Journey to the Savage Planet

 

Looking for a new co-op game, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find something to play. Was looking around at deals, and came across this game, Journey to the Savage Planet. I had seen it before a few times, but from the few screenshots and little information I had, it wasnt too appealing. It has this cartoony, childish look to it that was off putting, but still it was cheap on Steam so me and my buddy picked it up.

Right from the main menu it has a co-op option, which instantly got me and my friend joined up together and starting the game instantly. Which some co-op games mess up, and make it a pain in the ass to actually play with eachother. Thankfully its very smooth and seamless here. Then you get introduced with two modes, Normal mode, and some Classic mode where it seems like when you die it deletes all your game progress? Yeah, no thanks. So we went with normal mode and off into the game we went. It starts off inside some ship lobby area with TV's playing videos at you, giving you an overview of whats going on. You're some astronauts exploring this obscure planet looking for various materials, lifeforms, and ultimately fuel to send your ship back to Earth. The games cutscenes and tone has a mildly enjoyable element of comedy to it, it does give me Borderlands vibes, but its toned down compared to that game. The various random commercials that play on the ship TV's are actually enjoyable and funny enough to watch and listen to. They have real people acting, and its just silly little videos and commercials about various space aged technology like Glob, this weird sort of mush of food that tastes like anything you want it to, but its just a glob of purple goop. I can go on about the little commercials, but I'm just pointing out that they were probably a highlight of the game.

Then we set off into the various stages of the game. Its a pseudo open world game, meaning you can select different stages of the map to teleport to, but the maps are big and open enough where its not very linear and they are very vertical with lots of climbing and exploration to be had. From here we just looked at the main objective marker and followed it around kind of aimlessly. The games graphics are very colorful, cartoony, inoffensive,it kind of does feel like a kids game. It runs on the Unreal Engine, which more often than not for me is a bad thing as I find it allows the devs to be lazy in their game mechanics and I find lots of Unreal games have the same sort of feel and control to them, which I also felt here, like the movement, jumping, and platforming is satisfying enough, but it doesn't standout enough from the crowd of other low budget Unreal engine games. Soon enough we came across all sorts of different creatures roaming around the planet, and the vast majority of them arent threatening. They kind of just walk around and ignore you. Rarely, some of them will spit globs of shit at you, but its mostly nonthreatening and not a challenge. Its not really a shooter game at all. I'd say its a platformer exploration game. Mostly all you're doing is staring at the compass going towards the next main objective, and figuring out the right path to platform there. At first, you don't have any upgrades so traversing is quite limited. But as part of the main progression it forces you to get more than half of the upgrades in the game anyway, so if you just stick to the main quests you'll end up getting the things you need to traverse to the next progress point. The game...feels really hollow. Like, theres not much to it at all. There are resources you collect, like you can shoot the creatures roam around and the drop various resources, Silicon, Aluminum, and a few others I forget. But it feels largely pointless, Lke I barely gave a shit. When you die, you drop all your resources on the ground and have you go back and pick it up like a bloodstain in a Souls game or something, which I thought was a bizarre and stupid design choice. But once you go back to your ship via fast travel locations, it deposits what youve collected. But still, I never really cared about how many resources I had, or losing them, the few times  we didnt have enough resources to craft the mandatory upgrades we needed, we just went around and explored for 5 minutes and got them fine. In co-op, you also share resources, so its an even smaller deal. So the entire resource collection and upgrade system in the game feels meaningless, because you end up having to get half of it anyway.

So, what else is even in the game? Well, you also have this scanner ability. You press a button and it goes into this scanning mode which various things in the environment highlight and you can scan it for a box that gives more details about it. I'm not really sure what the point of this mechanic even was? They tried to make it this big deal, almost like its Pokemon and you can scan the various creatures to collect a little card and it puts it in your Pokedex basically, but who gives a shit? It doesn't seem to actually give you anything tangible. A few times you scan things and it gives little hints about how to open a 'chest' or how to move past some obstacle, but even these hints are few and far between. So the whole scanning mechanic feels pointless as well.. Thats two mechanics that feel worthless in the game, in a game that already barely has any gameplay. Not good. What else is there? Well yes, you do get yourself a Handgun type weapon. You hold this gun in your right hand, and your left hand just holds various utility items which are finite that you pick up around the world. Stuff like Bait cans, Bombs, Poison bomb things, Stun shock things, this thing that you throw at certain walls to grapple onto...basically the entire left hand mechanic is lame and I barely cared about any of it, only used it for the mandatory points. The whole mechanic feels like juggling useless bits of junk the whole game. And the controls for it suck, too. The right handgun is barely used. Yes, you can go around shooting passive creatures for resources, but like I said, I barely cared about the resources. There are, however, like 3 boss fights in the game. Complete with health bars on the top of the screen. However, these were piss easy and a joke. The first one is this Lobster monster that just stands still and shoots balls of shit at you and does a few worthless attacks. You just shoot some glowing yellow thing and he goes down. The next one, is called Floopsnoot and it actually reminds me of the last boss of Half life 1. This boss is a little more interesting, although hes still stationary, hes this big tenticle monster thing where you have to jump grapple around the arena to shoot the various yellow bits. At least its more engaging than the first one. Then you just have the last boss, which is visually stunning and exciting, but gameplay wise theres not much to it .Hes just this big ugly frog thing that again, is stationary, and shoots a few globs at you, but you just have to shoot the yellow balls again a few times and then you win.

