Sydney-based developer SMG Studio, best known for 2020’s Moving Out and its 2023 sequel, Moving Out 2, has finally brought its 2020 Apple Arcade exclusive, No Way Home, to PC.  No Way Home is a spacefaring twin-stick shooter that sees you play as stranded astronaut Amelia Cho in her quest to get back to Earth with the help of a snarky AI companion and community of quirky aliens. This PC release has brought a lot of changes to the original version of the game, such as user-interface improvements, more loot and enemies, as well as rebalanced gameplay.

With some fun cartoony alien and ship designs and a compellingly strange setting, it’s an enjoyable enough galaxy to get lost in. That said, the simplistic gameplay somewhat overstays its welcome despite the overall brisk pace. And no, No Way Home doesn’t have anything to do with the 2021 Spider-Man movie; as the Steam Store page description insists, SMG Studio picked the name first.

In No Way Home, you play as hapless space explorer Amelia Cho, who finds herself flung into the dark reaches of space. With the aid of an AI companion named Matey, she eventually makes her way to a community of mostly friendly aliens, and must forge alliances and complete errands for them her quest to get back to Earth. During her travels, she encounters mysterious artefacts named Domes strewn across the galaxy, which may hold the key to the origins of the universe and her way back home…

What grabbed me first about No Way Home was the presentation. The aliens that Cho encounters all have charmingly weird, pudgy designs that make them look like extras from High on Life, and I mean that affectionately. The galaxy is filled with bizarre and memorable characters, from cyborg religious zealots to mutinous pirates to an arcade owner just trying to fix a game cartridge, all of whom have quest lines that Cho can find herself roped into in her quest to return to Earth. Cho and Matey were a fun duo and provided an enjoyable contrast to the eccentric extraterrestrials they encountered, with Cassie Ewulu’s voice performance as Cho doing a lot to make her an endearing protagonist.

That said, while the 5-ish hour narrative has a fun amount of variety, with the twists and turns across each questline, the actual gameplay unfortunately suffers from repetition. No Way Home is a twin-stick shooter where you shoot down enemy bandits in Cho’s spaceship, with Matey providing covering fire as an orbiting drone. While you can unlock and upgrade different weapons, some of which have different elements or effects, each fight plays out in a very similar way by concentrating fire on your foe, dashing away when your ship overheats or shield overloads, and then coming back for more. While the game did scratch that looter-shooter itch whenever I came across some legendary loot with higher numbers than my current gear, they rarely ended up actually making the combat feel meaningfully different in the way that a new gun in Borderlands or Enter the Gungeon might.

The issue is mostly that the late game didn’t feel substantially different to the early game. You can only equip one weapon at a time, and you don’t have any additional abilities like grenades or supermoves or even a secondary weapon, which could have added some much-needed tactical depth. You do have a grappling hook; however, its utility was mostly limited to extracting far-flung loot and being part of No Way Home’s minigames. The procedurally-generated environments look suitably gorgeous, with some beautiful starry backdrops and intriguing junk-filled labyrinths to explore. However, they have the same issues that a lot of procedurally-generated environments ultimately have, which is that all the environments end up blending together, and little stands out. Fortunately, some of the main boss fights are hand-crafted, but that leaves much of the areas in between feeling comparatively indistinct.