Returnal™

is a good game, i like to kill monster and die all times :)

TL;DR - BUY ON SALE ONLY. It's an extremely fun third person bullet hell rougelite with a near flawlessly executed cosmic horror backdrop. The story has a way of grabbing you and refusing to let go, even long after you stop playing. Unfortunately despite the addictive loop, there's not much substantial reason to replay after getting all endings beyond the exceptionally tedious achievement hunting. The sound design is top-notch. Weapons and enemy sounds are crunchy and visceral, every action has meaningful feedback and feels punchy. Items and secrets can be found by listening carefully. The music is excellent dark synthwave, especially the boss fights (Hyperion and Nemesis have awesome themes). Environments are very alien and Lovecraftian (cyclopean?). Architecture is melded with biology, and you get the feeling the walls are screaming. The story is obviously also very Lovecraftian without explicitly tying itself to that mythos, which is very rare and welcome. Its hard to go into detail without spoiling, but anyone who is a fan of the themes and tropes of Lovecraft's stories should be very happy with the second half of the story and tonal shift in audio logs and ship logs. If you struggle enough with the game to put it down without finishing, at least do yourself a favor and watch a video about the story, because its still worth hearing for fans of the genre. This game has a fantastic gameplay loop, reminiscent of the modern Doom games, but with more moment-to-moment variety and replayability than Doom could ever have through the roguelite elements. There is solid weapon variety and each weapon has distinct strengths against certain enemies. Enemy bullet attack patterns are very clear and telegraphed, and frankly really pleasant to look at. The random perks on weapons are impactful. But there is not nearly enough enemy variety. Its not an exaggeration to say you will come across maybe 5 different enemies in each biome and they reappear with different abilities in later biomes. You'll end up running across the same enemies in each room, with the main difficulty just being the number of them in each room and how much space you have to work with. This got really egregious in the last biome with narrow walkways and endlessly spawning homing squids. This game gets compared to Hades, but Hades had much stronger enemy variety, and would tie the themes of the monsters to the environment. They didn't really try to do that at all here. In this game you'll see squid dogs, squid birds, squid squids, and robots--in tropical rain forests, deserts, and deep oceans. You now know exactly what to expect from the whole game with no deviation. After enough playing, you should find that the main difficulty in this game is just getting through the biomes to each boss. You'll spend 20-30 minutes grinding against hordes of the same trash mobs with simple attacks, combing the biomes for power-ups. Then you'll get to the boss. The best encounters in this game are the bosses, without question. The boss fights themselves are challenging, usually having a wide variety of attacks that they throw out very quickly, but they're simpler to handle since they're generally stationary and can't outnumber you like the trash mobs. However, if you're geared enough, the fight will be over in 2 minutes and you'll probably leave with unused consumables. There are 6 total bosses in this game (counting the Tower), which feels VERY lacking. It just doesn't seem like there's enough game in this $60 game, and the bulk of what there is to sink your teeth into is mostly repetitive. I can only imagine what goes into making a well-produced game like this, but I know that volume-wise, the final product doesn't feel like a $60 game. $40 feels more appropriate, so only buy this on sale. People have complained about crashes and memory leaks, but I haven't encountered a single issue. If you have trouble playing PS5 ports or other graphically intense games on your PC, you may have issues with this one. If you don't, then you probably won't. As someone who always wants to TRY to get 100% of the steam achievements, I nearly swapped this review to a "do not recommend", but didn't since most people don't play games like that, I'm still recommending it. Trying to 100% this may make you resent the game since the bulk of the required collectibles only have a CHANCE to appear per run, and you have no way to track the most tedious of them. I finished the secret endings 25 hours in and still haven't finished getting the collectible achievements after 20 more hours... I'm getting to the point where I'm losing the fun. So don't follow my example unless you're really having fun running these 6 biomes over and over again.