Journey to the Savage Planet is a fantastic name for a pulpy sci-fi game, but is a bit of a misdirect when taken at face value. A "savage planet" conjures up thoughts of hostility and survival, tapping into the inherent dangers of life on the frontiers of space. Sure, there are things that want to kill you in Journey to the Savage Planet, but they're only a minor inconvenience rather than the main focus. Instead, developer Typhoon Studios places the emphasis on exploration, coupling this with genuine humour and a charming tone to present a lighthearted and singularly focused chunk of sci-fi adventuring.
The entire game
takes place on a single planet located deep in uncharted space. You're
strapped into the space boots of an employee of Kindred Aerospace--a
rinky-dink outfit that's so proud of its standing as the fourth-best
interstellar exploration company, it'll make you shudder to think of how
bad the fifth-best must be. Once your feet touch the planet's surface,
you'll begin to catalog the flora, fauna, and life located across the
various biomes of planet AR-Y 26 to determine if it's fit for human
habitation, what with the whole climate change thing ruining Earth.
Journey to the Savage Planet excels when it comes to the
assortment of tools and equipment you can gradually craft and use to
reach every nook and cranny of the planet's surface. You're immediately
free to explore as you see fit, but it doesn't take long to discover
plenty of inaccessible areas. As such, much of the game is spent
scanning the flora and fauna to reveal whether they have gameplay
benefits or are just there to contribute to the planet's vibrant and
colorful aesthetic. Some plants may contain seeds that restore your
health or produce projectile explosives, while most of the planet's
hodgepodge glossary of alien critters are filled with resources you can
gather if you're heartless enough to put a laser blast between their
eyes. Gathering these resources and locating items that can be
reverse-engineered using your ship's 3D printer allows you to craft
equipment like grappling hooks, double-jump upgrades for your jetpack,
and other tools that make traversal and deeper exploration possible.
The
whole game latches onto this palpable sense of momentum, as each new
upgrade opens up more of the planet for you to probe. Your feet may be
firmly planted on the ground in its opening stages, but by the end of
the 10-hour adventure you'll be gliding across natural ziplines hundreds
of feet in the air, propelling across perilous chasms with a triple
jump, and using a powerful ground pound to unearth new passages. Journey
to the Savage Planet adopts the classic Metroidvania formula and
executes it wonderfully, presenting you with an ever-growing arsenal of
tools that are satisfying to use and feed into the game's inherent focus
on exploration.
Of course, the other side of this
equation is the planet itself, which is well worth turning inside out.
AR-Y 26 is split into three distinct biomes. Each one is moderately
sized, resulting in the planet's scale feeling manageable and allowing
you to explore freely without fear of getting lost. When presented with
multiple paths, it's easy to choose one over the other because you know
getting back to that initial fork in the road is going to be relatively
easy. This encourages you to poke your nose in every crevice, travel to
every far-away cave, and check behind every waterfall. You're often
rewarded for doing so, with extra resources or important upgrade items
hidden throughout the planet--not to mention the visual treats that are
on offer in each disparate biome, whether you're navigating through the
craggy icy caves and glaciers your ship landed on, walking amongst the
overgrown pink and turquoise mushrooms of the Fungi of Si'ned VII, or
jumping between the floating islands of The Elevated Realm.
Journey
to the Savage Planet isn't a completely leisurely tour, though. Your
first order of business is to develop a futuristic blaster pistol, but
combat is a means to an end rather than a major part of the game, and it
ends up being a drag. While most of the planet's creatures are docile,
there are outliers that become hostile as soon as they spot you.
Defeating these aggressive predators involves a rinse and repeat pattern
whereby you use a nifty sidestep or jump to avoid an attack before
following up by shooting one or multiple weak points. There are only
slight deviations on this back-and-forth that require you to lob an
explosive or poison cloud at the enemy before you can pepper its weak
spot. The pistol never feels quite accurate enough for the job,
especially because you're usually being asked to hit small targets, and
each of the combat's faults comes to a head during the game's closing
moments as you're thrown into one fight after another before facing off
against the final boss.
You
can play the whole game cooperatively with a friend, which does make
combat slightly more bearable, but co-op doesn't alter the
moment-to-moment gameplay in any significant way. Conflicts are easier
with two people, sure, but there's nothing about the co-op experience
that's intrinsically built for more than a single player. You can
explore the planet together or opt to split up and cover different
ground, but that's about it.
Playing with a friend can
result in moments of emergent humour, but Journey to the Savage Planet
is also genuinely funny due to the abundance of FMVs located on your
ship. These short and incredibly eccentric videos mock and parody
everything from exploitative corporate practises to the video game
industry. There's a commercial for a new game elegantly titled MOBA MOBA
MOBA Mobile VR V.17 Golden Fleece; its main selling point is having
more microtransactions than any other game, with one of its features
being an in-game "Custo-mi$er" for your created character. The humour is
somewhat frontloaded, but this does help the game's irreverent charm
establish itself early.
Journey to the Savage Planet
borrows plenty of familiar elements from other games, yet it does so in a
carefree way that sets it apart from other sci-fi exploration games,
settling on a relaxing playstyle that's informed by its single, vivid
planet and tightly focused design. It only takes a couple of hours to
reveal its humdrum combat, but this is the only significant damper on
what is an entertaining slice of lighthearted planetary exploration.
