Journey to the Savage Planet puts you in the role of the intrepid, under-equipped, and probably under-trained, individual sent to planet AR Y-26 by Kindred Aerospace - the 4th best outer space exploration company there is! It's your job to determine if the planet could be suitable for human habitation, by roaming around and scanning things with your helmet.
You quickly determine you are not the first intelligent species to visit, and are ordered to investigate this mystery further, while continuing your other research, as well as gathering resources to upgrade your equipment so you can keep exploring.
The gameplay reminds me of Metroid Prime. First-person perspective, your weapon in your right hand, a visor mode you activate by pressing up on the D-pad, scanning plants, animals, alien artifacts, all kinds of stuff. You eventually get a Grapple Beam, sorry Proton Tether, and your backpack can be upgraded to give you a jetpack. But the jetpack functions more like a double-jump (eventually a triple and quadruple-jump if you upgrade it enough.)
There is no upgrade to let you curl up in a ball and roll around, though I'm sure your character will want to do after the first time they stumble upon their own corpse.
Yeah, the gameplay may be similar to Metroid Prime, right down to the immense amount of backtracking you do as upgrades grant access to places you had to pass by earlier, but the tone is not. Your ship is a broken-down, cramped piece of junk, where every time you enter the ship or wake up, annoying live-action ads start playing (which you can thankfully stop.) The reason you have to upgrade your equipment is because Kindred gave you cheap crap.
They did, however, do a complete genetic scan of you, so when you die, they just, clone another. You wake up in a tube on the ship (the sliding doors of the tube jam), and you're back in action! You also have an AI assistant who offers you platitudes like, "You did your best. It wasn't very good, but you tried,." Or, when you smack a certain creature, because the game encourages you to slap the creatures you meet, causing it to split into two creatures that shriek in fright like a terrified cartoon dog, "Great, it's twice as annoying now! Seriously, you should just kill it."
You're also given the option to set how chatty the AI is at the start of the game. I chose the medium option, where it mostly just provides information, but there was one for it to talk a lot, and another to silence it. But that seemed too mean. It's stuck on this ship on this shattered mess of a planet, too!
A lot of the game is platforming, finding some way to make it from Point A to B. In recognition of the fact that not everyone is going to prioritize the same upgrades, the game usually provides multiple routes or approaches, depending on what tools and devices you have. You might use the Proton Tether for a direct approach, or the Gelatinous Blob (which acts a springboard) combined with the jetpack booster for a longer route of leaping from rocky outcropping to rocky outcropping.
One thing I would have really appreciated was a map function. The visor does have a vague ability to show you a bright symbol indicating your current objective and its distance (or highlight fuel sources or alien artifacts if you upgrade the visor enough.) But trying to figure out which way to even begin going from your Point A to reach your Point B, let alone how, can be a hassle. Plus, for a game that encourages backtracking, the lack of a map makes it hard to remember where I've revisited or where I saw that one weak rock seal earlier that I can break through now that I have the Stomp ability.
Boss and sub-boss fights are mostly a matter of dodging around and shooting the parts of the enemy that glow or light up when the opportunity presents itself. The sub-bosses tend to be very quick, so you have to time your dodges carefully so they rush by, exposing their backs. The bosses are typically enormous and sedentary, but they have ways of making the few safe platforms unsafe, so that it's difficult to find a way to stand still long enough to shoot anything. the targeting on your laser pistol is pretty forgiving, but there's no lock-on targeting.
I got 100% completion in about 20 hours, and beat the story in 2-3 hours less than that, so it's not a long game. I had fun with it, and got a few laughs, so maybe that's good. It doesn't overstay its welcome.
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