You'll find no Salvation here.
Compile Heart was a developer that piqued my interest with the Neptunia games, especially their crossover with Senran Kagura in the entertaining Ninja Wars entry. However, the Neptunia series dropped off in quality drastically after that title, producing a series of mediocre releases that attempted to cram in half-baked gameplay systems instead of making the gameplay the focus. While Scar-lead Salvation simplifies many of its systems to focus on gameplay, its bare-bones approach to everything around it causes it to suffer in significant ways, making this one of the worst Compile Heart releases so far.
Returnal can now join the list of games to see their formula copied and pasted as Scar-lead Salvation shamelessly attempts to recapture that magic. Willow is an amnesiac who will die repeatedly to understand what is going on as she attempts to fight her way out of a military facility. You'll pull from an assortment of weapons and upgrades, and dodge bullet-hell-like attacks against a series of robotic threats in the effort to be rescued. And, you’ll do this in boring and repetitive environments with little to no change in the enemy variety.
To keep Willow as part of the story-driven narrative, she'll have an AI companion who converses with her and helps to explain aspects of her situation. This is also used to convey the general story of aliens pushing humanity to the brink, even if you don't really experience much of that gameplay-wise. Their conversations are fine enough, even if the AI is more interested in conveying basic sayings than being direct with Willow.
Each floor will bring new conversations, but replaying floors after a death can result in often no dialogue until you press onward. It's bizarre and makes the runs you'll take very lonely. The vocal performances are fine enough, at least for Willow as far as I am concerned. Her personality and delivery are great, even if everything around her isn't as impressive.
Where Scar-lead Salvation suffers the most is really down to its presentation and gameplay. While you'll escape the first area after five floors and a mind-numbingly easy boss fight, the general format and flow of each new area is identical to the last. Sure, the next area has walls that appear to be frost-covered, but it is the same layouts, the same corridors, the same robots, over and over again.
What makes it more frustrating is that most rooms have additional doors, but these are always locked, making their apparent appearance here a head-scratcher. If every door is locked, why even have them? Rooms basically fall under four basic formats throughout the entire game: hallways, enemy encounter rooms, item rooms, and a boss room; and that's it. Sure, enemy rooms vary in their layout with walls to block incoming fire, jump pads, lasers, and some rare instances of verticality, but once you've seen four or five rooms, they are repeated ad nauseum.
What makes so much of it so trivial is you can just run past most enemies, skipping battles to just push ahead. Some rooms require that you throw down, but this isn't too common across an entire floor. In fact, while they will drop currency to level up your weapons, you'll actually find already leveled-up weapons in most rooms, negating the need to keep up with leveling your own.
Weapons range from various laser and plasma rifles with different spread patterns. From automatic rifles to shotguns and submachine guns. The variety is pretty good, with a laser rifle being my favorite by a mile. That said, the starting rifle is a solid replacement and has constantly stayed in my rotation.
You'll also gain passive effects like more armor, health, or dealing more damage with certain rifles. You'll find these in crates you'll shoot apart, and picking up the same one will level it up. These skills are fine for what they provide, but choosing the additional health doesn't provide health; it only extends the meter, so you'll have to track down health orbs to fill up the increased amount you have. Instead, I opted for more defense instead as you'll feel it working immediately.
To conquer each floor, Willow will have a jump, dash, and her Onslaught mode, a cooldown ability that makes her invincible for a short period of time and boosts her attack power; a feature I rarely remembered I could do or even needed. The dash is fine, but the jump rarely feels useful in most circumstances. Willow also has a melee attack, but it's mostly there to block incoming bullets should you be too slow to dodge out of the way.
And that's it, really. There is no skill tree to learn new attacks, or really any meaningful progression whatsoever. Sure, you can restart with your passives and your weapons, at least with the current patch, but those don’t really compliment a progression system. There is no way to permanently add to her skills or abilities in ways that make the roguelike genre sing. Here, it is the same Willow from scratch, each and every time. It's sadly boring.
Part of the design process for Scarlead Salvation was the fact that Willow’s armor can take a beating and break off, revealing small patches of her body suit destroyed. This is a far cry from other games that have done this because they often leaned into the fan service to a huge degree, making that idea work for their IP. Here, the armor tears are consistently in the same areas and don't do anything to really make you want to take damage to see her armor and clothing tear off. It's basically a mature-rated idea executed for a teen audience.
Despite an exciting trailer, Scar-lead Salvation is a huge miss for Compile Heart, despite a good premise. You are touring the same boring levels, enemies, and the few guns and passives you pick up don't shake up the repetitive nature of what Scar-lead Salvation is. While the breakable armor could have been an outlet for some impressive fan service, much in the same way it helped Steller Blade, here, it is such a miss that it is laughable.
Developer - Neilo, Compile Heart, Idea Factory. Publisher - Compile Heart, Idea Factory. Released - May 29th, 2025. Available On - PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X (Sept 2025), PC. Rated - (T) Fantasy Violence, Language, Suggestive Themes. Platform Reviewed - PlayStation 5. Review Access - Review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.