Saros is Forever, like Sun is Forever

It's important to know a little about the reviewer before you read their review.

The only similar game I've played is Hades and I loved Hades. Unlike Hades, Saros is more of a Rouglite but Play station is advertising it as an Action Adventure and I agree.

I do like Action Adventure and have played a plenty, let's see if Saros is worth the hype?

This review is broken down in sections for your convenience.

Gameplay

As I said earlier that Arjun keeps coming back to life and essentially that's what makes the game a rougelite, and each time you go back on a run, you get stronger and you are likely to go further and this is the whole premise of the game. At it's core the gameplay is centered around your choices, the weapons that you choose, the power ups you chooose and the attribute modfiers that you choose, they all define how your next run is going to be like and based on mistakes you made in your previous runs you try to make better choices, the only catch is that the world changes a little bit everytime you come out so no 2 runs are likely to be same.

Each time you go out on a run to find the whereabouts of your fellow crew mates, you find these containers colored blue, red or Yellow. These containers give you either a weapon, health, attribute modifiers etc. You also battle a bunch of enemies and defeating them drops some Lucenite. Lucenite is game's currency that you get to take back to your base camp and upgrade your weapons and attributes. You also find Halcyon that are used to unlock some rare attributes and this is how you get stronger after each run.

To simplify, there are 2 kind of upgrades going on within a game, a parmanent upgrade that last across runs and the temprory upgrades that last only for a run and those are your guns level, attribute upgrades that you find on the run.

Now the game has 8 biomes that you go through and upon finishing 1 you move on to the next one. So in case you die, you don't go all the way back, instead you just start over from the current biome. In fact you get to chose which biome you want to go to. As you progress, the previous biomes that you cleared become easier so someimes it maeks sense to start from previous biome and then get to the current biome (as they are connected), and this allows you to get powered up and make your current biome and bosses much easier.

Gameplay also offers a fair bit of platforming to make your way through the game. Each biome is divided into sections and you essentially clear one section after the other, each section has a set of enemies that you need to get through and some of these sections have platforming in it and some dont.

That's pretty much it for the gameplay loop but one thing I can say for sure is that the thrill on each run is super high!

Weapons

Saros brought the A game when it comes to the weapon and Playstation's Dual Sense controller elivated the whole expiernece. The Haptic feedback gave each shots fired a feel of relaism and no matter the guns you picked each one had the haptice feedback of the highest quality.

Talking about the weapons, the game offer 5 different kind of weapons and they each have mutile variants. You get a Hand gun, a shotgun, a Crossbow gun, a Disc Launcher and my favorite the automatic rifels. While I'm not going to talk about each one of them, the Smart Automatic Rfle made my life easier. The gun made sure that it finds a target with each shot and that allowed me to focus on all the bulets that I needed to dogde from the enemy.

Apart from the core weapons, you also have a power weapon that's integrated into your suit. You gain the ability to use the power weapon by absorbing blue orbs and once you have enough in your power meter you can then use it on an enemy for some extra damage.

And then last but not the least, like almst every sony game, you get an L3 + R3 ability which is called an Overdrive in this game. YOu fill up your oversrive meter by doing damage to enemy and once it's full you can unleash havoc on an enemy dealing insane amount of damage.

That's all we have in weapons department, now let's move on to the characters.

Characters

Game has one playable character and that's Arjun, portrayed by actor Rahul Kohli. I must say that Rahul did an incredible job in this game espesially the sequences where arrogance and anger were on display.He truly brought Arjun to life. Game also have some supporting characters and interacting with them reveals the story, piece by piece.

The supporting characters don't really have a lot to do as the game focuses mainly on Arjun and it's safe to say that actor Rahul Kohli did a great job holding the ship on its own. That's all there it is when it comes to character, the game also has one more major supporting character but I'm not talking about it to avoid spoilers. Alright, let's move on to the performance of the game.

