Journey to the savage planet is an exploration game, with some combat. Early on the platforming / puzzle solving is easy enough, but later content will get increasingly difficult, and then downright annoying.
As for the exploration, you will be gated from a lot of places early on, because of lack of navigation related upgrades. The quests to unlock them will have a destination marker, and even if unlocked, some of those quests cannot be completed until you do another required unlock quest before them. The uncompletable quests will be marked as such, so just focus on the ones that have a quest marker, and the required skills / equipment will be acquired. Except one early quest. There is a well known bug with the Fixer Upper quest. When you acquire your first alien alloy (the black pearl looking thing), you must hand it in at the 3D printer in the ship before exiting the game. If you exit before handing it in, the tube sucking it in at the 3D printer won’t ever appear again. In fact you won’t be able to interact with the 3D printer from there on, though you can still unlock some upgrades from your character screen. If you run into this problem, the only way to solve it is to restart the game from beginning. I wasn’t aware of this, and even in this way I could make it till the final boss fight – I just couldn’t deal with it, in some part because it turned into hard mode with my low level weapon. With stronger weapons I probably could have finished it as intended.
There are some puzzles / challenges in the game. Some I figured out. Some I just gave up, like sneaking up to an eye on a timed platforming section. But two challenges must be completed to reach the final boss room, and I hated both of them. It took for me a lot of retry to eventually finish them, the final third of the game were these two challenges, then reaching the boss room, then fighting that boss over and over, until I just rage uninstalled the game, probably for the better.
The game has a humorous tone. Some of it is mere toilet humor, with poop being a returning motive. But the over the top live action cutscenes introduce another, wry but silly humor, as something expected in the movie Idiocracy. The sarcastic AI almost seems like normal in this context.
The graphics of the game is stylized, with vibrant colors, both in the environment and for the animals and flora. It has a deliberately silly approach for most animals, the harmless ones looking groce but somewhat cute. If an enemy has a weak point, that will be brightly colored, usually in yellowish color. These tougher enemies will be introduced only gradually, and thankfully only in their confined zones.
The voice acting of the game is ok. Most of the times you will hear the sarcastic remarks of the ship’s AI, but mostly only the first times encountering some situations. But it should keep commenting on at least on your deaths. In the ship you will listen to a few messages from the corporation, and then to commercials. Those advertisements are deliberately over the top, and their relentless repeating (you can’t turn them off) really add to a dystopian feeling in the ship. Compared to that the planet is a silly escapism.
There is mostly autosaves in the game. Returning to your ship is also a reliable way to trigger such an autosave. All the materials collected will be deposited in the ship. Should you die before making it back to the ship with some materials, you will have to collect those at a zone close to your death. Since you cannot quicksave, you have to return to the quest location after a death from the ship, and restart it from zero.
The game can be played with a controller or with keyboard and mouse. I started with the controller, the intended method of playing. Early on that wasn’t a problem, but the shooting sections, even with the target snapping turned on were difficult for me with the controller. Might be that my controller is miscalibrated, it is a general problem for me with shooters. The hectic boss fights, and the small vulnerable spots of most late game enemies made these parts an ordeal for me, to the point that I couldn’t handle the final boss. So why didn’t I just use keyboard and mouse? I play with the numpad, Num5 being the forward (instead of W). For some reason, this game couldn’t handle that button. After a few seconds the walking speed slowed to a crawl. If I pressed left or right or jump, the moving speed resets to normal, but the crawl will resume in a few seconds. A strange error, this was the only game that I met with such a case. But since I had no hope of beating the final boss with my clumsy controller handling, I had to figure out something. So I just mapped the numpad keys to WASD with Autohokey. That made the game playable with keyboard, though I missed out the learning process of various actions with the keyboard. I still couldn’t beat the final boss, but almost made it.
There are a lot to collect in the game, padding out the game time. A lot of things can be scanned, there are a few mails to read, rare materials to collect (the fuel and the alien alloys), messages left in secret areas. I think there is a list of research quests too, though I couldn’t initiate those. Perhaps they are unlocked after the final boss fight, perhaps they are tied to the bugged quest. When you are near the entrance to a secret area, a hint will appear. But the actual entrance, or way to enter has to be found. A lot of times that will require items / skills unlocked later.
The game has a short DLC, and seemingly a sequel in work, after my time in the game I am not interested in either of those.
The game crashed only once, during the Floopsnoot boss fight.
