’s your biggest achievement while playing a game? Getting a nuke on Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? Beating all the ghosts in Mario Kart's Time Trials? For a while, beating Returnal was always my go-to flex. The unforgiving combat, coupled with the fact that it launched when not many people could get their hands on a PS5, meant few gamers experienced the thrilling adventure in Atropos, and Selene’s gripping story.

Thankfully, I don’t think this will be the case with Saros.

Five years on and with nearly 100 million PS5s sold, Housemarque has returned with yet another excellent bullet hell shooter, which is much more accessible to all types of players - hardcore and casual alike.

Saros is not a direct sequel to Returnal, but to view it as a standalone title wouldn’t feel right, either. Not only does the gameplay import many elements from Returnal, but the overall setup is pretty similar, too.

You play as Arjun Devraj, an Enforcer on Echelon IV – the fourth team sent to the alien planet of Carcosa by the mega-corp Soltari, hoping to establish a colony to harvest its natural resources for energy.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, something went wrong. Echelon IV is the rescue team sent in to find out what happened to the previous three missions.

So, Saros sees you land on a mysterious alien planet, fighting a host of organic and mechanical creatures, all to uncover what happened and how it ties into the personal story of the protagonist. Oh, and you keep dying and coming back to life. Sound familiar? It even stars the amazing Jane Perry, who played Selene in Returnal, if you need another link.

Saros is what Housemarque describes as a "Bullet Ballet" game. A bullet hell shooter, but with grace!

I was sceptical when I first heard this description, given my experience with Returnal was anything but graceful, but Saros does manage to add some more variety beyond the "dodge everything" tactic. This time, you have a shield! Except it isn't a shield, really, as it can't block everything. It's yet another method you need to harness to survive the onslaught of bullets and enemies thrown at you, forcing you to absorb and face certain bullets head-on.

This was just one of many new gameplay features introduced to build on Housemarque’s already excellent core gameplay loop, alongside additional weapons each with unique abilities. It brings back unique enemies of creatures and machines you could never have imagined, and epic boss fights that are often grandiose in their nature. Bullet ballet is absolutely the correct description.

Among diehard Returnal fans, there was some concern ahead of launch that Saros would be too watered down for a more general audience, in a similar vein to my experience with Death Stranding 2.

Fear not, though, fellow gaming masochists. Saros is still hard, especially in the beginning. Combat is punishing but rewarding, and boss fights remain brutal, epic battles that will force you to lock in like never before. Enemy encounters are chaotic battles, health items are scarce, and you will die a lot.

One of the core ideas in building Saros was around coming back stronger each time. This does ease the frustration of losing a run, as you’ll at least get some upgrades.

• Read more: Essential Saros tips for beginners

After you clear a few bosses, you unlock Carcosan Modifiers. This is a gameplay balancing system that lets you tweak the difficulty of the game, so long as it still remains 'balanced'. Saros is pretty generous in this definition, with trade-offs for increased damage given or decreased damage taken having similar weighting to some more minor negative modifiers. But, if this means that more players get to enjoy the full experience of Saros, that can only be a good thing.

While I think the gameplay was an overall improvement on Returnal (difficulty aside), the story is where things slightly falter. Returnal’s story of Selene uncovering the mysteries of Atrophos and her own life was a tight experience, fully focused on the one character.

Saros took a more traditional approach. It introduced other characters! Unfortunately, aside from the excellent performance of Jane Perry as Sheridan, not much would have been lost had Saros narrowed its focus to Arjun only.

The Echelon IV crew and other characters you meet along the way are not interesting enough compared to Arjun and the wider Saros story. Dialogue and cutscenes often feel unnecessary and in the way of the core gameplay loops.

In contrast, the Audio Logs found across the biomes did a superb job in gradually uncovering the fates of the Echelon missions. Had the whole of the narrative shifted into these notes, the journey would have felt much tighter and complemented the mystery of Carcosa that Housemarque developed so well.

Beyond the format, Saros tells another high-concept, puzzling story that makes you question the reality in which you view Carcosa and Arjun through.

That gradual understanding of how everything on Carcosa came to go so wrong, what happened to the former expeditions, and why Arjun is so sullenly invested in finding any survivors is a necessary bonus to keep you going after narrowly dying for the fifth time to that one boss you can’t seem to beat.

Saros is a confident convergence of Housemarque’s now signature style of gameplay and storytelling, elevating the studio into one of PlayStation Studio’s most reliable developers alongside Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Santa Monica and Sucker Punch. While the narrative framing fell a bit short this time around, I will be first in line for the game from Housemarque, likely set on an alien planet, with a mysterious and personal story, dancing the bullet ballet with a host of creatures.

Saros is available on PS5.

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