I am a hardcore returnal fan and among the top 300 tower runners.
First off I love saros, love the new gameplay and been waiting for years and im currently in biome 3.
I'm at work just writing my first thoughts.
What stands out most for me is that the backtracking element is gone.
I was always enjoying finding a key and teleporting back for some upgrades. Or being close to death and running around destroying statues to squeeze out a last obolite to buy a heal or an artifact to keep going.
Now if I take one of two paths and leave big aether orbs to pick up later, that part of the level is just blocked for no reason.
This makes the levels feels smaller for me.
Speaking about items, not having hubs to choose from artifacts and items to buy is also a loss because i cant direct the way I want my build to go.
I hope I will find more weapon variants soon, because this is not going to cut it. I dont want the pistol and arriving at the boss with a shotgun is a death sentence. So im halfway through the game and only have 1 weapon to use. Also compared to retunal the weapon models are plain hideous.
Getting permanent upgrades is also strange for me. I would expect to get the grappling hook by taking it from the dead hands of some boss and not pressing a random button at a random terminal to just unlock what was already there?
Also the plans to play together with friends are on standby because no online...
Small things like swarms of bats not reacting when you shoot at them really baffles me to a point where I have to say saros is a big step back from many many things that made returnal the goat for me.
I will still cherish the game and hope to sink 100+ hours into the tower and I'll be back with a final review when im finished.