Journey to the Savage Planet Review
I feel like nowadays there are a lot of people who say that they are really missing those good old B-Games. You know games like Singularity, Deadly Premonition and such…
You see to me that always felt odd to hear because I feel like there are a lot of b tier games coming out this generation, sure there are a few of them compared to the last decade but still there is a lot of them and very good ones I say. Journey to the Savage Planet is a perfect example of that!
When I was playing this game I often get these amazing and ambitious ideas for different aspect of the game, like what if the development studio could afford real comedy writers to make dialogues actually funny or what if they made the entire map of the game like a single open world and not like a Metroidvania style game and what if they had more time to make the gun play a bit more fun with some BioShock like abilities that seems to be kinda already there…
But after having all these ideas I slowly start to realize that they must had a specific budget and deadline and maybe that’s why they decide to make a B game which despite all those short comings is still a pretty fun little game. At the first glance Journey to the Savage Planet may seem like a survival game but while it’s not, it still kinda is? Structurally this game is pretty linear which is uncommon in survival games nowadays but it has a Metroidvania style of exploring and backtracking which are also getting very popular for big budgets games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
The execution of a first person Metroidvania game in Journey to the Savage Planet is pretty good and fun. You always know exactly where to go and what to do which ironically might be refreshing for some people. Of course there are side quest in this game too but they don’t feel like too flesh out or important in my opinion. That’s why this game is perfect for a relaxing time while you are mindlessly exploring and doing objectives one after another. You definitely don’t need to think too much about anything in this game and maybe you can even mute the sound completely to escape from those “trying very hard to be funny” dialogues.Speaking of dialogues, the story in this game is pretty bare bones. It’s a “finding a new home for humans” kind of story but it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting and of course as I said the funny attitude of the whole narrative doesn’t help anything.
While there is not even a potential in the story part of Journey to the Savage Planet but that’s definitely not the case for the impressive visual aspect of this game. Even with looking at a single screen shot you can tell that this game is pretty colorful and I can say while there is not a lot of environmental variety but overall I really didn’t get tired of beautiful and yet very simple visual style of Journey to the Savage Planet.The design of different creatures is pretty silly too and they might be the only thing that made me a bit chuckle while playing this game.
Overall I can say while this game didn’t blew me away, I very much enjoyed my time with it so I totally recommend it to anyone who find this kind of games interesting. There is also a co-op mode too which is a delightful way to play this game with someday so you can easily ignore any kind of talking in it.