As with so many other games, you must grind through the first several hours to get upgrades that fix some of the issues, but crashes that erase hours of progress don't do the game any favors.
Intro doesn’t give you any information. After picking a male or female character (it doesn’t effect the gameplay), you crash-land your spaceship on an unknown planet because someone took a shot at you. There you’re saved by a duck-like creature who gives you a strange pendant that interacts with objects on the planet. Your mission is to explore and find components to fix your ship.
There is one problem with intros and cutscenes in general. Because there are no voices, the game uses subtitles to communicate text. Unfortunately, you have no influence over them in cutscenes. This is a problem since the text moves too quickly for you to read. It appears that English was translated from another language, but there was no adjustment to pace or length, since several subtitles disappear at the corners of the screen.
I also recommend that you check out the settings and turn on a few options. For instance, the default settings turn the sound volume to zero. You can also turn on anti-aliasing. While the game looks more like a classic game without it, it is also quite ugly, with severe texture breakdowns.
Gameplay is standard to any other action/adventure. Your hero can move around, jump, run, and attack. Sadly, combat is bad. The first issue is a blaster with ridiculously low ammo that’s a hassle to recharge. Enemies don’t drop anything, so killing them is a waste of ammo and time. The second issue is a sword that’s worthless against enemies because they’ll shoot you before you even reach them.
There is no stamina to worry about, so you can do any action without restriction. A few more skills include swimming, which is a sluggish and minor gameplay aspect, and a roll, which is used to squeeze into narrow spaces. Roll is also incredibly slow, therefore it is not used to evade in combat.
A map immediately reveals the scale of the game's world, which is not particularly large. But, other from the boss and dungeon icons, everything is dark. Instead than uncovering the map through exploration, you must place radars at locations to clear a small piece of a region.
The building feature is unique. It starts with a big crystal and power lines running all over the map. These power lines are often blocked with stones, but you can easily remove the obstruction with your attack. As you follow these power lines, you might see small nodes connected to them. These nodes not only allow you to build radars, but also a few other things such as checkpoints or ammo storages.
A very strange design choice is that you cannot remove a structure. So, if you make a mistake or create something you do not want, there is no way to change it. This is a major concern because radar emits light into the surrounding region. Worse, you can later gain a better radar, which uncovers a much larger area.
However, there is not much exploring. The major attractions are structures from past expeditions, which hold plans for new constructions, and dungeons, which contain a special gem for upgrading your gear. But while dungeons are marked as cleared, the rest of the structures are not. Plans are locked behind simple and barely working mini-games. For instance, there’s one where you hover through a cavern, but you can’t see parts of it and you crash. In the other, you need to shoot asteroids that show up too fast. These games take less than a minute so you need some luck.
Dungeons are short, but unbalanced since they can be made unsolvable. Your blaster is sometimes used to shoot switches, but you’ll be stuck if you waste all bullets. The game tries to fix this by scattering them across the dungeon, but they still come in limited supply. The second problem are platforms that don’t return to their original place. So if you miss a jump, you’ll have no choice but to throw yourself into a pit to lose a heart and restore position of all assets.
Death is not a big issue because you don’t lose anything. There’s a free checkpoint in every dungeon so you can save. However, since there’s no autosave and you have to build checkpoints, you can easily forget about it and lose huge amounts of progress. You'll also waste time by looking for bullets; if you don't build at least one ammo storage nearby, you'll have to go all the way to the beginning with the only recharge point in the game.
While the first cavern area is pretty safe, the constant crashes show up in the second desert area. It can happen just by walking around and destroying hours of progress. The desert area also has some broken triggers. For instance, I fell into a hole once and respawned near a boss door (boss fight is just a fight against several enemies at once inside an arena). I’ve never visited that place before or cleared the puzzles leading to the boss fight. Also, the boss fight contained several enemies that disappeared. This made the fight impossible to beat.
Untravelled Planet is a action platformer and third-person shooter game set in faraway planet. explore Open-World hostile planet a and gather resources to expand your base.