As an astronaut of Kindred Corporation, your spaceship barely landed on an unexplored planet. While eating steak and sipping red wine, the company boss reminded you of the importance of the mission of finding a second Earth, and the mean-mouthed AI assistant has already arranged the task for you, so set off quickly, the journey to the wild planet is waiting for you!
With this background, it seems that this game should be an open world survival adventure game? If you expect this, you are wrong.
A wonderful adventure (to find the key)
In traditional role-playing games, there is a wonderful game cycle, which is to grind equipment in order to fight stronger monsters, and then fight stronger monsters to grind out more powerful equipment until you pass the level. In adventure games, there is a similar cycle, which is to find keys.
The general style of Savage Planet looks a bit like the popular work No Man’s Sky a few years ago, mixed with some Borderlands-style nonsensical humor and some satire on capitalism. You can indeed experience these familiar links in the game, but they are all slightly simplified. In fact, there is no planet in the game that can be explored freely, and even the entire game map is a series of independent islands. What players do throughout the game is to find keys of different models.
From the beginning of the process, there is a wall blocking the player, unless you can collect carbon to make a laser gun. From the middle to the end of the game, the obstacles are presented in the same way, and you can only reach the next area by unlocking new abilities or devices. However, this process is usually: obtain alien alloy materials, then collect enough elemental materials, and then return to the spacecraft to make them with a 3D printer. Although there are a few more steps, it is actually very simple to obtain elemental materials, and returning to the spacecraft is just a matter of using a teleport point or running away.
The game has a corpse-picking setting similar to Dark Souls, but the difficulty is not high enough to require this mechanism, and the package generation point is not accurate to the place where the player died, which sometimes makes it difficult to find.
If the process of obtaining these equipment is more natural, and has more functions besides “opening doors”, perhaps this game loop will not be so obvious. However, except for the most used hook, most of the props have little effect or many restrictions in combat, and their use in puzzle solving is just a simple logic of matching colors. Therefore, in the later stages, players will clearly realize that they are just following the mission markers to find the next key to the next door, rather than really exploring or using their brains to solve puzzles.
(Lack of) novel content
In the early stages of the game, you will find that there are many elements to play with. For example, scanning creatures, studying their habits, exploring different ways to obtain resources, etc. The original alien bird can be killed to obtain a certain amount of carbon directly, or it can be fed and waited for it to excrete more carbon; the strange two-headed creature will split into two and run away quickly after being attacked. It is not easy to scan its illustrations. The environmental design of the first area is also the most complex and three-dimensional, with many puzzles and collectibles scattered in it. The author stayed here the most time, because in the early stage, there was always a feeling of a new world after a dark period.
It is a bit regrettable that the game is very limited in the mid-term development, the richness of creatures has not been meaningfully improved, most of the new monsters are just re-skinned, and the total number is only 35. There are three large areas in total, and the latter two areas are more restricted to exploration. The process becomes extremely linear and lacks creative new mechanisms. However, players do not need to stay in one area for too long. Before seeing through the simple essence of the new mechanism, they will reach the next area. Therefore, the fun of the game stays in overcoming the level-by-level obstacles of a single puzzle, without expanding the use of equipment obtained in the process, and the process length is only less than 8 hours.
Another regret is the plot. At the beginning, the mysterious alien civilization, the tower towering above the clouds, made me imagine all kinds of things. Then, after searching for the remains of civilization, I found that the tower was…? Although there is nothing to spoil, let’s put it this way: the final boss is very cliché, and its relationship with the plot is also very cliché. It does not respond to the high-profile opening at all, and it seems anticlimactic.
(Mediocre) Fun Gameplay
Many shortcomings have been criticized before, but in fact this game is not a bad game that is unbearable to play. It just cannot reach the level of creativity of those independent masterpieces. This game does have an obvious unique feature – that is “retro”. Although there is a setting of picking up corpses in the Soul series and it is a semi-open world, the essence of the game is still a reproduction of the classic game in 2000, paying tribute to the design concept of American adventure games at that time. Like the adventure games at that time, most of the challenges are platform jumping, and the setting of collecting fruits to increase life is exactly the same. Although there are a few boss battles, at least the fighting methods are different, which makes it quite novel and not boring to play.
Of course, mediocrity is by no means an advantage, but fortunately there are still some black humor jokes to ease the atmosphere.
This half-bald man who plays the CEO of Kindred Corporation will jump out to make funny comments every time the player reaches a certain stage of progress, and often speaks capitalist remarks with a smile; the AI voice assistant that accompanies the player throughout the process often reveals some terrible facts, such as that you delete yourself when you teleport and then re-copy the destination, or that your resurrection is just transferring your memory to a spare clone (sometimes you will really find the body of a previous death); the TV in the cabin plays advertisements at a high volume around the clock. These advertisements seem to imitate the exaggerated sales advertisements of the past, and the style is extremely exaggerated.
Conclusion: Set your expectations right and you will have a better experience
Don’t expect a space survival game, or any mind-blowing puzzles or amazing plots. “Journey to the Savage Planet” is just a slightly open adventure game. Ironically, the “fourth best” colony company ridiculed in the game seems to be applicable to this game, because although it has no serious shortcomings, it is like a fourth place in a game that lacks a sense of existence.
