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It’s times like this when I wish Housemarque at least let you carry two different weapons at a time, rather than forcing you to run and gun with one. Some weapons have a short effective range, some have gravity drop off, and it makes them awkward to hit. Sometimes you have to do this while surrounded by enemies on all sides. In the final biome, there are floating orbs that you must shoot to produce platforms that allow you to cross deep chasms. I didn’t beat that boss because I figured it out, I beat it because I happened to have the right equipment. The random nature of equipment drops means you’re often at the mercy of RNG. I also don’t think it’s particularly fair. It’s harder than simply existing during pandemic times. It’s harder than a rocket-propelled diamond. I know that automatically makes people think I’m just crap, but Returnal is harder than a right hook from Mike Tyson in his prime. This is a hardcore game, and I’m not saying that just because I am, unfortunately, a game journalist. I also had a good assault rifle that I found by accident along the way.
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Eventually, I did it because of luck - I had a buff that auto-healed me when my health was low, which gave me just enough survivability to take a couple of free hits in the boss’s third phase. Oh, and all your equipment resets when you die. If you turn up with a pistol, you probably won’t have much of a chance. You can sprint there and ignore combat, but then you’ll miss out on health upgrades, weapons, and other buffs that could be beneficial when you eventually get another shot at the boss.
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Yes, you can skip over the first boss, but you have to fight through a dark forest full of spindly nightmares before trekking through an arid desert baked down under the heat of a red sun, battling floating tentacle monsters as you go. While you unlock slight shortcuts, you have to manually run to the boss from the very start of the game each time. It probably took me about eight attempts, but that’s without factoring in all the times I tried to reach it and died on the way. The second biome’s boss is a complete nightmare. Related: Returnal Developers On Making The Roguelike A Less Solitary Experience It’s just a shame the game gets in the way, like a novel where every page has a comedy boxing glove that pops out and bops you on the nose.
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The layout of the biomes constantly shifts, and you might find an audio recording where there wasn’t one before, or a new cipher that allows you to translate another part of an alien glyph.
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Even in failure, the story is breadcrumbed throughout just enough to keep you invested. It’s a great setup for a roguelite game, giving a solid narrative justification for your constant deaths and rebirths.
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