 There are a few smaller enemies that you have to kill to progress, like this time where there are these spinning dragon type enemies that are kind of hard to kill, you have to wait until they stop spinning and shoot the glowing bits. But the handgun is just not fun to use at all. First of all, its lame, it looks lame, and sounds lame. It has this annoying reload animation, and its the only gun in the game. The other mandatory enemy is this like frog animal that you have to shoot a certain spot in its back. Thats basically all the combat in the game. The game took is 7 hours to beat, and any real combat I'd say only lasted 10 minutes out of those 7 hours.  So, not really a shooter game at all. These small fights were not very fun or exciting , either. Just compared to how dull the rest of the game is, it was a bit amusing. At least you can instantly pick up your co-op partner as soon as he goes down, but if you both die you just respawn at the ship. There's not really any penalty for dying other than dropping some of your resources.


 So what else is there to the game? Thats it, really. You go around following the main marker, to collect random objects and resources, go back to the ship to get mandatory upgrades, first this double jump ability, second this mega jump ability if you hold a button, then last the grapple ability to grapple onto various 'rails' around the levels and grind almost like Tony Hawks or something, then the game just turns into a big first person platformer game more than anything. The game is frequently frustrating with its objectives and pacing, too. Like the objective will be vague and the marker will actively point you at the wrong thing, confusing us. A few times the objective marker would point us at something, and I'd use the scanner to get some hints, but the hint it would give me was only for a section later on in the mission, not relevant to the part I'm at right now, further confusing and frustrating us. It's just poorly designed. You can find these plants which give permanent health upgrades, but whats the point of caring about health upgrades in a game with virtually no challenge or combat? I only picked them up when I stumbled infront of one.

 I don't know what else to say, really. The game is dull as fuck. If I could define it in one word its just Boring. The game is boring. You don't do anything. There's nothing TO do in the game. Theres no mechanics or gameplay. The bulk of the game is just figuring out what rocks to climb or what place to grapple to reach the next waypoint. Like, the platforming isnt terrible, the controls are fine, it's just the game doesn't have anything else in it to have such dull platforming sections. Theres a narrator AI woman thats talking in your ear half the time, with the same sort of wacky sarcastic ironic humor as the Borderlands games, and infact a few times when you complete certain objects a little robot that looks almost like Claptrap shows up, this game takes the worst aspects of Borderlands, doesn't even retain the tiny bits of fun that shit game has (Like atleast some figure of combat) and it also takes the worst aspects of first person platforming, without anything to make up for it. I don't even get why the game is called "Journey to the Savage Planet"  What the hell is so "savage" about this game? It has some of the most docile, nonthreatening, pointless creatures in almost any game I've seen! Should be called Journey to the Timid Planet.

 There's just a bunch of little annoyances that build up, like the fact you cant see where the fast travel locations are on the compass, so if you lose sight of it, youre fucked and you just wander around aimlessly. The stupid pacing where it will suddenly prevent you from doing the main quest unless you stand around doing side "Research" missions and reach "Level 2"  so you can suddenly craft new things? Stupid shit like "fall 50 feet and save yourself with a double jump!"  "Use the Live scanner on these random enemies!"  "Kick this creature into 5 other creatures" Like why do I have to do this menial busywork just to complete the story? It sucks. The annoying sound effects, the game is clearly trying to be whimsical , hilarious, cute or whatever, but its just grating and annoying. Why are there creatures farting all the time? Shut the fuck up! These little sections where you have to fumble with all your left hand throwing items to find the one required for the next obstacle, like one time we got stuck at this Grappling seed part because we didnt have any Grappling seeds and backtracked like 15 minutes, because we didn't realize you can get more seeds from these random nests on some trees.

The last area of the game was especially terrible. We were excited to be at the end of the game, thinking it was almost over. Well no, the last section is this gauntlet of bullshit where you go through this deep cave arena and you have to run around in circles which took us over an hour , staring at walls trying to find various yellow blobs to shoot just to progress...I mean what the fuck? This isn't fun. Tedious annoying labour. We finally found all the blobs, which I admit we had to Google some. And we reach the last boss, which like I mentioned before, sucked and was trivial and more lazy stationary blob shooting. The real kicker is when we beat the last boss, the end credits played. Ok, great! I can uninstall! - Nope. Turns out to actually "beat" the game you have to collect 5 fuel sources which could be ANYWHERE on the fucking map, meaning we'd basically have to go right back to level 1 and replay the entire game over searching every nook and cranny for these fuel sources to actually beat the game. You can also get an upgrade which helps you detect these fuel sources, but thats also locked behind probably hours of grinding tedious garbage. We just said fuck it, and looked up the exact location of the last 4 fuel sources on YouTube, speedran to them and grabbed them all in like 20 minutes and finally finished the damn game. Gave us some cutscene about us returning to Earth, but then the presenter guy starting laughing manically like a villain, meaning we didn't get the "true" ending because we also didn't 100% every single optional thing in the game to unlock it. Yeah, that's NEVER going to happen. This game was shit, period. We got the end credits, I don't care about your "true ending". I reluctantly bought this game not expecting it was gonna be great or anything, but it somehow even let me down and was worse than I thought it was going to be.

 4/10