Journey to the Savage Planet is a first-person adventure game that released on 28th January 2020. It is available to play on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. The game was developed by Typhoon Studios and published by 505 Games.
505 Games have had a hand in the release of a variety of great games. They are currently working on bringing Death Stranding to PC, which is set to be released in Summer 2020. Typhoon Studios is a fairly new company. They have put everything into creating Journey to the Savage Planet. Now that the game is ready for release, Typhoon Studios have joined the team at Google to work with the Stadia Games and Entertainment team.
A Journey Like No Other
Journey to the Savage Planet is all about exploration. You can play solo or co-op with a friend. You begin your adventure with your ship stranded on an uncharted planet, and your mission is to catalog and explore the planet to determine whether or not it is fit for human habitation. The ship’s computer will guide you to collect materials and resources with the promise of leaving the planet to explore further.
As you explore this weird and wonderful planet, you will be able to learn new abilities. You will also find and unlock new weapons and gear to use. Unlocking new abilities and gear is important because it will allow you to reach new and unexpected heights. Exploring the environment and getting your ship off the ground comes in the form of missions, and you will be able to track these missions in your journal.
Journey to the Savage Planet offers a vast amount of different alien life and plant life that you will face. With every new encounter of weird and wonderful life, you will have the ability to scan them. These scanned creatures and plants will be available to view in an index menu. Some alien life is extremely dangerous and will attack you on sight. Other life you find will be quite docile and will only attack when provoked. There are also some really annoying but hilarious forms of life that will just scream at you whilst running in circles or running away.
Creativity Is Key
The best thing about Journey to the Savage Planet is the creativity behind it. You can tell that a lot of thought has gone into everything that the game has to offer. For their first game, I believe Typhoon Studios have done an outstanding job. Journey to the Savage Planet is funny, creative, beautiful, weird, disgusting and addictive. I especially enjoyed experiencing the game through the co-operative mode. Every two minutes one of us was saying, “What the hell is that?”, followed by laughter. The game is extremely bright and colorful. The alien life, plant life and environments offer such an amazing amount of variety. Each area is different, each enemy is different and this shows that a lot of time and creativity has gone into making this fun-loving game.
When I first started playing, at one point I was still coming to grips with how to control my character, and I accidentally shot a cute little wide-eyed chicken alien hybrid. I was in absolute shock when the poor thing popped and its weird green, gooey insides coated my adventurer. Even more to my surprise, I got an achievement for it! I also quickly learned that if you feed certain aliens, they will poop out materials that you will need. Because, of course, if you were cataloging an alien planet, this would be quite normal….
You’re Just a Number
Journey to the Savage Planet has some minor glitching and loading issues; however, these are so rare that they aren’t really even worth mentioning against the game as a whole.
When you die in Journey to the Savage Planet, you are cloned. Even though I find it quite amusing that I am just a clone, I end up having to bury my old body after I’m revived, and I think this is my only issue with the game. This made me lose a bit of the connection with the character. I didn’t really care whether they lived or died. Of course, this didn’t stop me from continuing to play and enjoy the game.
The real issue behind being a clone is that there is no personalisation. I would have loved to have the option to change my space suit appearance, personalise it somehow, or at least choose a gender for my little adventurer. When playing in co-operative mode, I like there to be a bit of difference between myself and the person I am playing with. I know that further into the game, you can unlock a different visor for your helmet. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t feel like it is enough for me.
You Will Never Be the Same
As I have mentioned, Journey to the Savage Planet is all about lighthearted fun. This is taken to the extreme through videos and advertisements that appear on screens all around your ship when you enter. The more you play, the more space advertisements you will witness. Whenever I enter my ship, I find myself stopping in front of the biggest tv screen on the ship and watching these advertisements. Each one is extremely unique and hilarious. Some take the mick out of in-game purchases, some are just weird new and futuristic gadgets and some are quite disturbing. The most disturbing one I have witnessed offers the sexual services of an alien blob. With each advertisement, I found myself in hysterics.
Get Your Thinking Cap On
Another great aspect to Journey to the Savage Planet is the amount of puzzle-solving that it offers. The puzzle-solving comes in different shapes and forms. There may be a good bit of loot that you need to find, but you first have to find out exactly where it is and how to get to it. It may be a boss that you are trying to defeat, but you need to first figure out how to damage it. A puzzle may also just come in the form of finding the path to another area.
After each puzzle that you have solved, you feel a real sense of achievement because some of them are extremely challenging. This is especially the case for puzzles that could mean that if you do it wrong, you could lose your life. This is where it may be better to play the game with a friend so that you can solve the puzzles together.
Life and Death
If you do lose your life in Journey to the Savage Planet, the ship’s computer will clone your character with all of the same abilities that you had before. Although, to find your loot, you will need to locate your old character’s body and pick it up. You can even bury your old character’s body, and a little memorial will appear, which is a sickeningly but also adorably funny touch. The minor details like this make the game stand out for me.
The only time that being cloned after death doesn’t happen is when you fall from a great height. In this scenario, you will be teleported back to where you initially jumped from. This is because if you fall to your death into an abyss, there would be no way of recovering your loot.
Developer: Typhoon Studios
Publisher: 505 Games
Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC
Release Date: 28th January 2020