A little bit of puzzle, a bit of shooting, and a tad of exploration.
Journey to the Savage Planet is a First-Person Action Adventure developed by Typhoon. It follow a singular or two explorers as they land on ARY-26 representing the 4th best in spacetravel: Kindred Aerospace. They're here to check if the planet is habitable for humans, making sure there's nothing weird about it via exploration, and get enough fuel to make the trip back. The game combines elements of 3D platforming, FPS, and other aspects into a unique blend that, for the most part, works pretty well! All with a very comedic tone all throughout.
Gameplay of Journey to the Savage Planet focuses on what else, exploration. You're plopped into a open-zone area and are just given free reign to look around, discover stuff, and find secrets. This format allows for linear progression but you are free to look elsewhere if need be. You're also able to scan a ton of the objects in the world to learn more about the planet, ranging from the fauna, flora, and anything else alien. Combat is basically exclusively dealt with your trusty laser pistol, as while you do have a melee attack it's more effective in pushing small enemies around. You also have various environmental gadgets in your other hand which provide effects that aid exploration, combat, or both! Enemies typically are the basic "shoot at them until they die" but there are some enemies that require a tad more thinking, sometimes even needing a environmental gadget to break their armor. The planet is also full of collectables, ranging from the full you need to leave, alien artifacts, and this weird orange goo that somehow upgrades your health. Enemies and Ore Veins in the environment also drop three kinds of resources to collect. With a 4th special one being tied to combat or puzzle challenges. These resources are used to purchase upgrades from your spaceship, such as upgrading your suit for extra jumps and better scanning, your gun with more ammo, damage, and some alt attacks, and your throwables from being able to collect new ones, to buffing them up. You access your ship via teleports which you unlock throughout your travels to easily backtrack or get around the place.
While this is a fairly solid loop, there are a few notable irks that stood out while playing, especially during the 100% cleanup since the game isn't that terribly long. Firstly is the movement, as while you do get some superb vertical movement with your various jump upgrades, your actual on foot movement is absolutely sluggish. Even with the sprinting it's still painfully slow and honestly conflicts with the combat with enemies that move decently faster than the player. That's even with the dash moves you do have. It also makes backtracking a lot more annoying since you're gonna be running around back and forth to teleporters since you HAVE to be at a teleport to well, teleport. I think having a upgrade that increased your movement speed would have easily been a net-positive as a late upgrade. Speaking of upgrades, for some reason the game has a drop loot system on death which feels very out of place since there's not really any other proper survival mechanics in the game that would warrant promoting a system like this. It's kinda just there to be milling annoying and possibility softlocking you getting 100% if you were carrying that 4th finite resource and it bugs out. Lastly the tools given to the player to assist with 100% are pretty poor, with some trackers noting the item through walls instead of their challenge entries and there being absolutely NOTHING to checkmark the flora and fauna, a very minor annoyance given there are guides for this stuff but it would have been nice if it was all in-game.
Stylewise, Journey To The Savage Planet very obviously runs on Unreal Engine 4 so it very much looks like a game on Unreal 4, at least to me. But actual planet of ARY-26 is flourishing with color and legitimate fantastic enivroments that hit a mix of cartoon and realism, more so the former. Each major area of the game feels distinct from one another and are populated up and down with plenty of creatures to fight or scan. While the game auto set the graphics based on my computer, the game still looked really nice despite not being on max graphics thanks to it's art direction, which is always nice to see. The writing is also fairly comedy in tone with your boss and your personal A.I. assistant Eko got a lot of flavorful dialog whenever they yap to the player, there's also these fake commercial that play in your ship while you're going back and forth and they're pretty entertaining. Kinda like something you'd see in Xavier: Renegade Angel if I could compare it to anything. But the game legit has some pretty interesting lore bits with the creation behind the planet you're exploring so it's not entirely all jokes and no substance.
Hot Garbage DLC review, the title is accurate. Not that it's bad, it's just way too short for how much it's asking for.
Overall, Journey To The Savage Planet was a pleasant surprise! I wasn't exactly sure how a FPS action adventure hybrid thing would turn out and what I played showed that the idea was pretty enjoyable. Everything from just exploring around, seeing what ARY-26 has to offer, and upgrading along the way was a whole lot of fun. I really just wish the on foot movement was a tad faster and the 100% cleanup was made less annoying. From what I've heard the game has spawned a sequel though it seems to have completely swapped the perspective to third person and seemingly improving on everything this first game did. Which sounds like a good sign of a great sequel.
