There’s a certain reckless charm to Baseless – a confidence in its own chaos. From the moment you grip the controller, you realize you’re not playing a typical twin-stick shooter. Movement isn’t about simply walking or strafing; here, your gun is your engine and means of propulsion. Fire at the ground and be hurled across low-gravity spheres, gravity wells tugging you in unpredictable arcs. It’s a premise that sounds playful, maybe even cartoonish (Sacre Blue on the Switch comes to mind), but once you dive in, it becomes clear: Baseless is unapologetically ambitious, friendly-looking on the surface but beneath it, a beast begging to be tamed.
At its best, Baseless delivers a thrilling sense of mechanical mastery. As you gradually retrain your reflexes – learning to shoot with purpose, then dash, block, slash, and propel yourself – the game starts to feel like some kind of frantic ballet. The combination of weapons, melee tools, shoulder-button-mapped actions, and optional power-weapons gives a gratifying breadth to combat. Once you acclimate, every grapple-hook swing, every shotgun blast mid-dash, every bubble-shield deflection becomes a little choreography. The more unconventional the combat sounds on paper, the more it pays off – once you wrestle with it enough.
Visually and tonally, Baseless is a treat. Its art style isn’t trying to be gritty or hyper-real; instead it embraces a bright, surreal aesthetic – glowing planets, vivid colours, bold bloom effects, simple but expressive character designs that feel almost toy-like. There’s an otherworldly quality to its environments, made even better by the way gravity shifts and camera angles rotate as you bounce around globes. On PS5, that kind of fluidity and visual flair makes the world feel alive – goofy, but alive.
But for all its charm and ambition, Baseless doesn’t always stick the landing. The physics-based movement, powerful as it feels once mastered, can also be unwieldy and frustrating – especially when chaos hits full swing. In hectic fights, with projectiles flying, enemies closing in and hazards everywhere, it becomes easy to lose track of your character. That sometimes saps some of the fun and sharpness, especially when the screen fills with effects and foes.
Moreover, the narrative – or at least how it’s handled – won’t be for everyone. On the one hand, the story attempts to give emotional weight: your hero, his navigator companion, and the increasingly murky revelations about what exactly you’re fighting for. On the other hand, the writing style leans so heavily into quirk and odd humour that you can sometimes get lost in it. After a while, dialogue begins to blur into white noise – charming at first, occasionally amusing, but eventually skippable for those who just want to get back to the shooting and jumping.
Then there’s the difficulty curve. Baseless is not gentle. Its physics swing between moments of weightless, space-like traversal and gravity-heavy sections anchored by large orbs scattered throughout the levels. The spin-gun doubles as weapon and propulsion, and while intentionally awkward to master, it is essential for navigating this strange world. Boss fights push everything to the limit, bombarding you with relentless attack patterns that require sharp focus and quick reactions. Each world allows only three lives; lose them, and you must replay the entire sequence of zones before attempting the boss again. Victories feel weighty as a result, but repeated losses can grind away patience. For players drawn to high-stakes challenge, this structure is exhilarating. For others, the built-in assist or accessibility options might feel necessary – but even they can’t always soften the hardest encounters: controls sometimes betray you, notably when a shield fails to trigger, or when visual clutter (like poison clouds) obscures what’s going on.
Still, Baseless earns its moments of triumph. There’s a rare kind of satisfaction when everything clicks: when gravity, momentum, weapons, and positioning align and you blast through a swarm of foes or nail a big boss with a chain of moves. And because stages vary – shifting from small gravity-spheres to sprawling, hazard-filled zones – what feels like repetition rarely wears as repetition. Different gravity settings, zones that menace you with new environmental quirks, and evolving weapon choices help the game remain fresh even after dozens of hours.
In the end, if you approach Baseless on its own terms – as a weird, beautiful, punishing indie shooter that asks more of you than a typical joystick-and-strafe dance – it delivers something special. It isn’t polite, and it doesn’t apologize for being a bit awkward and messy. It asks you to commit: to learn, to fail, to return, and to master. For players drawn to challenge, chaos, and the payoff of gradually understanding a bizarre, gravity-bending combat system – this game becomes addictive. For those expecting a casual arcade romp, you might find yourself skipping cutscenes and muttering “just one more try” more than once.
Baseless isn’t for everyone. But for those who can embrace its wild physics and colorful lunacy, it’s one of the freshest shooters we’ve played in years. Sometimes irritating, often demanding, but when it clicks – gloriously rewarding.
Score: 8.0/10
Press Play Media 