The Long Journey Home

TLJ, why did you have to break my heart. You have such promise - when I started playing all the right building blocks were there, a myriad of possibilities for exploration open, a way for me to undertake the hard journey of going home, watching the distance to Earth decrease with every jump I managed to snatch away from the jaws of fate. I don't mind the arcade elements of the game, even if I am not an arcade fan - what I really like is to go around collecting mysterious stuff and then using said mysterious stuff to unlock stories. There is ample opportunity for that. Or to upgrade my ship, etc. etc. Unfortunately, the game is too hard. I enjoy moderate challenges - I am not of the type who will spend hours on trial and error to find viable strategies to survive. I do not begrudge those that do - for them, there should be higher difficult settings, but even on easy this game can be a buzzkill. It is quite common an hour from the start to find yourself dying with the diplomacy/trade system so ruthlessly stacked against you that there is no hope of recovery. That was kind of my experience through the couple of hours of playing - everytime something broke in my relations to the different aliens, or someone got sick and I'd have had to do hours of work just to get back to my starting situation. For me, that's no fun, that's work - and I do enough of that during my job hours. So the game has a lot of promise, and if you are the type that enjoys figuring out the proper game mechanics to get an advantage, try it. But if you are just looking to have a story and fun exploration, you might be disappointed by the difficulty curve.

This is a long review describing the many, many aspects of The Long Journey Home which render it a complete garbage fire of a game. It is so bad as to be an exquisite example of incompetent and ludicrous design. Mostly though it's just hot garbage and I am super angry at having wasted £33. I want my damned money back! The tl;dr version: A combination of elements which in isolation would and should be amazing, but are so ham-fistedly mashed together by an incompetent and amateur team as to conflict with each other and provide zero enjoyment. It's like someone took an infinite number of monkeys and had them typing C++ for an infinite length of time hoping for a great game to be made, and when the monkeys came up with TLJH the publisher was like: **** it, good enough. The long version: I had insanely high hopes for this game. It seemed to channel Starflight and Star Control 2 with its space exploration, space combat, and ability to kit out your ship while also landing on planets for resources. The roguelike nature of it also called to mind FTL (Faster Than Light), while the random starmaps and alien races, of which only a select few are randomly allocated with each "randomisation seed", reminded me of Masters of Orion 1 & 2. Plus of course the hardcore survival aspect seemed somewhat reminiscent of NeoScavenger and Day R Survival. I wanted to love this game so badly, that even despite the bad reviews which popped up immediately, I still put down my £30. Most negative reviews complained of the difficulty, to the point the developers actually patched in an easier "story mode" option. "Ha!" said I, laughing. Having completed a lot of very hardcore tough games (such as Pathologic) and loving them, I assumed the complaints where from younger gamers who simply didn't know what a decent challenge was. How wrong I was. The problem with The Long Journey Home is not really the difficulty, but rather the fact the game itself is not fun, does not motivate you, provides no joy within the struggle, and provides almost no choices in order to adapt to the difficult. It wastes your time, demands you play it in one very specific fashion, and punishes you simply for following its own imposed rules. The best review I've read of TLJH was titled "Of Cargo Cults and Child Baking" and GOG. Cargo cults being people who know that something's wonderful and want to replicate it, but can only produce a sad and ineffectual mockery of what inspired them. While "child baking" is a child who will add every ingredient to a cake they thinks is tasty, each in excess, and the outcome is inedible. I should have listened to this review, since it succinctly highlights the core problem of TLJH. The ship combat is clunky - and why can I only fire sideways? The lander minigame is repetitive and boring. The resource management is so simplistic as to be just crap. The alien interactions are neutered by a 3-question limit - they might as well not even exist! The randomisation is illogical and obtuse. The "special events" are extremely boring - whether it's a space brothel or ancient monastery, the reward will be some generic "item" you can get at a dozen interchangeable places. Why bother? Nothing about this game is redeemable. It's badly programmed, badly designed, grossly overpriced, and an utter waste of time. It fails to comprehend what makes a decent, it fails in absolutely every regard. And the worst thing is I paid £33 to suffer this. The Hi-Def remake of Star Control 2 is available online for FREE under the name Ur-Quan Masters. While FTL, NeoScavenger, Starflight 1 & 2, plus Masters of Orion 1 & 2 can ALL be bought for less than this single piece of slop. About £27 by my reckoning, which leaves £5 in your pocket for other games. Do not waste your money on The Long Journey Home. The sheer awfulness of this game is so immaculate as to border on brilliance. I cannot believe any group of people could create something so buttock-clenchingly terrible and then have the audacity to charge SO MUCH for it! Like shovelling hot, rancid trashbags into the mouth of my unborn child. This game makes me weep with anger and regret.

Skim this review section and you see how frustrating this game is. So I'll just describe what tipped me over the edge: - I needed to repair my lander, as it was nearly destroyed. Your lander is how you get resources to use/sell; it's the most important thing. To repair it, you need metal. To get metal, you need to mine with your lander... and take damage while mining (WHY?) Catch-22. Though I had something that repaired ship hull, but not lander hull (WHY?) - Ok, I'll trade for metal with other aliens... Nope, they only ever offer money in exchange for YOUR items. (WHY?) - Ok, I'll go to the starport. You can 'talk' too so I did some talking before buying/selling. But for no reason at all, you can only talk a certain amount, then they get bored of you. Talking doesn't have much benefit anyway and you usually get stock responses, so... (WHY?) - Since I 'talked too much' and the conversation ended, rather than allow me to then start trading and buying, the game forces my ship to leave the starport. (WHY?) - Ok, I go back into the starport and browse the wares. Turns out I don't have enough money for anything that might repair my lander. (Money is hard to come by.) So I leave to think up a new plan... and I get CHARGED A 'PYLON' FEE? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?! (WHY?) - And because I don't have the money, I've automatically taken out a LOAN?!?! For 100 CREDITS?! WAIT WHAT'S GOING ON, there are LOANS? (WHY?) - So I looked this up, and it turns out in some starports, you get CHARGED if you don't buy AND sell something before you leave. (WHY?) - Now I'm even more screwed for no reason because I'm trying to buy a lander repair kit here! WHY wasn't I warned about this bizarre design choice? How was I expected to know this? - I jump to the next sector... and some ship intercepts me and demands the loan back already, when I've only just left the sector. (WHY?) - As above, I can't pay, so now he RAISES THE FEE TO 250. (WHY?) Game closed. This was on easiest difficulty

Well this isn't. It's mostly fighting the physics engine for control of your ship. Do you like rock hard and unforgiving shuttle landing simulators? Again and again and again? This is the game for you if so. It's a pity, because there's a potentially great game lurking somewhere in this dumpster fire. Right I advise you to save your money.

Lets get some things out the door: - TLJH is punishing, even on story mode - TLJH is punishing if you try taking the shortest path home - The controls take a lot of getting used, and went you do it becomes bearable - Credits are at a premium... you need them to survive - The events aren't as great as they make them out to be - Combats aren't too bad if you know the proper tactics (stock weapons help) - The lack of item/ship/lander stats makes it hard to evaluate each on their merits (the Discovery has such amazing jump range) Btw.... save yourself a ton of pain and buy fuel and repairs rather than burning your metals on them. (or burn them only if you have to). Get EM from orbiting stars Good game to get while on sale, but not at full price. Not great for some of the issues others pointed out where the controls don't feel the best and the events feel.... generic. I can see why people hate the game, but I personally thought it was fine.