Journey to the Savage Planet

The game starts off well. It's humorous. Controls are decent. The puzzles start off with you having to think your way through it, but as the game progresses, it turns into a shooter where you have to fight enemies that you can only harm if you hit them just the right way with terribly inaccurate hit detection. And the puzzles go from thinking to speed running accuracy. For many gamers that might be perfectly acceptable. When you buy a game for story and humor and it being advertised as not a real shooter, for it to turn into one is highly disappointing.

Journey to the Savage Planet is a game that attempts to answer the question "What if No Man's Sky had humour?" And whilst that humour certainly is enjoyable (for me), it cannot survive alone on just that merit. So what have we got here? A linear exploration around an alien planet full of stuff to scan, interact with, ruthlessly murder and colonize. Classic stuff, really, this kind of game has been done many times before. And yet, it's let down completely by a reliance on an upgrade system to progress through the game which requires you to deal with some of the lumpiest controlling platforming, awkward combat that is weirdly difficult for what the game is and world geometry that isn't quite as well thought out as it could be. The majority of times I died or fell of platforms purely because the game wasn't exactly clear about what I could or couldn't jump onto or mantle onto etc is beyond silly. It wears its influences on its sleeves so blatantly that it's almost obnoxious, much the same as the humour style. I'd wager that within the first 5 minutes you'll know if you'll enjoy the game or not. Ultimately though, what killed any interest for me was the first time encountering a fast moving fast attacking enemy that took a lot of effort, health and usage of a beyond inadequate dodge move to defeat, only for the game to reward me with two more at the same time immediately after. It's got so many great ideas at hand but it just doesn't mesh together all that well at all and ultimately at the end of the day I can only say you're better off just going and buying No Man's Sky instead.

The game looks fun, but is unplayable in Co-Op mode. Every few minutes to 10 minutes, we lose connection to the other player. I don't understand why there is no local network mode, as we are trying to play in our local network, but no, the co-op has to work through some online server....

I like exploration games but this one didn't click for me. The world was beautiful at first and all the different plants and animals looked and behaved really well. I was able to get immersed into the world and I found the fourth wall breaking and humour charming. As I went on in this game I realised it was more of the same. Enemies would just be reskinned and buffed, the fauna looked very similiar. The world map felt disconnected and in a metroidvania where you have to "remember" where certain things are so you can come back later it all looked the same and I had no desire to go back to hidden areas because often the reward would not be worth the time taken, more often than not it would just be a collectible item. The boss fights were fun and the game ran well once I had played around with settings. Perhaps in coop it would be more fun but I stopped enjoying the game once I'd beaten the final boss and got bored as it felt so unrewarding. The gun mechanics were unnecessarily annoying.

Disappointing gameplay and terrible puzzles. The only decent things are the futuristic adverts and even they wear quickly.