Apple Arcade review #30: No Way Home

I really like No Way Home, and I plan to keep playing it.

You float around in your spacecraft, accompanied by a personable drone, exploring, shooting, and doing missions for a variety of alien NPCs (with voices straight out of Star Wars). It’s basically a rogue-lite married with twin-stick shooter controls, although the developers brand it a survival game. Despite the 2D art (which is quite beautiful), there’s a real sense of three-dimensionality and scope to the world. Exploring its procedural spaces was thrilling, and gave me a real sense of discovery and adventure — especially when I came upon one of the giant alien artefacts.

So far, I’ve played No Way Home on the phone, the tablet and on the Apple TV. The phone’s a bit cramped, and not my favourite device for this game. While the gamepad makes flying around, shooting and grabbing things much easier on the TV, menu interactions are more fiddly; the controller design could have used some more thought and development time, and that’s a real shame. There are also some frame-rate issues on the 4K TV, a common theme with Arcade games. The touch controls are pretty good, even though I struggled a bit with the grabbing mechanic, so I think I’ll keep playing on the iPad, where the colourful art has room to breathe.

A couple of niggles: when playing on the phone, I kept accidentally skipping dialogue and story sequences (including the intro movie, which I was never able to replay…even after starting a new game). This is unfortunate, since the dialogue is funny and well-written. The voice acting is also top notch. Another issue is the overheating guns. The only way to keep track of the temperature is to watch the narrow gauge in the top left corner, which distracts from the action (and the trying-to-stay-alive bit). There should perhaps be an aural and visual warning on the ship itself when your guns are getting hot.

Minor niggles aside, this is a top-notch Arcade game, one of the best on the service. A must-download, regardless of which device you own.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/no-way-home/id1455060401