It’s Metroid Prime! Only with humour and all the colours! And with big eyed aliens who meow at you! And it’s very, very good.
Like Metroid Prime, there’s first person shootering, although that’s not really – bar some bosses – the main focus of the gameplay. No, you’re expected to explore, find upgrades to enable further exploration, and you need to discover what all the strange alien artefacts on this supposedly undiscovered and uninhabited planet mean.
You find resources either from rocky outcrops or by killing things, have so solve a few puzzles, and get tools like grenade-ish exploding seeds, things that let you grapple up surfaces (and hang from “rails”, like in Bioshock Infinite), acid bombs that dissolve amber, etc. and each is used both as a weapon to defeat certain types of enemy, and as a method of getting past hazards or walled off areas.
The humour is great, with your sarcastic AI always chattering about how you should do stuff that’s dangerous and how she can always 3D print a new you if you die, and videos from the CEO of the company who sent you to the planet as well as ridiculous TV adverts to entertain when you return to your space ship.
Journey to the Savage Planet is a wonderful, fun, clever little game with lots to discover and even though I’ve completed it there’s still things to find and do – such as get the rest of the fuel needed to actually leave!