Performance

As expected from any 1st party Playstation studio, Saros delivers an excellent performance throughout. I didn't notice any frame drops or any major bugs that would make my experience bad. I did not experience any crash either. Irrespective of whether you are playing this game on base PS5 or Pro, everyone experinces the game the same. The game does not offer any extra settings and runs 60 FPS during gameplay and 30 FPS during cinematics.

Story

Where do I even begin! When you play a game that's considered a rouglite you don't really think too much about the story aspect of the game but Housemarque delivered an exceptional game and belive it or not most of it through their storytelling.

The story of Saros is told through every piece of the game, through flashbacks, through message logs, through audio logs and by talking to various characters.

Story of Saros at its core is simple and focues on integrity of lead character in the game, Arjun. But how this story is told throughout the 2 endings of the game is a masterpiece, it's like watching a Christopher Nolan movie where pieces of the story come togehter by the time you achieve the true ending.

Without spoiling the story let me tell you a little bit about the story. Arjun is seeking out someone close to him in planet called Carcosa. Arjun has a team up their with him but only he is the only one that keeps coming back to life even if he dies on the planet. How? well, I'm not gonna tell you that. If I tell you anything more then I risk spoiling the game for you.

Graphics and Sound

The Graphics of Saros is incredible. It's up their when it comes to fidelity but the art design is where the game truly shines! Every biome you go to looks different and something that you would never be able to imagine! I love it when a video game shows you something that you would have never thought of and that's exactly what Saros does with it's world design. With the tagline 'Sun is Forever' the game takes the color scheme of Sun and paints the most beautiful pictures that you could possibly see. Hats off to the developers for creating something mesmerizing!

As for sound, oh wow! While I played the game mostly on monitor speakers, the rare occasions when I put my headphones on, the sound design just blew me apart. Every projectile shot, every enemy movement, the OST and everything else in the sound department is crafted with utmost care. My favorite? Vibing to the hard OSTs while fighting the bosses! I wish everyone to experience that.

Alright, let's talk about the enemies in the game now.

Enemies

Game had a good varity of enemies but the bosses just stood out. The bss degin in this game is unmatched. I have played many games but I've never been this impresed by the boss designs. Not just the way they look but their attack patterns, their uniquness and the dangers that come along with it. How you fare against a boss totally depends on how ell did you understood the mechanics of the game.

There were plenty of mini bosses too and they were called Alphas. What made it fun was that you never knew when these Alphas would pop out as each run was different due to the ever changing nature of the word. Basic enemies were also done well and there was nothing more satisfactory then get rid of the cluster of them.

That pretty much sums up various aspects of the review so let's move on to the Strength and Weaknesses of the game.

Strengths

The game through and through shines in it's gameplay. The gameplay is simply addictive. On runs where you fail, you come back with this determination to succeed in the next run. THe way the combat works also pulls you back everytime you are about to give up. There is something about making your way through the bullet hell!

Other thing that you appreciate by the time the game ends is its story and how developers chose to reveal it across 2 endings. While you are in the middle of the game you don't really care about the ending but then as you get closer to the end the more pieces of the story are revealed and by the time you finish the first ending, you are bound to chase the True ending. This doesn't happen to me often but I was very excited to Find the true ending and loved it when I was able to finsih it.

ok, let's move on tothe game's waekness.

Weaknesses

I got none, sorry

Conclusion

Saros is one of the most incredible games you will play this year. It moves away from Sony's tried and tested formula of Story based - heavy on cut scenes - action adventure games.

The whole journey of Saros was about determination. Determination to get stronger and get back out there to look for answers and for ones it felt nice to not look around in the deepest corners of the game to look for the treasure chest. The game kept it simple, get out there, the powerups are right in front of your eyes, grab them and fight your way through and if you fail, make sure you learn from your mistakes and go back again!

There is no doubt in my mind that I'll be jumping on this game from time time for another run, this game has definitely achieved that and in doing so - just like Sun, Saros becomes forever.

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SpwanYaard