SAROS Review
Is It Worth Your Time?
Developer: Housemarque
Platform Reviewed: PS5
Genre: Third-person bullet hell roguelite shooter
Playtime: Around 18 hours of deployment time, closer to 25 hours with cinematics and NPC conversations
Price: $70
Intro
SAROS is the follow-up to Housemarque’s knockout 2021 game, Returnal. It is a third-person bullet hell roguelite shooter, and if you are watching it thinking, “This looks and sounds a lot like Returnal,” well... you are not wrong.
In some ways, SAROS is a step forward. The combat is smoother, more accessible, and incredibly fun. But in other areas, mainly story, soundtrack, and environmental variety, it feels like a few steps back from what Housemarque achieved before.
So the question is simple.
Is SAROS worth your time?
Story
You play as Arjun, a member of the IV Echelon, also known as the clean-up crew. His mission is to land on the planet Carcosa and locate the first three Echelons that were sent months before him.
But Arjun has his own motives too. Someone he loved was part of the first expedition, and he is determined to find her.
Pretty quickly, you discover that death does not work normally on Carcosa for you. When Arjun dies, he is somehow resurrected in a backroom from a pool of... something. I don’t know what. And strangely, he never tells anyone. His teammates do not seem to notice either, though to be fair, they are a little preoccupied with not going insane from sun madness or whatever is happening to everyone on the planet.
The mystery of Carcosa is genuinely interesting. What happened to the first three waves? Why is this planet doing what it is doing? What are the machines? What is the eclipse? What is actually going on here?
The problem is that SAROS seems far more interested in Arjun’s love life than the cosmic sci-fi nightmare happening around him. I have a hunch as to why…
Returnal had a deeply personal story too, but it tied that story directly into the world, the enemies, the environments, the items, and the loop itself. Every death peeled back another layer.
SAROS feels like it wants that same emotional weight, but it never really earns it.
You get flashbacks of Arjun in alleys and bedrooms. The game clearly wants you invested in his lost love, his regrets, and his strained relationships. But compared to the ancient civilization, the strange eclipse, the resurrection cycle, the lost expeditions, and the madness consuming everyone around you, Arjun’s personal story just is not the most interesting thing here.
After seeing both endings, I was left scratching my head. Not about Arjun. Not about his relationship. Not about his past. I wanted answers about the planet, the machines, the resurrection cycle, and what was actually happening on Carcosa.
Gameplay
Luckily, the gameplay is peak.
They took the best parts of Returnal and made them better. Mostly.
Arjun controls beautifully, which is exactly what you need in a bullet hell shooter. You are constantly dodging, jumping, shooting, weaving between projectiles, and reacting to threats from every direction. And through all of that, you always feel in control.
As the game goes on, you unlock more movement tech, more tools, and more ways to dominate the battlefield. Eventually, you feel less like you are surviving the chaos and more like you own it.
Maybe a little too much.
The game still has difficult moments, but with everything you are given, you can start to feel pretty overpowered. This is a roguelite, so each death lets you keep currency that can be used to upgrade yourself. Over time, you slowly boost your overall power and progression. Later on, you can also customize runs using modifiers you unlock along the way.
Some of these are quality-of-life bonuses, like increased pickup range. Others increase damage, restore health, or make runs easier in other ways. You can also use modifiers to make things harder, though I did not see much reward for doing that.
Weapons are fun and varied, with different traits and mods that change based on your stats. Artifacts also add new wrinkles to each run, sometimes helping you and sometimes making life harder.
The one downside is enemy variety. By the third or fourth biome, it starts to feel like you have seen most of what the game has to offer. You still get new combinations and slight variations, but not enough to keep everything feeling fresh.
Still, the combat loop is fantastic. Even when the story lost me, the gameplay kept pulling me back in.
Graphics
Modern games generally look great, and SAROS is no exception. Instead of just saying “it looks good,” I want to focus more on performance, UI, environments, and how the game feels visually.
Performance on PS5 was excellent. It felt like a solid 60 fps the entire time. Even when enemies were filling the screen with bullets, I never noticed drops, dips, or stutters.
For a game like this, that is not just nice. It is required.
If the game started stuttering every time combat got hectic, the whole thing would fall apart.
The UI is fine. It does the job, but it leaves a lot unexplained. I found myself jumping into the tutorial menus more than I wanted, just to understand what certain icons meant. That is not the end of the world, but it does mean the UI is not communicating as clearly as it should.
The map is a bigger issue.
In Returnal, you could open your menu, look at the map, and actually inspect where you had been. In SAROS, the map is mostly a tiny corner display. You cannot easily open it up and check if there was another route a few feet back. You just have to walk over there and look.
The environments are also a little disappointing. You visit several different locations: a city, an underground labyrinth, a swamp, a palace, and more. But despite those different labels, they do not feel distinct enough.
