JOURNEY TO THE SAVAGE PLANET
Kindred spirit
RELEASED OUT NOW! Reviewed on PlayStation 4
Also on PC, Xbox One
Kindred Aerospace might have dropped you (and an optional meat-clone co-op partner) onto AR-Y 26 on a rickety spaceship with next to no equipment, but at least it’s honest about it. Its quirky yet somewhat unsettling CEO Martin Tweed tells you your mission: to scan the planet’s wildlife to see if it’s fit for habitation and, once you uncover it, to explore the mysterious tower on the planet, of which the company seemingly has no record.
Tweed’s video messages provide live-action punctuation that sets the tone for Journey To The Savage Planet’s whole vibe, his greenscreen stock footage monologues satirising the future of space age capitalism, with your mission to come up against alien wildlife aping schlocky B-movies. Ostensibly that mission is for scientific research, but most of your research takes place at the end of a blaster in first-person shooter style. It’s all tongue-incheek, requiring you to crack open ancient alien artefacts to harvest the planet’s flora and creatures for upgrade materials.
Your journey around the cracked floating islands that make up the planet, searching for a way to open the tower, is halted at every turn by new upgrade requirements that send you on little fetch quests to increase your traversal options – things like a grapple hook or jump thrusters. Off the beaten path are plenty of things to discover, from new and strange wildlife to scan, to collectibles, which range between orange goo you gulp down to level up (riddling your body with weirdly helpful tumours), and alien text logs from a previous explorer’s journey to the planet. But there’s not much variety to how you actually explore.
The strange environments are dense with things to discover, either by yourself or with your co-op friend – though progress is shared, so you may find you miss out on finding things your buddy has already encountered. Sadly, once the bizarre sights wear off you’ll realise the collectibles are all fairly samey, and the goofy tone’s true chuckles are few and far between. Oscar Taylor-Kent