Returnal - space simulator lesbian edition.

Iron Jaguar said:
The only decent game with a woman protagonist was Mirror's Edge.
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Portal and Portal 2 are good despite having a female protagonist.

The Mass Effect trilogy, The Elder Scrolls series, and the Fallout series are good games despite having the ability to play as a female.

I've heard that Control, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Horizon Zero Dawn, and A Plague Tale: Innocence are good, but I have not played them yet.

That being said, Returnal's protagonist manages to look less attractive than Abby from TLOU 2... I guess you can go lower in the negative ratings.
 
The only thing I know about this game was that it came out at the same time as Pokemon Snap and apparently Sony fanboys review bombed Snap.
 
Marcus the Mong said:
The game is great, GOTY so far for me.
It plays incredibly well and the gameplay is tons of fun. Narrative is definitely not going to be for everyone (parts of it are quite interpretative), but it's not some "woke lesbian space marine" story, there's none of that. Sound design is top notch (especially with headphones) and it looks good visually.

I was always skeptical about DualSense because controller innovations tend to be pretty gimmicky ("SHAKE YOUR CONTROLLER TO ESCAPE!"), but this game utilizes it surprisingly well and definitely adds to the experience.
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The woke lesbian stuff is nonexistant. Its basically an action take of "Solaris."

I've beaten four of the bosses and working on the last two biomes. As far as longevity, it really depends on how the combat connects with the player. It is repetitive, but its kinda the point.

You get better with weapons and start becoming more proficient with movement.

I think the combat is very good. If I have one grip its spacial awareness. Sometimes you get swarmed and you don't have a great sense of the peripheral.
 
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I've been playing a few hours today. It looks neat and the design so far is appropriately alien. After learning the main character is just an old lady rather than modern day ugly female her looks doesn't bother me.
The one big gripe I have is that the shotgun is shit.
 
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Finished it today, really on the short side of around 10-15 hours. I'm by no means a good shooter player (though the gameplay is far more dodge focused, which I am good at), and the game was on the easy side since it lets you heal and respawn once a biome if you pay the price. I'll put my thoughts:

Gameplay wise it's decent, the control is tight and the fighting is satisfying. Like I said, it's more akin to Nier's gameplay of dodging slow projectiles rather than focusing on shooting/taking cover. To the point that most fights are just dodging while aiming the reticule in the vicinity of enemies rather than proper sniping. The two major issues are that:
A. There are no builds, you can't really tailor the run to specific gamestyle besides run and gun (despite having melee).
B. Weapon balancing is really shit. The game has weapon variety (you can only carry one weapon during the run), but weapons with a large amount of ammo are always superior than anything requiring accuracy due to how hectic the combat is. I pretty much ended up using the same two weapons during each run even if I got stat-wise "better" guns.
One thing that is done well is that enemies drop money that disappears after few second, which makes cheesing enemies from afar not worth it in the long run, and encourages aggressive play and melee.
I found the first two bosses to be challenging but the bosses afterwards were pretty easy to the point I beat them all on the same run. Shame there aren't more bosses or different variations. You also don't need to redo bosses or go through the same areas besides the "hub" biome which is nice (and runs could go for more than an hour easily).

The runs themselves are well designed, I never got the sense I'm turbo fucked like in other rogue-lites after a tough battle (or by getting too many bad rolls), and I had the constant choice of exploration or exploitation. The game likes to throw a lot of choices with a chance of a (removable) debuff, but the debuffs themselves can be so game breaking I just didn't do any of them unless I'm really in a tight spot.
There isn't a lot of reason for me to replay the game to get the true ending (which involves random item collection and beating the same final boss). I pretty much saw all the game had to offer by now and until there's some full biome dlc no reason to dive back in.

One of the weirdest design choices in the games is locking some of the gear to traverse levels behind plot progression. This ends up being incredibly annoying when you are constantly put through areas with collectibles you can't reach yet.

Plot wise the game veers too much into psychological horror to the point it's not clear if the planet is even there or it's just the protagnist going insane from a hereditary brain condition. So at some point I just stopped caring about what happens since it's clear that there will be no conclusive answer since modern game designers take ambiguity as a sign of good writing rather than a hack tool to spam interesting plot points without an answer. Which is a shame, since there is a great progressive arc of the protagonist going insane and starts rambling about how the alien's technology is a gift from god. Edit: Actually thinking a bit more on the plot, at least to my interpretation, the game is actually an excellent allegory to inherited degenerative disease with a lot of the elements fitting really neatly together, way more than the usual gaming story attempts. So unironically great job here.

Visually it looks... okay. Honestly I stopped caring how many polygons there are in every strand of hair years ago, the game at least runs smoothly without any hiccup and I was never too overwhelmed by what's going on screen. Sound design is also alright. There's good feedback to the action.

tl;dr: Might be worth around 30$ if you want some novel run and gun experience on the ps5, definitely doesn't worth the massive markup price I paid on the israeli PSN store.
 
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Got this from one of the monthly free ps+ games idk how long ago. Decided to finally fire it up last night, played for a couple hours. It's a good game. Not sure I'd spend money on it, but for something that was free I'm enjoying it so far.
 
is this game woke ? I randomly remembered it since sony has so few exclusive most of them are forgotten or some shitty sequels where the mc is a cuck
 
my brief time with the game is big budget roguelike from sony that is okay.
 
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