I never had that moment of stepping into a new area and thinking, “Wow, this place looks incredible.”
It was more like, “Okay, new furniture. Same vibe.”
That is where Returnal had a huge edge. The rainy forest, the red desert, the frozen wasteland, the underwater depths. Each biome had its own identity. SAROS never quite captures that same feeling.
Sound
The 3D audio in SAROS is incredible.
If you play this, make sure the audio settings show 3D audio is enabled. I had to plug my headphones into the controller to get it set up correctly, but once I did, it made a huge difference.
You can hear where bullets are around you. Behind you. Beside you. Closing in from angles you cannot see.
In a bullet hell shooter, that matters. Knowing where danger is coming from helps you decide where to dodge, where to move, and when you are about to get boxed in.
The soundtrack, however, was a letdown.
I praised Returnal heavily for its music. It was varied, memorable, and tied beautifully to bosses and story moments. Some tracks built alongside the encounter itself, escalating as the fight unfolded.
SAROS does not hit that same level.
Everything here feels heavily inspired by Mick Gordon’s DOOM soundtracks. And do not get me wrong, I love DOOM. That music rips. But SAROS feels like it is reaching for something more emotional, and the soundtrack does not help it get there.
Every fight, every boss, every level starts to blend together musically. It works in the moment, but it does not stick with you afterward.
Final Verdict
So, is SAROS worth your time?
I have been pretty hard on this game. A lot of that comes from how incredible Returnal was.
SAROS feels like a step down from the heights Housemarque reached before. Except for combat. The combat is absolutely a step up.
That does not make SAROS a bad game. Far from it. The core loop is incredibly fun. I put many hours into it, completed both endings, and kept playing because the gameplay was that good.
But the other pieces fall short.
The story does not land. The endings do not help. The soundtrack is not memorable. The environments lack identity.
If you played and loved Returnal, I would probably wait for a sale. SAROS is good, but at $70, it feels rough paying full price for something that improves the combat but downgrades so much of the surrounding experience.
If you never played Returnal, or bounced off it because of the difficulty, you may have a better time here. The story still struggles, and the music is meh, but the combat and accessibility improvements will give you hours of fun.
SAROS is worth your time if you are here for gameplay.
But if you are hoping for the full Returnal experience again?
Wait for a sale.
SAROS Review
Is It Worth Your Time?
Developer: Housemarque
Platform Reviewed: PS5
Genre: Third-person bullet hell roguelite shooter
Playtime: Around 18 hours of deployment time, closer to 25 hours with cinematics and NPC conversations
Price: $70
Intro
SAROS is the follow-up to Housemarque’s knockout 2021 game, Returnal. It is a third-person bullet hell roguelite shooter, and if you are watching it thinking, “This looks and sounds a lot like Returnal,” well... you are not wrong.
In some ways, SAROS is a step forward. The combat is smoother, more accessible, and incredibly fun. But in other areas, mainly story, soundtrack, and environmental variety, it feels like a few steps back from what Housemarque achieved before.
So the question is simple.
Is SAROS worth your time?
Story
You play as Arjun, a member of the IV Echelon, also known as the clean-up crew. His mission is to land on the planet Carcosa and locate the first three Echelons that were sent months before him.
But Arjun has his own motives too. Someone he loved was part of the first expedition, and he is determined to find her.
Pretty quickly, you discover that death does not work normally on Carcosa for you. When Arjun dies, he is somehow resurrected in a backroom from a pool of... something. I don’t know what. And strangely, he never tells anyone. His teammates do not seem to notice either, though to be fair, they are a little preoccupied with not going insane from sun madness or whatever is happening to everyone on the planet.
The mystery of Carcosa is genuinely interesting. What happened to the first three waves? Why is this planet doing what it is doing? What are the machines? What is the eclipse? What is actually going on here?
The problem is that SAROS seems far more interested in Arjun’s love life than the cosmic sci-fi nightmare happening around him. I have a hunch as to why…
Returnal had a deeply personal story too, but it tied that story directly into the world, the enemies, the environments, the items, and the loop itself. Every death peeled back another layer.
SAROS feels like it wants that same emotional weight, but it never really earns it.
You get flashbacks of Arjun in alleys and bedrooms. The game clearly wants you invested in his lost love, his regrets, and his strained relationships. But compared to the ancient civilization, the strange eclipse, the resurrection cycle, the lost expeditions, and the madness consuming everyone around you, Arjun’s personal story just is not the most interesting thing here.
After seeing both endings, I was left scratching my head. Not about Arjun. Not about his relationship. Not about his past. I wanted answers about the planet, the machines, the resurrection cycle, and what was actually happening on Carcosa.
Gameplay
Luckily, the gameplay is peak.
They took the best parts of Returnal and made them better. Mostly.
