Imagine if John Wick was in a gunfight with a furious fireworks display that hated him, and you're one bizarre step closer to understanding the brilliance of Returnal. Housemarque's third person shooter is a neon nightmare, an air-dashing, constantly exploding, bullet-hell blast. A love letter to roguelikes, grimdark sci-fi, and going a little over the top with the particle effects. It's also easily my favorite shooter on PS5. (Sorry, Concord!)
Returnal stars Selene, an unlucky astronaut who crashes on a planet that could only be more hostile if it was made of bombs. With her ship in ruins, Selene starts exploring and soon stumbles upon the corpse of an astronaut. But wait a second… that's her corpse?! It's only missing the Twilight Zone musical stinger.
The joy of repetition
Selene perishes shortly after, but wakes up back on her crashed ship, and this interstellar roguelike properly begins. Selene, naturally, is absolutely horrified. But I was delighted. Not because I've always dreamed of endlessly dying on a hostile alien planet (that's just a fun coincidence). But because I adore a good roguelike, and from the second I fired my first gun in Returnal, I knew I was in safe hands. Safe hands with peerless trigger fingers.
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This is punchy, satisfying gunplay from a team who know how to make firing a gun feel like winning the lottery. Instead of the miserable pea shooter you're usually saddled with for the first hour of games like this, Returnal's starting pistol has such a great sense of impact that you could feasibly try finishing an entire run with it (though, erm, good luck if you do). The shotgun feels like it could blast a black hole into the sky, and using the late-game rocket launcher is akin to a dino-wiping cataclysmic event.
Then there's the more alien weapons. The hollowseeker has an absurdly high rate of fire and bullets that 'seek' out enemies, so long as you're pointing vaguely in the right direction. The trade-off is that each bullet does about as much damage as sending the enemy a strongly-worded letter.
Returnal's shooting proves that the DualSense is PS5's greatest feature.
Stick with it, though, and the benefits start to outway the negatives. That high-rate of fire is great for interrupting enemy attacks and staggering them, giving you an opportunity to get in close with a powerful melee strike. A gun I'd dismissed at first eventually transformed me into a space ninja. If only all gaming weaponry had such satisfying arcs.
Returnal's shooting proves that the DualSense is PS5's greatest feature. It's the way the right trigger locks in place when you use the joyously overpowered alternative fire. The rat-a-tat rumbling as you spray a desperate round of machine gun fire at the relentless beasts pursuing you. Even the controller's speaker, so gimmicky and distracting in other games (looking at you, God of War Ragnarok), is used perfectly here, telling you the crucial information that your alt-fire is once again ready to be blasted into some alien horror.
Pretty deadly
That's extra-helpful, as an on-screen prompt would almost definitely be missed. When the action is at its most intense, Returnal is a borderline incomprehensible light show, like being beaten to death by an angry kaleidoscope. Surprisingly, this isn't as common a problem as you might expect, thanks to strong visual design and clever color-coding of enemies and projectiles. Besides, I'd argue the fantastic visual splendor is more than worth the cost of a few unclear deaths. And if it all gets too much, you're only ever a few taps of the dash button from enjoying the deadly fireworks display from afar.
Housemarque wisely makes almost no attempt to hide their arcade-shooter roots. They constantly snub dull concepts like 'realism' (pah!) in favour of spectacular gunfeel and pure power fantasy. That lovely dash works just as smoothly in mid-air, Hollow Knight-style. Artifacts you discover on runs can be as utterly game-changing as Balatro's finest jokers, like one that rewards melee kills with two bolts smacking nearby enemies. Suddenly I'm holstering my gun in this third person shooter so I can focus on being a lightning-spitting swordswoman instead.
Even its impressively intimidating bestiary isn't above being repurposed for joyously silly bits of pure videogame logic. I've been fighting monsters that live on the ceiling and use their tongues to drag me up to their jaws since Half-Life, but Returnal is one of the few games I can think of where you're encouraged to be caught by them. They've transformed an iconic videogame monster into a handy elevator, because you can dash-escape at any time, helping yourself to that health upgrade that was on higher ground. As inspired as it is ridiculous.
99% Rogue, 1% Like
If you loved Hades 2 and are looking for more roguelike fun, be warned that Returnal isn't nearly as warm and immediately rewarding as that one set in, er, Hell. Because Returnal is deliberately creating a far more oppressive, despairing atmosphere than a bunch of Greek God thirst traps bickering. The only voice you'll hear in this game is your own, in recordings you'll find from previous runs that you don't remember, and you can't even trust that. Returnal doesn't just borrow its excellent 3D map from the Metroid Prime Trilogy; it's also helped itself to the isolating atmosphere and the tension of exploring a truly alien world that constantly wants you dead.
It keeps you coming back thanks to the glorious gunplay and the fact that even your most disastrous run is subtly training you. Enemies spray you with horrible projectiles, bullet hell-style, encouraging you to keep your distance. But the crucial currency they drop upon death won't stick around for long, forcing you to keep close for the best rewards.
Fancy sticking alien parasites on your body to get buffs like better healing?
Returnal loves forcing you into dilemmas like this. You find infected chests that might contain a great gun, but also come with the risk of some horrible drawback, like extra fall damage, or less effective healing. Fancy sticking alien parasites on your body to get buffs like better healing? Go for it, but you'll be amazed to hear that attaching symbiotic parasites that look like they've just crawled off the set of Alien Earth also has negative consequences. Found a shotgun with impossible range that also spits bonus explosives? Help yourself, but you can only carry one gun at a time, and that'll mean saying a tearful goodbye to your pistol with the tremendous fire rate and ricocheting bullets.
Weapons sometimes have upgrades that require you to use them to be unlocked, Ratchet and Clank-style, which is great at forcing you into trying something new. The hollowseeker gets a lot easier to love when you've unlocked the bonus purple discs of pain that start blasting out of the barrel. So there is constant progression here. Housemarque just makes you earn it, and rewards you handsomely for putting the time in.
Returnal has been on PS Plus Extra and Premium for ages, and that includes its excellent DLC too. Until lightning hopefully strikes twice with their next game, Saros, there's no shooter on PS5 I'd recommend more. If I die some day, only to discover my life has actually been a rougelike timeloop nightmare from the second I bought my PS5, I know what game I'm reinstalling first.
Check out our best PS5 games ranking for what to play next!
