JOURNEY TO THE SAVAGE PLANET
New science at the end of a shiny blaster
Welcome to AR-Y 26. You’ve been shot off into space (along with an optional co-op partner) in a bangedup spaceship in order to assess whether this planet is fit for civilisation. Unfortunately, the landing leaves your fuel canisters empty, and you’ve got next to no equipment – only a 3D printer that requires materials to print new gear. Good luck!
If you thought this was a survival game from the setup then fair enough, though you’d be wrong. Your task here is exploration. As you investigate your surroundings you realise the environment is filled with nooks and crannies hiding things like orange goo (which you unwisely gobble up to increase health and stamina), alien alloys (for crafting the best gear), and alien artefacts (which fill out more of the planet’s backstory).
STAR TREKKING
The planet looks gorgeous and suitably alien.
You make your way from fields of ice to a lush jungle full of spiky plants to crackling lava pits and a red, mushroom-filled forest. All these environments are on cracked islands floating in the atmosphere, loosely connected and surrounding a mysterious grey tower covered in foreboding skulls. Beyond repairing your ship and scanning as many samples as possible, your goal quickly becomes to investigate this tower, find a way inside, and figure out just what it’s there for.
Its door is, however, sealed. Your quest for a way to open it leads you to explore each area, scanning more of your surroundings and collecting material to print new gear. You can make everything from bigger utility belts to carry more things to items that give you new abilities, such as a grappling hook or a bombegranate stabiliser (which enables you to store the exploding fruit – without it you have to pick and hurl them within a few seconds). You can also print upgrades for your gun so it’s capable of new blast modes, your visor to scan for secrets, and your backpack so you can perform extra double jumps and thrust boosts.
Because of the tower, your exploratory journey consistently takes you further upwards, which means quite a bit of first-person platforming – and annoyance if you fall down. It’s fiddly, but rarely too annoying or punishing, especially after you level up your backpack. A mantle system means you can pull yourself up onto ledges just in front of you, though in many cases this doesn’t work when you feel like it should, so you spend a lot of time secondguessing yourself.
Exploring AR-Y 26 is more fun with a friend (I enjoy it once I tear Jess away from taking a knee at every shiny object we pass, anyway). As long as you’re in the same zone, you’re free to stick together or branch out in the large environments as much as you like. But oddly, as the bulk of the game is about uncovering secrets, you can’t help feeling like you’re missing out on the half of the game your friend is finding on the other side of the map.
EKO LOCATION
Often key traversal upgrades require a unique alien element to craft, which means diverting your journey to visit the alien shrines your AI partner, EKO, finds for you. But watch out: helpful as she is, EKO’s also sassy in that way that goofy robots often are. However, as she makes some quite wry statements and doesn’t repeat herself too often, she’s a fun addition and gives a nice, chatty atmosphere to a game that would otherwise be very subdued (aside from the great music that kicks in at more action-heavy points). You can adjust how often she talks in the options, too.
Another welcome presence is that of zany, over-the-top capitalist Martin Tweed.
You see quite a few of his live-action video messages over the course of the game. Actor Adrian Burhop’s dry delivery is perfect for these corporate stock video parodies. His performance sets a bar for humour that the rest of the game doesn’t manage to clear. Some of the scanned information on the world around you is chuckle-worthy, but there’s a surprising amount of straightforward text in the journal. There’s an odd clashing of tones throughout, and the promise of the corporate parody
“A WELCOME PRESENCE IS THAT OF ZANY, OVER-THE-TOP CAPITALIST MARTIN TWEED.”
is never really delivered on. Savage Planet has the feel of a humorous game without being one; it has a zany tone yet often lacks anything actively funny. It rarely surprises in the way good comedy often can.
LIVE, DIE, REPEAT
There’s a discrepancy between your ‘scientific’ mission and your distinctly unscientific approach (mostly shooting things), but it doesn’t really make you laugh. In fact, you’ll probably wish there was less blasting. Thanks to finicky movement that makes it difficult to move precisely and enemies that frequently jump around from in front of you and require precise shooting at their weak points it often feels cumbersome. That’s not to mention tiers of upgrades locked behind ‘scientific levels’ – these require you to complete side-missions, meaning you have to search for groups of enemies to pull off specific tasks like exploding a flying enemy so it damages two others, or killing three enemies at once with a particular weapon. It’s somewhat dull.
While Journey To The
Savage Planet presents you with new environments and gadgets, once the novelty wears off you realise you’re mostly doing the same thing you were doing at the start of the game. The world feels densely strewn with rewards, but the ways you explore it are limited. Oh, something hidden in long grass again… in another cave… or in yet one more chest. There’s plenty to love about the game – it’s a fun, short but sweet explore-’em-up – but we wish it had shot for the stars more.
VERDICT
There’s so much Savage Planet gets right: it’s slick, gorgeous, and dense with things to do. However, for all the exploration, much of the action feels quite samey. Oscar Taylor-Kent