No Way Home review

 

  Sometimes I wonder if part of my beef with game subscription services is the payment model. I recognize that it's entirely possible that my impression of a game might be tainted by the fact that I am continuously paying to have access to it. But then, I do things like play No Way Home--a former title from the disastrous Apple Arcade service--and find myself more or less walking away from playing it feeling basically exactly how I did years ago when I was still trying to rank every game on Apple Arcade.

 

Lost in space

No Way Home is essentially a dungeon-crawler, though it is set in space with you controlling a small emergency escape vessel. The game opens with a humorous cutscene showing the massive starship your character was on being completely destroyed and waking up from cryo sleep in a galaxy that is nowhere near Earth.

From here, you control your craft and stop at spaceports to meet local lifeforms, outfit your ship, and complete missions in hopes of finding a way back to Earth. From a gameplay perspective, this generally just means having a sort of open-world to fly through while using familiar twin-stick shooter controls to fight enemy ships and lifeforms.

Same old shlooter

No Way Home makes a great first impression thanks to its whimsical art style and fun voice acting. These things stay at the forefront, but it unfortunately takes a backseat to a focus on combat, loot collection, and fetch questing.

I say this is unfortunate because--while these things are reliably fun mechanics--the way they are implemented in No Way Home are generic at best and clumsy at worst. There's no great options for dismantling a lot of junk loot you find, very little information on how to acquire certain crafting materials for other ship parts, or any real way to tell at any given moment if you are strong enough for whatever challenge you are taking on besides just trying to complete it.

Loose orbit

Luckily, if you just want to experience the story No Way Home is telling, you don't have to worry too much about its loot grind. Most side-missions have fun narrative arcs that are completable without doing too much in the way of intentional crafting or upgrading, and the main story "missions" comprised of wave-based arena challenges in "domes" are all reachable from the very start of the game. Some of the furthest ones can be tricky, but almost all of them you can kinda cheat out a victory through smart use of cover and some patience.

I mostly enjoyed playing No Way Home this way, but even in kind of ignoring some of its systems the game kind of felt like it was loosely arranging its component parts around a core instead of fully integrating them. If the humorous storytelling kept pace with the amount of wandering and shooting you do, or the upgrades came faster and with more variety, or the environments felt more designed and had more to do within them besides find chests or pickup missions, or everything was just shorter, No Way Home would feel more complete and intentionally designed. In the absence of all of those things, No Way Home feels a little tossed together in a way that works, but generally has lots of downtime, dead spaces, and aimlessness. If you're cool with that, there's a ton of game here, though, including a New Game plus system that lets you just keep grinding on to your heart's content.

The bottom line

No Way Home is a decent twin-stick shooter, but its systems don't really gel into a tight or cohesive whole. This leaves it feeling a little empty, shallow, and aimless, despite how much character it has aesthetically and how sound its systems are.