Arjun controls beautifully, which is exactly what you need in a bullet hell shooter. You are constantly dodging, jumping, shooting, weaving between projectiles, and reacting to threats from every direction. And through all of that, you always feel in control.
As the game goes on, you unlock more movement tech, more tools, and more ways to dominate the battlefield. Eventually, you feel less like you are surviving the chaos and more like you own it.
Maybe a little too much.
The game still has difficult moments, but with everything you are given, you can start to feel pretty overpowered. This is a roguelite, so each death lets you keep currency that can be used to upgrade yourself. Over time, you slowly boost your overall power and progression. Later on, you can also customize runs using modifiers you unlock along the way.
Some of these are quality-of-life bonuses, like increased pickup range. Others increase damage, restore health, or make runs easier in other ways. You can also use modifiers to make things harder, though I did not see much reward for doing that.
Weapons are fun and varied, with different traits and mods that change based on your stats. Artifacts also add new wrinkles to each run, sometimes helping you and sometimes making life harder.
The one downside is enemy variety. By the third or fourth biome, it starts to feel like you have seen most of what the game has to offer. You still get new combinations and slight variations, but not enough to keep everything feeling fresh.
Still, the combat loop is fantastic. Even when the story lost me, the gameplay kept pulling me back in.
Graphics
Modern games generally look great, and SAROS is no exception. Instead of just saying “it looks good,” I want to focus more on performance, UI, environments, and how the game feels visually.
Performance on PS5 was excellent. It felt like a solid 60 fps the entire time. Even when enemies were filling the screen with bullets, I never noticed drops, dips, or stutters.
For a game like this, that is not just nice. It is required.
If the game started stuttering every time combat got hectic, the whole thing would fall apart.
The UI is fine. It does the job, but it leaves a lot unexplained. I found myself jumping into the tutorial menus more than I wanted, just to understand what certain icons meant. That is not the end of the world, but it does mean the UI is not communicating as clearly as it should.
The map is a bigger issue.
In Returnal, you could open your menu, look at the map, and actually inspect where you had been. In SAROS, the map is mostly a tiny corner display. You cannot easily open it up and check if there was another route a few feet back. You just have to walk over there and look.
The environments are also a little disappointing. You visit several different locations: a city, an underground labyrinth, a swamp, a palace, and more. But despite those different labels, they do not feel distinct enough.
I never had that moment of stepping into a new area and thinking, “Wow, this place looks incredible.”
It was more like, “Okay, new furniture. Same vibe.”
That is where Returnal had a huge edge. The rainy forest, the red desert, the frozen wasteland, the underwater depths. Each biome had its own identity. SAROS never quite captures that same feeling.
Sound
The 3D audio in SAROS is incredible.
If you play this, make sure the audio settings show 3D audio is enabled. I had to plug my headphones into the controller to get it set up correctly, but once I did, it made a huge difference.
You can hear where bullets are around you. Behind you. Beside you. Closing in from angles you cannot see.
In a bullet hell shooter, that matters. Knowing where danger is coming from helps you decide where to dodge, where to move, and when you are about to get boxed in.
The soundtrack, however, was a letdown.
I praised Returnal heavily for its music. It was varied, memorable, and tied beautifully to bosses and story moments. Some tracks built alongside the encounter itself, escalating as the fight unfolded.
SAROS does not hit that same level.
Everything here feels heavily inspired by Mick Gordon’s DOOM soundtracks. And do not get me wrong, I love DOOM. That music rips. But SAROS feels like it is reaching for something more emotional, and the soundtrack does not help it get there.
Every fight, every boss, every level starts to blend together musically. It works in the moment, but it does not stick with you afterward.
Final Verdict
So, is SAROS worth your time?
I have been pretty hard on this game. A lot of that comes from how incredible Returnal was.
SAROS feels like a step down from the heights Housemarque reached before. Except for combat. The combat is absolutely a step up.
That does not make SAROS a bad game. Far from it. The core loop is incredibly fun. I put many hours into it, completed both endings, and kept playing because the gameplay was that good.
But the other pieces fall short.
The story does not land. The endings do not help. The soundtrack is not memorable. The environments lack identity.
If you played and loved Returnal, I would probably wait for a sale. SAROS is good, but at $70, it feels rough paying full price for something that improves the combat but downgrades so much of the surrounding experience.
If you never played Returnal, or bounced off it because of the difficulty, you may have a better time here. The story still struggles, and the music is meh, but the combat and accessibility improvements will give you hours of fun.
SAROS is worth your time if you are here for gameplay.
But if you are hoping for the full Returnal experience again?
Wait for a sale.
ABOUT US
We wanted to play games that were worth our time. From work to family and kids, and other hobbies, game time was scarce. Our goal is to help you know which game to spend your time playing.
Contact Me